Don Anderson - Kamikaze attack on HMS Formidable

Transcript

Then for the next few months we operated off the coast of Japan or the home islands of Japan and putting up with kamikazes and I'll you a photograph of the Formidable after she'd had a rather bad attack from kamikazes.

The ship was 800 feet long and I watched with absolute amazement as the ship virtually exploded with flames, flames 100 feet high for the whole 800-foot length of the ship and she turned into the wind to keep the flames away from the lower and all you could see was black smoke which after a few minutes that seemed to mostly disappear.

Then we could watch cranes dumping the planes. Kamikaze planes had come down and ignited all the planes on the flight deck in one monstrous bonfire, but the ships had some of the planes in the air and they had nowhere to go, did they? Within half an hour they had cleared all the rubbish off the flight deck, and they were loading their aircraft. It was just amazing.