The carriers during the day resembled a very large oil field fire, if you've ever seen one. The fire coming out of the forward and aft end of the ship looked like a blow torch, just roaring white flame and the oil burning, the crude oil, boil up, I don't know how high and just billowing big red flames belch out of this black smoke. The dive bombers told me they saw this smoke at 18,000 feet that day and really did make a nice fire and they'd burn for awhile and blow up for awhile and I was sitting in the water hollering "Hooray, Hooray."
I was in a funny position to be cheering for the thing, but I was really tickled to see the dive bombers really pasting them even though they were in pretty bad shape. But during the afternoon after they pretty well burned themselves up, the larger one close to me there, the [Japanese aircraft carrier] Akagi, sank just after dark, the [Japanese] cruisers raked her with fire finished her off, and the other two, the [Japanese aircraft carriers] Kaga and the Soryu, burned all night, but they didn't necessarily explode. As a matter of fact, the Japs were there trying to put the fires out. I could seem them playing around, searchlights, picking up people and trying, I think they were trying to salvage these two ships; but the explosions that I heard the next morning turned out to be our submarines putting torpedoes into these things and they finished them off.
Recollections of Lieutenant George Gay, USNR sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8) describing his experiences during the Battle of Midway. He was subsequently awarded the Navy Cross for his actions, while his unit received the Presidential Unit Citation for this battle.
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/oral-histories/wwii/battle-of-midway/recollections-of-lieutenant-george-gay.html