October 1969. Hospital Corpsman Second Class Robert J. Anderson prepares to X-ray a patient’s broken foot aboard Battleship New Jersey. At sea, a battleship had to work like a small city, because getting someone to shore was not always possible. Besides a hospital, the ship had its own dental office, bakery, barber shop, laundry, chapel and library. All of these spaces are open for you to explore.

Casualties on a warship in World War 2 were handled by the crew itself, often in the middle of a fight that was still going on, with very limited medical help and nowhere to go. Medical care depended heavily on the size of the ship. A battleship or fleet carrier had a proper sick bay with several doctors, an operating room, and a staff of hospital corpsmen, which the US Navy called pharmacist's mates. A destroyer often had no doctor at all, just one or two pharmacist's mates who might be in their early twenties and were expected to handle everything from amputations to severe burns. During general quarters, ships didn't rely on the sick bay alone, since a single hit could wipe it out. Instead they set up battle dressing stations spread around the ship. On many ships the officers' wardroom was converted into an emergency surgery, and the dining table became an operating table. Getting wounded men to treatment was its own problem. Warships are a maze of narrow passageways, steep ladders, and small watertight hatches. Men were strapped into wire basket stretchers called Stokes stretchers so they could be hauled vertically through hatches and up ladders. Corpsmen carried morphine syrettes and frequently marked a man's forehead with the dose so the next person wouldn't overdose him. The signature wound at sea was the burn. Bombs, shells, torpedoes, and later kamikazes ignited fuel, ammunition, and anything else that would burn, and steam lines ruptured. Sailors were told to keep sleeves rolled down and collars buttoned in action, and the British issued anti-flash hoods and gloves for exactly this reason. Late in the war, ships hit by kamikazes off Okinawa or carriers like the Franklin and Bunker Hill generated hundreds of burned men at once, far beyond what the ship's medical staff could manage. Ordinary sailors with almost no training ended up doing triage and first aid. The worst cases were transferred to other ships, sometimes by being swung across in a stretcher on a line between two moving vessels, and eventually to hospital ships or bases ashore. The dead were handled according to circumstances. If the ship was close to port, bodies might be kept in refrigerated storage spaces normally used for food so they could be brought ashore and identified. If the ship was going to be at sea for a while, which was common in the Pacific, the answer was burial at sea. The body was sewn into canvas or a mattress cover and weighted, usually with something heavy like a spent shell or a projectile. By long naval tradition the sailmaker or whoever did the stitching put the last stitch through the nose, partly to make absolutely sure the man was dead. The crew assembled, a chaplain or the captain read the service, and the body slid off a board from under a flag into the sea. After a big attack these were mass burials, with rows of shrouded bodies on the deck. Identification was often grim work. Dog tags helped, but men who were badly burned or caught in an explosion could be hard or impossible to identify, and sometimes all that could be recovered was partial remains. Personal effects were gathered, inventoried, and sent home to families. Cleanup fell to the crew, usually the same men who had just been through the fight. Damage control parties fought fires, shored up bulkheads, and pumped out flooding, and once things were under control the decks and compartments had to be cleared and hosed down. Some compartments couldn't be reached for days. One of the hardest realities was flooding: to save the ship, damage control sometimes had to seal off flooding compartments while men were still inside. Bodies were sometimes found only when a ship reached a shipyard and those spaces were finally pumped dry. And in cases like the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the ship itself became the grave. Then the ship went back to work. Watches still had to be stood, guns manned, and the next attack might come that afternoon. Men often went back to their stations within hours of carrying their friends to the rail, which is a big part of why so many veterans of the naval war, especially the kamikaze campaign, never talked about it afterward.

USS Philippine Sea (CVA 47) underway in 1955

Date: Fall 1941. Location: Tromsø, Norway. Event: Armed with six 105mm SK C/33 anti-aircraft guns, self-propelled battery Nymphe (former coastal defence ship Tordenskjold of the Norwegian Navy) provides protection for the German anchorages against the RAF bombers. Current status: Scrapped in 1948-49, lifespan of 53 years.🧜‍♀️

USS Montpelier at Mare Island Navy Yard, California, United States following overhaul, 21 October 1944; USS Indianapolis in background

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