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.

The worst admiral of WW1 might be Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne. He lost track of one ship, and it helped drag an entire empire into the war. August 1914. War has just broken out. Milne commands the British Mediterranean Fleet, including three battlecruisers. He's a well-connected courtier type, a friend of the royal family, better known for society life than for fighting. His main target is the German battlecruiser Goeben and its escort, the light cruiser Breslau. Two ships. That's the whole German presence in the Mediterranean. Milne has them outgunned and outnumbered. British battlecruisers actually spot Goeben on August 4 and shadow her. But Britain isn't officially at war with Germany until midnight, so they can't fire. Goeben's boilers are in bad shape, but her crew pushes so hard that she pulls away anyway. Some stokers reportedly died from the heat. Goeben slips into Messina in neutral Italy to coal. Milne decides the Germans will try to break west for the Atlantic. So he puts his battlecruisers west of Sicily to block that route. Goeben goes east. The only British force in the way is a squadron of four armored cruisers under Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge. On the morning of August 7, Troubridge is closing in for a fight. Then he turns away. His orders said not to engage a "superior force," and he decides Goeben's big guns count. He lets her go without firing a shot. One small British light cruiser, HMS Gloucester, keeps chasing the Germans alone and even trades fire with Breslau. Then it's ordered to give up. And Milne? On August 8, the Admiralty mistakenly sends a signal saying war with Austria has started. Milne breaks off to regroup against the Austrian fleet. By the time the error is corrected, Goeben is gone. On August 10, Goeben and Breslau sail into the Dardanelles, to neutral Turkey. Here's where it gets worse. Just days earlier, Britain had seized two modern battleships being built in British shipyards for the Ottoman Navy. Turkish citizens had helped pay for them through public donations. The Ottomans were furious. So Germany makes a gesture. Goeben and Breslau are "sold" to the Ottoman Navy. Renamed. The German crews swap their caps for fezzes and stay aboard. In late October, those same ships, still under their German admiral, raid Russian ports on the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire is now in the war on Germany's side. What followed: Gallipoli. Mesopotamia. Palestine. Russia's Black Sea route to its allies cut off, helping starve its war effort. Hundreds of thousands dead. Churchill later wrote that no single ship in history had ever caused so much slaughter and misery. All because two ships got away. Troubridge was court-martialed and acquitted. He never commanded at sea again. Milne was officially cleared by the Admiralty. He was also never given another command. And Goeben? She outlived all of them. She served in the Turkish Navy for decades, under the name Yavuz, and wasn't scrapped until the 1970s.