Documentary: Navy Medicine at War: Stepping Stones To Tokyo

August 26, 2025 | Glenn | , ,
Five stretchers with wounded marines lie side by side at the bottom of a steep hill. Half a dozen medical personnel tend to their wounds while another wounded marine sits on the ground,his head wrapped in bandages. 20 February 1945, on Iwo Jima. National Archives, 80-G-435702
U.S. Navy doctors and corpsmen tend to wounded Marines at a first aid station on 20 February 1945. Navy Chaplain Lieutenant (j.g.) John H. Galbreath (right center) kneels beside a man who has severe flash burns, received in an artillery battery approximately 50 yards away (Official U.S. Marine Corps photograph in the collections of the National Archives, 80-G-435702).

If you know nothing about World War II in the Pacific Theater, or even if you do, this 41-minute documentary, which combines footage taken during the war with oral histories of the men who were there, is very educational.

If you had an ancestor who served as a Pharmacist’s Mate, Hospital Apprentice, nurse, or doctor, this documentary will help you understand what they went through. This is especially true if one of your relatives was a Navy corpsman who served with the Marines.

It’s not just combat either. Disease, especially Malaria, laid many men low. Some units experienced 100% casualties due to disease.

The documentary takes you from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Okinawa in 1945, offering excellent narration that places you within the broader context of the war.

Clicking this image will take you to the Internet Archive site, where you can view the documentary.

This is one in a series of blog posts about documentaries produced by the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in the early 2000s. The bureau’s historian, Jan Herman, did an exceptional job of combining excellent wartime footage with captivating oral histories from men and women of the US Navy who provided medical treatment to Navy, Marine, and Army personnel, some of whom did so while under fire. Here are the earlier posts in the series.

Battle Station Sick Bay

Navy Medicine At Normandy D-Day

Pearl Harbor Oral Histories of Medical Personnel,

 Bataan Death March and POW Oral Histories

Did you arrive here via a search engine? I am the author of the forthcoming book Heroes By The Hundreds: The Story of the USS Franklin (CV-13). In addition to writing about the bravery of the crews that saved her, I will discuss the lessons we can learn from leadership and decision-making, as well as the changes the US Navy made in response to those lessons.

Feel free to follow me on Facebook. There, I am [M. Glenn Ross, Author (https://www.facebook.com/MGlennRoss/). I also write a monthly newsletter, Glenn’s Action Report, about subjects that interest me in my research. You can sign up for it below. Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question. Thanks for reading.  

-Glenn

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