Ancient Web: USS Haven Veterans Kept Their Hospital Ship’s Story Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The USS Haven site is not a slick military-history exhibition. It is a veteran reunion website that makes room for a ship's roster, photographs, specifications, personal recollections, and a remarkable typed report from September 1945.

Visit the USS Haven reunion archive.

Haven was a U.S. Navy hospital ship, AH-12, commissioned in May 1945. The site's ship history follows its early work in the Pacific, its participation in the postwar atomic-test program, and its subsequent service treating casualties during the Korean War.

The technical specifications describe a 520-foot vessel with space for approximately 800 patients. Another section offers shipmates' reunion material rather than institutional interpretation.

A 1945 report reaches the Web

The most compelling surviving document is Rescue Mission to Kyushu, written by Navy pharmacist Charles Sterling Berry and dated September 15, 1945, aboard Haven at Nagasaki. The page says a copy was supplied to the reunion association by Margaret Curran in May 2003.

Berry describes the ship entering Nagasaki harbor past mines and damaged buildings, coordinating with local officials, preparing dockside showers, and taking aboard former prisoners of war. He also recalls a vehicle trip through areas devastated by the atomic bombing, including the remains of industrial buildings.

This is a firsthand American military perspective, not a complete history of the city or its survivors. Its period language includes derogatory terms for Japanese people and occasional factual or chronological errors; those features belong to the primary source and should not be silently repeated as established fact.

The wider reunion homepage links a crew roster, reunion photographs, a memorial table ceremony, and separate ship photographs. Those simple sections place an individual wartime narrative within the social network of former crew members and their families.

The website does not provide an unequivocal original launch date, so its age should not be inferred from its design alone. The independently dated 2003 contribution demonstrates the early online preservation work already happening here.

The enduring achievement is modest and important: family-held material was copied into a public archive where later readers could encounter it.

Read Berry's Kyushu report and explore the ship's service history.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.