was deemed so essential as to be placed under the War Manpower Commission. Despite shortages of qualified nurses during the war, the navy was able to hold to its standards and enroll nurses of outstanding qualifications and experience. These outstanding nurses received advanced training in surgery, orthopedics, anesthesia, contagion, dietetics, physiotherapy, and psychiatry, the latter helping men understand and manage Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (then known as shell-shock) and battlefield fatigue. But the navy nurses' duties not only included the tending to the injured and sick but also to the equally serious task of training Hospital Corpsmen. Many of these young men had never seen the inside of a hospital unless they themselves had been admitted, and as such it was training from the ground up. Once trained, the men were sent to work aboard fighting ships and on invasion beaches, where nurses were not yet officially assigned. Additionally, nurses trained WAVES for the Hospital Corps. In the Pacific, Navy Nurses were the first American women to be sent to the islands north of New Caledonia, and the first group to Efate, in the New Hebrides. At Efate they cared for the wounded from the long Guadalcanal Campaign, Army as well as Navy and Marine personnel. Others were stationed in New Caledonia, the Solomons, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, Coral Sea, Savo, Samoa, Tarawa, Attu, Adak, Dutch Harbor, Kwajalein, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Leyte, Samar, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. The purpose of these forward operating areas was stabilization. Only when patients were fully stabilized were they sent on to Pearl Harbor, and then eventually to the contiguous United States. In Europe, navy nurses served in both England and Italy and in North and South America at Trinidad, Panama, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Brazil, and Newfoundland. Navy nurses were even stationed in Africa. In the contiguous United States, navy nurses were stationed at 263 locations, consisting of both large naval hospital complexes such as USN Hospital San Diego, California and Bethesda, Maryland as well as at a multitude of smaller naval convalescent hospitals and training station facilities. One of the more colorful convalescent hospitals was the USN Convalescent Hospital located at the Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho. After the lodge – built by the Union Pacific Railroad and its chairman W. Averell Harriman – opened in 1936, it quickly became a hotspot for the rich and famous. Notables included Ernest Hemingway who worked