USNS Mercy
1975 Mercy-class hospital ship
USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) is the lead ship of her class of hospital ships in non-commissioned service with the United States Navy. Her sister ship is USNS Comfort (T-AH-20). She is the third US Navy ship to be named after the virtue mercy. In accordance with the Geneva Conventions, Mercy and her crew do not carry any offensive weapons, though defensive weapons are available.
United States Naval Ship (USNS) Mercy was built as a San Clemente-class oil tanker, SS Worth, by National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, San Diego, California, in 1976. Starting in July 1984, she was renamed and converted to a hospital ship by the same company. Launched on 20 July 1985, Mercy was placed in service on 8 November 1986. She has a raised forecastle, a transom stern, a bulbous bow, an extended deckhouse with a forward bridge, and a helicopter-landing deck with a flight-control facility.
The conversions from oil tankers cost $208 million per ship and took 35 months to complete. The Mercy-class hospital ships are the third largest ships in the US Navy Fleet by length, surpassed only by the nuclear-powered Nimitz- and Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers.
“USNS Mercy” enters the record as 1975 Mercy-class hospital ship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what USNS, Mercy and Mercy-class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2714105. VIAF identifies the subject as 124559593. The Library of Congress control number is n2007180663. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1984, 1985 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “USNS Mercy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.