Responding to the Turkish Government's appeal for help, the US navy has sent three ships including the mighty Kearsarge.

The USS Kearsarge is the largest naval ship in the area, and together with the two smaller ships in its group, it is offering the services of 22 helicopters and more than 2,000 American marines, as well as an impressive array of medical and other facilities.

The Kearsarge was built to mount an invasion - to pour a marine force ashore by landing craft and helicopter and provide the back-up they need in the early days of the attack.

But invasions do not happen often, and meanwhile the huge ship is put to other uses. It can mount a relief operation - as it did for the Kosovo Albanians earlier this summer - or an evacuation.

Two years ago, during an outbreak of fighting in Sierra Leone, it was calimed that the Kearsarge carried out the biggest ever civilian evacuation in a single day, plucking more than 1,200 people from a beach near Freetown.

Battlefield medicine

I was one of those evacuees, and as we were ushered down the ramp from the helicopter deck we marvelled at the sheer size of the ship, and the vast cathedral-sized hanger inside it, where we were welcomed with a hot meal.

The Kearsarge is a floating city, with its own bakery and water purification plant, its own dentist, even its own radio and television studios.

More to the point for Turkey, it has cranes and bulldozers, as well as a fleet of jeeps and trucks.

And above all it has medical facilities. The group has 630 hospital beds, with five X-ray units and six operating theatres, and its doctors and medical staff are specialists in battlefield medecine.