Normandy Memorial Trust seeks relatives of soldiers saved by heroic WWII nurses
The Normandy Memorial Trust is on a mission to find the living relatives of soldiers who were saved by two nurses who sacrificed their lives rescuing them from a sinking ship during the Second World War.
Sister Mollie Evershed and Sister Dorothy Anyta Field, who was known as Anyta to her family, were serving on the hospital ship SS Amsterdam when it hit a mine off Juno beach on 7 August 1944.
As the ship was sinking, the two women from the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service repeatedly went below decks to rescue as many injured servicemen as they could.
"They succeed in bringing 75 men up on deck and to the waiting lifeboats, but on the final time they went back the ship sank, taking them with it," said Jane Furlong, a lead historical researcher at the Normandy Memorial Trust.
The Manchester Evening News reported how survivors wrote to Sister Dorothy's mother saying they owed their lives to her extraordinary bravery.
"We would very much like to trace any families where the men they rescued talked about this experience so we can add this side of the story associated with these two women," added Ms Furlong.
"It is also an opportunity to illustrate the very important role played by the medical services in the care given to those servicemen injured in Normandy and lives that were saved by them.".
The hospital ship was hit not far from Juno beach – one of the five beaches involved in the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944.
D-Day, codenamed Operation Neptune, was the largest seaborne invasion in history, which saw thousands of Allied troops storm the shores of northern France in the penultimate year of the Second World War.
The British Normandy Memorial honours the names of the 22,442 servicemen and women under British command who fell on D-Day and during the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944.
Out of more than 22,000 names on the British Normandy Memorial, only two belong to women.
These brave women are Sister Mollie and Siter Anyta.
By 1943, more than 7,000 nurses were risking their lives by saving others on the frontline.
Sister Anyta was the matron nurse on board SS Amsterdam.
The last man she saved had just had his leg amputated minutes before the hospital ship hit the mine.
Sister Anyta had reached the safety of the lifeboat, but went back to save more patients trapped on board and was never seen again.
The two nurses were posthumously mentioned in despatches and were awarded the King's commendation for brave conduct in 1944.
When Sister Anyta died, her parents were still grieving for her brother Charles, a test pilot who had been killed in 1943.
The men that Sister Anyta saved wrote letters of gratitude to her parents who lived in Crow, a small village in the New Forest in Hampshire.
Both Sister Anyta and her brother Charles are commemorated on their local war memorial in Ringwood.
Sister Molly volunteered for the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1943 after training as a nurse at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.
Her school remembered her as "practical, steady and reliable".
A 1945 issue of the school magazine at Ely High School, which Sister Mollie attended, read: "Mollie was always eager to help in any way. She was energetic, lively, full of fun and friendly and popular with everyone in the school, both staff and girls.
"We who knew her and remember her were grieved to hear of the loss of a young life, so full of promise, but we are also very conscious and proud of the heroism, devotion and sacrifice which she showed in that hour of her supreme testing."
The Normandy Memorial Trist is now attempting to find living relatives of the nurses in time for the 80th anniversary of D-Day on 6 June.
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