Cemetery: Bayeux Memorial
Country: France
Area: Calvados
Rank: Sister
Force: Army
Official Number:
Unit: Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service.
Country of Service: British
Details:
Mentioned in Despatches. Lost in Hospital Carrier Amsterdam. 7th August 1944. Age 27. Daughter of Reginald Avery Evershed and Thora Margaret Evershed of Soham Cambridgeshire. Panel 27.
Only two British servicewomen lost their lives in the Normandy Landings – heroic nurses Dorothy Field and Mollie Evershed. This is their tragic story...
They paid the ultimate price as they tried to save the lives of badly injured soldiers - becoming the only two British service women killed during the Normandy landings. Nurses Dorothy Field, 32, and Mollie Evershed, 27, perished while tending 75 wounded soldiers from a sinking hospital ship.
Dorothy and Mollie were serving with Queen Alexandra's Imperial Nursing Auxiliary on the SS Amsterdam. The Amsterdam had carried US Rangers to Omaha Beach on D-Day – where they had suffered heavy casualties scaling the cliffs – before converting into a hospital carrier ship, with wards and operating theatres, aimed at keeping the wounded alive and transporting them back to the UK for hospitalisation.
For weeks after, the medical staff, including Mollie and Dorothy, had nursed horribly injured men caught in the fighting still raging on the French mainland. Then on August 7, 1944, while making its third journey back to the UK carrying casualties, the vessel struck a mine off Juno Beach in fog, shortly before 7am.
Knowing the ship was stricken, both women went below to help the stretcher-bound wounded up to a waiting lifeboat. Amid the chaos and panic of the sinking ship, they helped save many lives. The last man Dorothy assisted had just had a leg amputated. But by the time they tried to escape the foundering ship themselves, it was simply too late.
The Amsterdam sank in just eight minutes and their bodies were never to be recovered.Witnesses reported seeing a nurse, thought to be Mollie, trying to squeeze out of a porthole as the ship sank.
In total, 55 wounded men were lost, along with 10 medical staff, 30 crew and 11 prisoners of war – 106 souls in all. But there is no doubt the death toll would have been far higher without their heroism.
One of the Amsterdam's crew, Patrick Manning, later recalled: "The ship seemed to be broken in the middle, with one half listing one way and the other half the other. "One of the funnels and the mast were down and the screws were out of the water. Only one LCA (landing craft assault) could get away to pick up survivors."
The wounded men were safely evacuated back to Britain where they wrote praising letters in tribute to the heroism of the nurses.
They also wrote to Dorothy's parents in Crow, Hampshire, who were already grieving the death of her brother Charles, a test pilot, killed in 1943.
Mollie, born in Battle, East Sussex, went to Ely High School in Cambridgeshire. In July 1945, the school magazine published a stirring tribute to its fallen pupil. It stated: "In August of last year, she was on a hospital ship full of wounded men. An explosion occurred and the ship began to sink but Mollie and the Matron succeeded in carrying up to the deck about 70 stretcher cases. Finally, however, Mollie was trapped below deck and she went down with the ship.
"Practical, steady and reliable, 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."
Mollie and Dorothy were posthumously mentioned in Dispatches and awarded the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct
Photograph by Steve Rogers
