大象传媒

Two nurses are to be the only female names on a new memorial to the people who lost their lives in the Battle of Normandy.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron attended a ceremony to see the first stone laid for the memorial, which will feature 22,442 names.

Among them are Mollie Evershed, who trained in Norwich and lived in Soham in Cambridgeshire, and Dorothy Field, who grew up in Lower Kingswood, Surrey and qualified at King's College Hospital in London.

In August 1944, they were serving on the hospital carrier Amsterdam which was ferrying injured troops back to England from northern France. As it was preparing to make its third journey home, it struck a mine.

It took just eight minutes for the boat to sink, but in that time the nurses helped to save 75 lives before losing their own.