For Dorothea Chisholm and her fellow nurses, the news that they were being shipped to France came late at night.
It was soon after the D-Day landings in June 1944, and Dorothea, who had been working in a children’s hospital in Liverpool, was newly qualified and had not yet seen active service.
‘I wasn’t scared,’ she recalls. ‘The adrenalin was really flowing by the time we reached Arromanches in Normandy. It was daylight and, as we neared the harbour, I looked over the side of the ship and saw bloated bodies floating in the water.’