D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: George Simpson

George Simpson, Age 100, Royal Army Service Corps

Interviewed 17 April 2024

Describing himself as a trimmer fashioning canvas into medical apparel and tents, George Simpson helped set up field hospitals in Normandy and was involved in fighting too because the hospitals were often close to the front line.

They had to be mobile and could cater for hundreds of patients at a time in rows of tents.

There was a large complex of these field hospitals near Bayeux which came to be known as Harley Street, with a well established system to evacuate troops - and with doctors and nurses on hand as well as supplies of blood.

Royal Army Service Corps personnel such as Mr Simpson would dismantle and then rebuild hospitals at new sites as the Army moved forwards.

Mr Simpson said: "We built hospitals in the middle of a field.

"They decided that they had found a field and it was a field the Germans had sometimes dug trenches in there and left them quite clean and they had been checked.

"We could use the trenches as and when, and then we would work and we would build a hospital bang in the middle of that field -a large field.

"Then three days later there was the walls of a field hospital starting to go up - and in eight days we had built a hospital.

"And we were imposing those lads that were coming back shot and injured - they were being dealt with in that hospital in the field. 

"You never stopped doing it.

"When you advanced more you advanced with them, and you would find that there was fighting going on when you were very close up there.

"And you would then go to attack, to capture and take the place that was being held."

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