THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Locations of British General Hospitals during WW2

     The locations of British General Hospitals during the Second World War are held at the National Archives [WO222/1568] and comprise twenty-three typed sheets, which list 122 hospitals by theatre of war, and then by the name of the place in which were situated with the date.  There is no list of the hospitals themselves in numerical order, and no way to find out the movements of any particular hospital, other than to go through those sheets individually and try and pick out the hospital you're looking for each time it's mentioned, write it down, and then sort the entries into date order.  I've now taken those sheets, and produced a list of the hospitals by number, with each location and date that they were there.  With some hospitals moving up to twenty times during the war, I hope it makes everything rather simpler.

     The original lists have been difficult to transcribe, as spelling errors are too numerous to mention, and I can only imagine that the person typing the list was either under some duress at the time, or else had a very limited knowledge of world geography.  Many of the mis-spellings of place names have been corrected, but some have defeated both me and Google, and I would be most grateful if you could let me know of any mis-spellings that I haven't picked up, and they will be corrected.  I realise that some place-names have now been changed officially, and those will be left in the original, but there are others in all theatres which have proved a problem.

     The next page is a long one, but I feel it's better to show these 122 hospitals in one complete list rather than divide it - if there is no number, then no hospital with that designation is listed on the original sheets.  There are quite a few gaps  in dates and locations of individual units, and any of my own notes and comments about the entries are in square brackets with italic text.  As far as I'm aware, this is the only place that such a list appears, either in printed form, or on the internet, and I hope it will prove useful, if only to a limited number of searchers.