A FLY-PAST over the Churchill Hospital in Oxford has commemorated the site’s historic links with the US armed forces.

The hospital in Headington was built in 1940 to treat expected mass casualties from German air raids during the Second World War but was taken over by the American Hospital in Britain in September 1941 to care for US service personnel based here during the conflict.

In 1992, to mark the 50th anniversary of the hospital’s foundation, a garden in recognition of the Americans was planted.

Following the opening of the new £109m Oxford Cancer Centre earlier this year, the garden was moved to the front of the building.

On Monday, a ceremony celebrate the move featured a fly-past from a 1940s US-built Harvard trainer plane. and a blessing from the Rev Philip Sutton, one of the hospital chaplains.

Dame Fiona Caldicott, the chairman of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, was joined by officers from the United States Air Force base at Fairford, in Gloucestershire, and the US embassy in London, as the plane flew overhead.

She said: “Some of the patients who come to the new cancer centre will be struggling to cope with the diagnosis of their disease.

“This will be a nice quite place for patients and their families to come.”

Colonel Joseph Dill, 420th Air Base Group Commander at RAF Fairford, said: “We have been working together with the Brits now for a long time, and I think we do have a special relationship.

“We obviously wanted to do anything we could to help with today’s ceremony.”