'Top secret' D-Day orders emerge

Image credit: Royal Navy

A set of top secret orders for naval captains during the D-Day landings have turned up in an attic. The document should have been destroyed after the invasion of Normandy but instead turned up decades later in a chest in a loft. The orders were issued to Lieutenant Alexander North Hardy, the skipper of a minesweeper vessel operating off the coast of France in 1944. Hardy had kept the document up until his death in 1978, after which it had ended up being stored along with other family documents in the home of one of his daughters.
"The front page says it should be 'destroyed by fire on completion of the operation'," said Hardy's son-in-law. "But it seems my father in law didn’t have a fire available at the time." The inch-thick document - which should have been destroyed at the end of the Normandy invasion - gives a detailed account of the navy’s role in the landings.

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