'Top Secret' D-Day orders emerge - 69 years after they should have been destroyed
Top secret orders issued to naval captains involved in the D-Day landings have emerged after spending decades hidden in a chest in a loft, where they were discovered following a house fire.
Photo: Family of Lieutenant Alexander North Hardy
Diagram of Valena by Lieutenant Alexander North Hardy
By Jasper Copping
2:17PM BST 07 Jun 2013
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.
The orders were issued to Royal Navy officers who were involved in Operation Neptune – the code-name for the initial phase of the D-Day mission.
The newly-emerged copy was issued to Lieutenant Alexander North Hardy, the skipper of HMS Valena, a minesweeper, which operated off the French coast on June 6th 1944.
Hardy, who died in 1978 at the age of 70, held on to them after the war and they ended up in a chest of old family documents in the loft of one of his daughter’s home. They were only discovered after the property caught fire and the box was recovered and its contents checked for damage. The family have now agreed to release some pages of the documents, to mark this week’s 69th anniversary of D-Day.
His son-in-law, who has asked not to be named, said: “The front page says it should be ‘destroyed by fire on completion of the operation’. But it seems my father in law didn’t have a fire available at the time.”
As well as charts of the routes across the channel that the Allied fleet was to take, it contains around 50 photographs, presumably taken from a submarine lying off the coast, of the enemy shoreline onto which the invasion force was to land.
The images were not to be used as navigational aides, but to help sailors to identify different areas of the beaches.
The document also instructed ships as to what their particular role was to be. For minesweepers like HMS Valena, they were to clear designated areas of any mines, and then act in a “communication” role.
HMS Valena
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The book also contains details of what the fleet should do, if German patrol boats, submarines or heavy battleships were to arrive on the scene and disrupt the landings – and also what to do in the event of the invasion failing and the Allied forces needing to withdraw.
“They were basically, to go back the way they came,” Hardy’s son-in-law said. “There is also lots of technical stuff in there, instructions about call signs and how to verify and authenticate things.
“But there are also some beautifully drawn charts and, amid all the military detail, what I think is a magnificently concise description of what D-Day was all about: ‘The object of Operation Neptune is to carry out a joint Anglo-American operation from the United Kingdom to secure a lodgement on the Continent from which further offensive operations can be developed’.”
Hardy’s daughter said that, as a child, she had played with the documents, not knowing what they were. Hardy, from Whitehead, in Northern Ireland, had worked for a shipping company in Birmingham before the war.
Earlier in the conflict, he had served on escort duty during the Battle of the Atlantic. At the end of the war, he and the crew of HMS Valena found themselves in the Low Countries, where he took part in a VE-Day parade with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
The ship itself was a converted private yacht, rather than a purpose-built warship and had on board, among other luxuries, a four poster bed and a Royal Doulton bath.
Lieutenant Alexander North Hardy (right)[/SUP]
