"Bernard Jordan embodied the spirit of initiative and derring-do of a generation whose like may never be seen again, when he left his care home last year at the age of 89 to join the 70th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings in Normandy. Efforts to get him a ticket had foundered, yet the former Royal Navy officer was determined to honour for the last time his comrades who had died in the mighty Allied assault that on 6 June 1944 began the liberation of Europe from under Hitler's Nazi jackboot. Unbeknownst to the staff of The Pines Care Home in Furze Hill, Hove, East Sussex, Jordan buttoned his war medals beneath his grey macintosh coat, left his wife of 68 years, Irene, who also lived there, and set off for the festivities with a coach ticket and a £30 passage secretly booked on Brittany Ferries' crossing to Caen. The uncertainty of his mission, just like the touch-and-go hesitations of Eisenhower faced with a narrow window of opportunity to launch the invasion those long years ago, was to blossom into magnificent victory. He took his place in triumph, hailed by fellow veterans recognising one of their own, to sit within 100 yards of the Queen and world leaders as the ceremonies unfolded. Back in Britain there had been consternation, with worried staff at The Pines alerting police and checks made on coaches, railways and taxi services. Only when a fellow veteran telephoned to say that Jordan – always known as "Bernie" – was alive and well did his wife, friends and helpers breathe a sigh of relief. He was staying at an hotel in Ouistreham, the port for Caen, at the eastern end of what was the wartime Sword Beach. "I expect I will be in some trouble," he said, "But it was worth it." Jordan's most vivid memory of arriving on the French coast for the first time, with the 1944 invasion fleet, a few days short of his 20th birthday, was, he recalled, the opening of the electrically operated bow doors of his Tank Landing Craft before a terrifying barrage of enemy gunfire. The boy who enjoyed playing with yachts and dinghies in south coast harbours as he grew up, being educated locally in Hove, had taken himself off to Portsmouth and enlisted as soon as he turned 17 in 1941. He joined the Royal Navy as an electrician – a Marine Engineering Artificer, known as a "Sparks" – and was posted to the destroyer HMS Intrepid." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/bernard-jordan-dday-veteran-whose-visit-to-the-70th-anniversary-celebrations-last-year-was-hailed-as-his-great-escape-9963749.html
