D-Day+7 ‘Flying Nightingale’ Lydia Alford
Header: WAAF nursing orderly Cpl Lydia Alford was the first British servicewoman to land in Normandy after D-Day.
Seventy-five years ago, on 13th June 1944, D-Day+7, 27-year-old WAAF Corporal Lydia Alford was the first British servicewoman to land in Normandy. She was also the first British servicewoman ever to be sent deliberately into a war zone by the British Government, something that is normal and commonplace today, but which in 1944 was an exceptional precedent.