BILLY MACLEOD MBE
AUTHOR - ROYAL ENGINEERS
Most people still picture Dunkirk as soldiers queuing on beaches and little ships crossing the Channel, not the men in denim overalls wiring bridges in the dark. Yet without the Royal Engineers, the British Expeditionary Force could not have retreated, regrouped or escaped.
A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk puts one of those men, fictional Sapper Donnie MacIver of 59th Field Company, back at the heart of events. The company is real, the bridges and canal crossings are real, and the work described in the novel is based on documented Royal Engineer operations during the retreat.
The Royal Engineers in France in 1940 were organised into field companies attached to divisions and corps troops whose job was to keep the BEF mobile. 59th Field Company, Royal Engineers, served as part of the force pushed back through Belgium towards the Dunkirk perimeter.
Their work covered everything from route clearance and repair to demolition of roads, railways and bridges to slow German armour. On 28 May 1940, for example, Royal Engineers from 225, 7th and 59th Field Companies prepared bridges around Nieuport and Furnes for demolition as units fell back towards the coast. Those demolition orders, carried out under fire, turned a retreat into a fighting withdrawal rather than a rout.
The technical heart of Royal Engineer work in the retreat was simple to describe and brutal to execute, blow what the enemy needs, keep what your own side still has to use. In practice that meant calculating the minimum delay a cratered road or dropped bridge could give the BEF without trapping friendly transport.
In A Sapper’s Story, we see Donnie and his section crawling through culverts, packing guncotton, running cables back to improvised firing points and timing their shots so British columns can pass before the road is destroyed. That sequence, set around Belgian towns and canal lines near Comines and Warneton, mirrors documented engineer methods, including multiple culvert charges to drop raised roadbeds and bowstring bridges wired rib by rib.
The novel shows the work as lived experience, not textbook diagrams. Donnie walks steel ribs high above the Lys with bundled charges in his hands, sweating, swearing and trying not to look down, while traffic still crawls across the deck below him. That is how Royal Engineers actually operated, often placing charges while infantry, refugees and lorry columns were still crossing the structure they were about to destroy.
Once key bridges were prepared for demolition, Sappers often stayed forward to help infantry hold the line around those crossings. The novel captures this at Warneton, where Donnie’s section digs gun pits, stacks sandbags, cuts loopholes into whitewashed houses and helps the infantry prepare for German attacks along the canal.
They build a double apron fence across the fields between Vauthem and the main road, driving pickets, pulling wire and tying in with other sections to create a continuous barrier from village to blown crossroads. That kind of obstacle was standard Royal Engineer work, used to break up armour and channel infantry into kill zones covered by machine gun fire. Once completed, the fence in the novel is described as running from Vauthem to the first junction, from the first to the second, and down towards Comines where another section has tied in, exactly how engineer officers would plan an integrated obstacle belt.
At the same time, the book shows the human cost of holding such positions. When mortars walk along the canal line and German machine guns sweep Comines and Vauthem, Donnie and Bert leave cover to drag wounded infantrymen back into the ditch they have just reinforced. That is faithful to Royal Engineer accounts which describe Sappers not only as specialists but as front line soldiers fighting and carrying casualties alongside the infantry they support.
Billy MacLeod MBE writes these scenes as a former Royal Engineer who has wired real bridges, built real obstacles and lived with the after‑effects of service. His work with Veterans In Action since 2008, walking thousands of miles with over 500 veterans and rebuilding Land Rovers and woodlands with men and women carrying trauma, shapes the way he portrays Donnie and the section.
The novel is historical fiction rooted in verified events and engineer tactics, written by someone who understands both the technical detail and the emotional weight of carrying it out. That combination means the Royal Engineers at Dunkirk are not distant figures in khaki, they are recognisable Sappers whose lives echo the veterans Billy works with today.
When you stand Donnie’s fictional section alongside the real 59th Field Company, one thing becomes clear, Dunkirk was built, held and, when the time came, destroyed by Sappers whose names most of us will never know. A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk exists to honour that kind of service, sacrifice and survival, not by turning them into plaster saints but by showing them as flawed, funny, frightened men still doing their job.
You can pre-order A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk directly through Billy’s pre-order form. Signed copies are available ahead of publication on 1 October 2026. The nominal roll at the back of the book closed on 31 July 2026 and can no longer be added to.
