BILLY MACLEOD MBE
AUTHOR - ROYAL ENGINEERS
On the men who built, blew and held the line in 1940, and the novel that finally puts them at the centre of the story.
Ask most people to picture the British Army at Dunkirk and they will give you the same scene. The beaches. The long queues stretching into the sea. The little ships. What they will not picture is the man standing in the surf, soaked to the chest, lashing planks across the roofs of submerged lorries so that the queue has somewhere to walk.
That man was a Sapper. And for most of the last eighty years, he has been left out of the picture.
Billy MacLeod MBE spent a lifetime noticing the gap. A Royal Engineer himself, he grew up reading war books, the same ones passed around every barrack room and every overseas posting until the covers came off. Infantry. Commandos. Special forces. The men at the centre of the action. The Sapper, when he appeared at all, got a line or two. Fix the bridge. Clear the road. Then get out of the way while the real story carried on.
“In most of those books,” Billy writes in his Author’s Note, “the Sapper was hardly there at all.” A few years ago, reading a series of Second World War novels his son had bought him, the same question kept coming back to him. Where are the Sappers in all this?
That question became A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk.
The Royal Engineers have always been asked to do whatever is necessary, wherever it is necessary. In the retreat through France and Belgium in May and June 1940, that meant holding bridges open for the British Expeditionary Force to pour back across, then bringing those same bridges down at the last possible moment with the enemy in sight.
At Tournai, on 16 and 17 May, the Luftwaffe bombed the crossings on the River Scheldt while the 7th, 59th and 225th Field Companies worked the bridges under air attack. The city burned around them. Civilians fled west in their thousands. The job still had to be done.
Further north, at the coast, the Sappers solved a problem that geography had handed them. The beaches east of Dunkirk were shallow and shelving, and the larger ships could not come close enough to take men off the sand. So at low tide the Engineers drove lorries out into the surf, parked them in columns, widened them with more vehicles, and decked them over with planking. When the tide came in, the lorries went under but the walkways stayed clear, and men filed out along them to reach the small craft working between the shore and the ships offshore. Three such piers were built, two at La Panne and one at Bray Dunes, raised and repaired under shellfire and strafing. The 18th Field Park Company supplied the decking that held them together. When a pier was destroyed and could not be mended, the men simply waded.
None of this is the romantic version of Dunkirk. It is wet, exhausting, dangerous graft, carried out by working men who happened to be soldiers. And it is almost entirely missing from the popular memory of the campaign.
There is one moment above all that captures why Billy felt the record had failed these men.
On 28 May 1940, the Belgian surrender took effect and tore a wide gap in the northern flank of the BEF. German forces were already across the Ypres-Comines Canal and pressing towards the roads to Dunkirk. That evening, the 7th, 59th and 225th Field Companies fixed bayonets and counter-attacked along the canal, supported by a handful of men from the Black Watch and two light tanks of the 13/18 Hussars. Up to four hundred men went forward. They were Engineers doing infantry work in the worst conditions imaginable, and they pushed the Germans back far enough to buy the line behind them time to consolidate. By Billy’s account, drawn from the regimental histories, it was the only time in the whole of the Second World War that three Royal Engineers companies were thrown together into an infantry assault.
Sixty of them did not come back.
General Sir Harold Franklyn, commanding the 5th Division, recorded the action in a single sentence. “A few Engineers were collected from somewhere and off they went about 7:00pm.”
A few Engineers. From somewhere. That was how four hundred men with fixed bayonets, sixty of whom would be killed, were written into the history. Read that line as a Sapper and you understand exactly why Billy sat down to write.
Billy is careful about what this book is. It is a novel, not a formal history, and he does not pretend otherwise. The reason is honest and revealing.
We know where the field companies were in 1940. We sometimes know what they were ordered to do. What we almost never know is what one corporal, one lance-corporal, one Sapper actually saw in the moment itself. At section level, where most of any war is really fought, the record falls silent. That silence is exactly where Billy works. Where the history is clear, he follows it. Where it goes quiet, he draws on his own years as a Sapper, on how men behave under pressure, to imagine what might have happened.
So the units are real. The 59th Field Company served with the BEF in 1940 and exists to this day. The ground is real, the operations are real, the conditions are real. The men of Two Section are invented, but they are built from people Billy knew. The protagonist, Sapper Donnie MacIver, grew up on Byron Street in Partick, left the Glasgow shipyards for the Army, and carries the backgrounds and sometimes the names of men Billy served alongside. “Donnie’s background is mine,” Billy writes. “His streets are my streets. His people are my people.”
The story stays at ground level by design. No operations room, no politician, no general scanning the horizon. The bridge in front of you. The charge in your hands. The section beside you. If Donnie does not see it, the reader does not see it.
Billy MacLeod was born in Partick and raised on the Drumchapel estate. He walked into an Army careers office at fifteen and joined the Royal Engineers as a boy soldier at sixteen, in June 1977. Injury ended his service in 1986. In 2008 he founded Veterans In Action, the charity for which he was later appointed MBE. He writes, as the former Chief Royal Engineer Lieutenant General Sir Mark Mans puts it in his foreword, “with the understanding of a man who knows what it means to belong to the Corps.”
That foreword closes on the point the whole book is built to make. “This book remembers the Sappers not as background figures but as soldiers, craftsmen and comrades in their own right. It gives them weight. It gives them voice. It puts them where they have always belonged, in the thick of the story.”
Billy puts it more plainly still. The Sappers have always been there. It is time they stood at the centre of the story.
A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk is published on 1 October 2026. Pre-order before 31 July and your name will be printed in the Nominal Roll at the back of the book. You can pre-order, and follow the story as it builds towards launch, at billymacleodmbe.com/pre-order.
