Dunkirk to D-Day

A Commando’s War

By Jeff Steel and Linda Adlam Nash

Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $32.99 in paperback  |   ISBN 9781922765185

In common with a lot of men of his generation, Bill Adlam never spoke about the war to his family. It was only after his death in 1980 that his daughter, Linda, became determined to piece together the story of what her father had undertaken during the war. Jeff Steel, fresh from other collaborative writing projects, was the writer she turned to.

Steel had long been interested in the stories of ordinary men doing extraordinary things on the battlefield. And this was no ordinary story.

Joining, firstly, the Territorial Army, where he was promoted to sergeant, he became the first Territorial to win the Military Medal, in France in 1940 just before the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. (Bill escaped the Dunkirk disaster via a bayonet charge into Nazi machine guns.)

He then volunteered for the commandos. Number 4 Commando took him to a surgical strike in the north of Norway. The stated objective: to destroy oil installations. It was a feint.

Ian Fleming of the Secret Intelligence Service had masterminded the raid. Its objective: to help break the Enigma Code.

Bill’s prowess as a commando saw him headhunted to a top-secret location in the wilds of Scotland. Here he trained others in the dark arts of ‘butcher and bolt’.

And then of course the day arrives when the British Army no longer needed him. And like millions of others, he was left to fend for himself in a bleak post-war world, the idea of transition services clearly foreign to authorities at the time.

VERDICT: This is an engaging story of a man with a tremendous aptitude for soldiering. How he ever come out alive is the question that remains.