Jeff Steel

Bill Adlam’s hair-raising escape from Dunkirk, his dramatic commando raids and his storming the D-Day beaches reads like fiction. But it all happened. Bill escaped the Dunkirk disaster via a bayonet charge into Nazi machine guns. He was presented with the Military Medal ‘for gallantry under fire’ by King George VI. Later, Bill volunteered for commandos: he thrived on adrenaline. 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. Number 4 Commando then sent him on a raid to Dieppe in August 1942 to spike naval guns to enable a landing by Canadian forces. Bill’s commanding officer was Lord Lovat: cousin to Ian Fleming and (allegedly) template for the fictional James Bond. 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’. On the morning o 6 June 1944, D-Day, Bill passed over the sands of Normandy in minutes. The next two months saw him up against Hitler’s elite army and Waffen SS divisions. The reader will ask the same question that Bill asked: how would he ever come out alive?

His hatred of Nazism made him leave his six-month marriage to Miranda on hold. Over Germany his Halifax bomber is shot down by a night fighter: He has ten seconds to act or he will never see her again. Ambrose Adlam did not even want to go to war. Hitler's war came looking for him. The war enveloped him, it took over his world; there was no escape. To do nothing was not an option. Ambrose joined RAF ground crew. That was not enough. He volunteered for active service as a Flight Engineer in Halifax bombers. The RAF high command forgot to tell him that his chance of survival was minimal. Ambrose found out the hard way as his bomber plummeted to earth in flames. Parachuting into a duck pond in Nazi Germany, he narrowly escaped death. On the run, he is pursued by German forces. They shot him. He survived...