Dunkirk - 1.Retreat

Episode one: Retreat
Day 1: Cpt. Bill Tennant, RN, at the Admiralty receives reports of the British Expeditionary Force's retreat and prepares to oversee Operation Dynamo. Pvt. Alf Tombs and his decimated company rest at Wormhoudt on the western end of the corridor to Dunkirk. New Prime Minister Winston Churchill chairs a briefing of the War Cabinet where Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax presses for peace negotiations. Adolf Hitler has halted the Blitzkrieg giving Tombs’s company time to reinforce their position and signalmen Clive Tonry and Wilf Saunders return to offer support.

Day 2: Tennant sails from Dover on HMS Wolfhound to find the Port of Dunkirk decimated by enemy bombardment. Divisions between Churchill and Halifax deepen over the proposed mediation of Italy threatening a leadership crisis. Embarkation progresses slowly and Tennant signals the Queen of the Channel to come up alongside the eastern breakwater to speed up the process.

Day 3: Tonry and Saunders intercept enemy orders for a pincer movement on Dunkirk. Tombs’s company is forced to pull back as it comes under fire and Tonry and Saunders head into the front line in a last ditch attempt to hold open the corridor. After nine hours of fighting the line breaks as Tombs’s company surrenders to the advancing enemy and Tonry and Saunders retreat to Dunkirk. Tombs narrowly escapes as the rest of his company is massacred but is later recaptured and spends the rest of the war in a POW camp.

Day 4: Tennant orders all vessels to be brought up to the eastern breakwater at once for embarkation as numbers on the beach swell. Churchill decrees that the wounded should be left behind to speed up the retreat. The enemy launch aerial attacks on the beaches from captured British airfields south of Dunkirk, sinking 30 British ships and leaving 400,000 allied troops stranded on the beach.