In 1940 at the French port of Dunkirk, an Allied army of more than 300,000 troops was on the verge of being wiped out by the Germans when they were rescued by an extraordinary seaborne evacuation. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan fulfilled a longstanding dream of depicting their miraculous triumph-in-defeat with the release of his Oscar-winning 2017 epic , for which he and historical consultant Joshua Levine extensively interviewed survivors and pored over period documents. This companion to the film is Levine's sweeping historical narrative, told in the words of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and civilians involved in the nine-day gauntlet.