On the heels of the summer blockbuster film Dunkirk, Michael Korda’s ALONE: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory, tells the larger story of the turning point in World War II history when over 300,000 Allied troops were trapped off the coast of France and a ragtag fleet of civilian fishing boats, pleasure crafts, and ferries came to their rescue.

Bestselling author Michael Korda has witnessed many remarkable events in the 20th century, not to mention edited presidents, world figures, and newsmakers during his esteemed tenure at Simon & Schuster. But it is his six-year-old self who offers another perspective on the tumultuous spring and early summer of 1940, when the European conflict escalated from “phony” to all-out war.

In ALONE: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory Liveright Publishing, Sept 19, 2017), Korda gives a thorough recounting of the figures and consequences around Germany’s blitzkrieg into Belgium, France, and the Netherlands in May of 1940, while interweaving his own memories as a child bystander across the Channel.

Michael Korda is available for interviews Tuesday, September 19 – Friday, October 6, 2017 from 7 am to 10 pm ET.

Korda chronicles the mounting diplomatic failures and military miscalculations as England woke from being an island of appeasement to the plucky, Churchillian nation of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

Providing fresh portraits of Neville Chamberlain (“his flaw was not pusillanimity; it was a lethal combination of vanity and pig-headedness”) and Churchill (“the rarest of men, a well-functioning, even hyper-functioning alcoholic”), Korda breaks down the myriad players, big and small, who were thrust into the confusion as Hitler capitalized on Allied tactical blunders to seize more and more territory. It would culminate in the heroic British evacuation at Dunkirk, when a flotilla of civilian English boats made the perilous voyage to the French coast to save the lives of 250,000 British soldiers.

In dramatic counterpoint is the saga of the Korda family, and young Michael whose war consciousness forms as he listens to Chamberlain declare war over the radio on September 3, 1939—followed immediately by the wailing air raid sirens that would become the soundtrack of London for the next few years. Soon he would be swept up—along with three and half million other British children—by Operation Pied Piper, a mass evacuation out of London and other major UK cities.