Just before dawn on May 10, 1940, German parachute troops rain down on Holland. Watching from his home on the Dutch coast is former international footballer Billy Marsden. It’s ten years to the day since Germans saved his life in a Berlin hospital after he suffered a broken neck while playing for England – and now it’s this German invasion that is putting his life in jeopardy.

In The Hague, Margot Fonteyn and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company watch the dogfights from the roof of their hotel. In Amsterdam, trying to file the story of the invasion are journalist David Woodward and his American wife, NBC war correspondent Margaret Rupli (one of the rare women reporting on the war for American radio), while young British diplomat Peers Carter attempts to organise an evacuation just eight months into the job.

Set across one weekend in May 1940, this is the true story of how all these people came together, along with a dozen more British football coaches and three million pounds worth of diamonds, to escape on the last boat out of Holland before the Dutch capitulated.