Our tour begins by looking back to May 1940. After their victorious rampage through Europe, Hitler’s Panzers were only ten miles away from 400,000 Allied troops trapped on the Normandy beaches. Mass surrender seemed inevitable, the invasion of Britain just a matter of time.

But the Führer hesitated and within ten days most of the defeated British Expeditionary Force had been safely evacuated from this corner of a foreign beach that is forever England. We shall stand on that beach, pay our respects at the memorials of those who fought and died there and ask the question: What is the truth behind the enduring legend of Dunkirk? Was the evacuation a “miracle” or, as Churchill himself opined, “a colossal military disaster”?

We will move along the coast to the pebble beach at Dieppe and on in time to August 1942. Could the Allies launch a successful invasion of Europe? The subsequent Dieppe Raid, brainchild of Lord Mountbatten, became one of the costliest, most ill-fated actions of the entire war.

Then we will be transported to June 6th 1944 and the greatest military armada in history: Operation Overlord. We will walk the D-Day beaches of Sword, Gold and Juno as well as the coast where the Americans suffered such huge losses – Utah and Omaha. High up on the cliff’s edge stand the German gun batteries that tried to thwart the Allied invasion and at low tide we will see the hulks of Mulberry Harbour, crucial to Overlord’s success.

As well as looking at the mass movements of arms and men, our course will consider individual deeds of valour: Stanley Hollis was the only British soldier to be awarded a VC on D-Day; Leonard Lomell was accorded America’s highest military decoration at Utah beach; and at Villers-Bocage Michael Wittman single-handedly destroyed fifteen British tanks in as many minutes.

Our first night will be spent in the heart of Dunkirk at the three-star Hotel Welcome; we then spend three nights in Caen at the centrally located Mercure Hotel Port de Plaisance.