My grandfather was left behind at Dunkirk, taken prisoner, spent the rest of the war in Poland and returned home in one piece but very thin (6ft 4 and weighing around 8 stone according to family legend). He died aged 48 a year before I was born - heart problems, which might be expected I suppose.
I'm now working with the jigsaw of records and archives in the UK to try and find a little more about what happened and where as a result of the film mainly.
While true, the BBC has always taken current popular media as a platform to have a frank discussion about the issues that media explores. It's not intended to advertise the film, so much as expand on the events portrayed for those who came out of the film wanting to know more.
The politics were involved, but in a subtler way, by warping the decision-making process. The army was exhausted and needed to rest, repair their vehicles, and resupply. There was debate about whether it should first finish off the Dunkirk pocket or let the air force finish them off, and the air force chief Göring (who was both politically strong and fantastically overconfident) insisted that he could take care of it. Very similar to his later overconfidence in the Battle of Britain, and the way it warped German strategic decision-making.