POOLE pensioner Elizabeth Barry was a frightened nine-year-old schoolgirl when she found herself stranded at Dunkirk, alongside hundreds of thousands of retreating allied serviceman.

She was one of only a handful of civilians rescued from the beaches, in a World War II evacuation later dubbed 'The Miracle of Dunkirk'.

A flotilla of more than 800 boats, hundreds of them small craft wholly unsuitable for warfare, braved the English Channel crossing, eventually rescuing more than 338,000 Allied servicemen - and Elizabeth and her family - from the advancing Nazis.

On the eve of Dunkirk's 75th anniversary celebrations, Elizabeth, sitting in her Soper's Lane home, recalled: "It was hell on earth. We stayed in the cellar of a hotel and there was a machine gun above us firing all the time.

“They were also bombing, we had a little radio with Gracie Fields playing. I was only nine but it is something you cannot forget.

“The soldiers were trying to get away, some had died, some were all right. My mother tried to help them.

"We couldn’t eat or drink anything, then we got in with the Cheshire Regiment. They asked what we were doing there and called us ‘the little family’."

Elizabeth, her French father, her mother and brother, had been living near Antwerp when the Second World War broke out.

The 84-year-old explained how her family, desperate to escape to England, had ended up trapped at Dunkirk in the crosshairs of the advancing German army.

"From Belgium, we went to the station, got on the train, went a little way, then it stopped. We all had to get out and walk. That’s when the walk started to Dunkirk. Everyone said make for the beaches and see if you can get a ship and get out."

Her family stayed near the beaches for days before escaping to Dover on a small oil tanker.

"How we got out, I just don't know. Soldiers were retreating and shooting.

"I had a blanket, I had nothing on my feet. They were bleeding because I'd been walking all that time."

Elizabeth also still recalls the heart-breaking memories of young servicemen handing notes to her mother, notes for their families back in England should they be killed on the beaches.

"I remember dead bodies coming up from the sea, all covered in oil. The clergymen were burying them and where the bodies were buried a little bottle was put down as a marker," she added.

  • Operation Dynamo, the military evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and the harbour at Dunkirk, was later hailed a 'miracle of deliverance' by British wartime leader Winston Churchill.

Between May 27 - June 4, some 338,226 soldiers were rescued by a flotilla of more than 800 boats.

During the disastrous Battle of France, ending with the Dunkirk evacuations, the British Expeditionary Force lost 68,111 men, killed wounded or captured.

For every seven men escaping from the beaches, one became a prisoner of war.