WINSTON Churchill, who had been Prime Minister for less than a month, called it a “miracle of deliverance”.

Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Dunkirk 75 years ago, was the heroic effort that succeeded in bringing back 338,000 Allied troops as France and Belgium collapsed fell to the onslaught of German forces.

The first full day of the evacuation was Monday, May 27 – but with information about the war heavily suppressed, newspaper readers knew little about it.

The Bournemouth Daily Echo’s front page headline that day read: “Allies holding on to Calais”.

The story said: “The curtain of silence must still remain drawn over the fierce battle now raging on the Western Front. It would be extreme folly to allow the slightest information to leak out of the operations now being carried out by the Allied armies with the object of closing the vital gap, to prevent reinforcements reaching the German mechanised forces which have reached the coast, and of consolidating our line in the north.”

But the paper added that the Allied armies were “fighting with superb heroism, standing up to the mad onslaughts being made by the German forces”.

The next day, readers learned more about the course of the war, when the Echo reported that King Leopold of Belgium, “acting against the will and advice of his Ministers, has ceased resistance to the Germans”.

By May 30, the headline was “Grim struggle goes on”.

“It is not possible to know where the different divisions are or exactly which part of the front the French are holding and which part is held by the British,” the Echo said. But information from France made clear that “the escape towards the coast goes on”.

In fact, a flotilla of 800 boats were bringing back Allied troops as fast as they could. Some men were transported from the beaches to the bigger vessels by the “little ships” – merchant marine, boats, pleasure craft and lifeboats.

Among the members of the British Expeditionary Force in retreat was Arnold Johnson, whose unit had been under heavy bombardment at St Omer in France. Speaking to the Echo in 2005, he recalled marching down the deserted streets of La Panne in Belgium to the beach.

“Daybreak brought a German fighter which flew over the beach, firing. We scattered into the sand dunes,” he said.

As the hours went by, more men arrived to be evacuated. “Then we saw lifeboats being lowered from the ships. Some waded out into the water up to their necks in the rush to escape,” said Mr Johnson, who later settled in Bournemouth.

“Equipment was discarded left and right on the beach. They were panicking.”

Arthur Taylor, from Christchurch, is now 94 and was in France last weekend for the 75th anniversary commemorations.

Speaking in 2010, he remembered the retreat to the Bergues Canal and the subsequent march to Dunkirk on May 29, 1940.

“At this point we’d had no drink or food for days. We went to a café and were told there was no water in Dunkirk because the Germans had blown up all the water mains. Instead they filled our bottles with vin rouge,” he said.

There were massive queues for the boats at Dunkirk. “We were queuing for 36 hours to get to the pier. The line was 20 people wide. For 36 hours we were bombed and shelled,” he said.

“We saw people machine-gunned right before our eyes.”

Les Kerswill, of Bournemouth, was among those trying to hold back the enemy, 10-15 miles from Dunkirk, as the evacuation went on.

Many of his colleagues were gunned down and he remembered the sight of some of them wading through a river. “I remember seeing cook, he had been hit and blood was coming out of his leg. The water was red,” he said.

Bill Loader, who settled in Kinson, was among the troops left behind as they fought a rearguard action. He was one of around 100 who surrendered after being overrun by the Germans and would spend five years as a prisoner of war.

“They marched us all back to Poland. I wore out a pair of army boots. I never counted the days. We were doing 20 to 30 miles a day and they didn’t really give us enough to eat,” he said.

The story of the evacuation began to come out on June 4, when Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons.

The Echo headline was “Premier’s thrilling story.

The Prime Minister, had told “how men of the BEF and French armies have been evacuated, as by a miracle, from a position which threatened annihilation”.

Churchill’s speech that afternoon continued in the paper’s “stop press news” column, which concluded by reporting him as saying: “British Empire and French Republic will defend to death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to utmost of their strength.”

Time or space seem not to have allowed the paper to report the famous words that came shortly after:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”