But the British public did not know that at the time. Unlike today, no journalists were ‘embedded’ with British soldiers as they were forced to retreat behind the Nazi blitzkrieg and onslaught of Panzer tank divisions through the Low Countries and into France.

The British Expeditionary Force, which had been in France since war was declared in September 1939, became trapped—together with a substantial number of French troops–in a diminishing pocket of land around the port of Dunkirk.

On 25 May Boulogne was captured; the following day Calais fell to the Germans. So, on the evening of 26 May, the British government — now led by Winston Churchill — ordered the evacuation of as many of the BEF as possible.
There were some 400,000 British and French troops under constant attack from German forces who needed to be got away.

At Dover Castle, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay was in charge of what became known as Operation Dynamo. The Admiralty believed at best 45,000 might be saved in the two days before Dunkirk was expected to fall.

The Dunkirk evacuation is often best remembered for the ‘Little Ships’ — a motley array of river-going and coastal pleasure craft that was gathered together off Sheerness and then formed into flotillas at Ramsgate to cross the Channel to Dunkirk where a huge plume of black smoke rose into the sky, often visible from Kent, as a result of Nazi bombing of oil storage tanks. 

The first convoy of ‘Little Ships’ left Margate on the evening of 29 May. Within 24 hours, 31 ships had been destroyed and eleven seriously damaged.

However, against all the odds—and the Admiralty’s pessimistic forecasts— by 4 June 1940 338,000 troops were rescued from Dunkirk. Over 200,000 of them passed through Dover—and of these 180,982 were cleared on 327 special trains. 

Another 42,783 soldiers were transported from Ramsgate — the second busiest station during the evacuation — on 82 special trains.

The ‘Dynamo Specials’ were organized by the Southern Railway utilising a pool of 2,000 passenger coaches drawn from its own fleet and those of the other mainline railway companies — the Great Western, London Midland and Scottish, and London and North Eastern Railways.

The Southern also borrowed 180 steam locomotives from the other railways to help haul the special trains. One elderly Southern locomotive called Victoria was attacked out of a clear blue sky by a Luftwaffe fighter plane, which sprayed the old engine with bullets. As the aircraft passed overhead the locomotive's boiler exploded, causing the plane to crash in a nearby field and killing the pilot.

Dunkirk could not have come at a worse time, as the Southern Railway was already evacuating no fewer than 48,000 schoolchildren from coastal areas for fear of a German invasion after the fall of France.

Despite these difficulties, one General was heard to remark: “I wish the Army could operate with as few written instructions as the Southern Railway does in an emergency.”

The GWR was the other railway most closely involved, not only because it adjoined the Southern but because the policy was to route most of the ‘Dynamo Specials’ from Kent via Redhill, Guildford and Reading, in order to bypass London and avoid congestion.  From Reading, the special trains then fanned out all over the country.

Feeding the rescued troops aboard the trains was a major logistical challenge. Much improvisation was required as each trainload — around 550 per train — had to be fed in just eight minutes’ station dwell time. 

John Richards’ on-line book ‘Dunkirk Revisted’ (which can be downloaded in full at http://www.dunkirk-revisited.co.uk/) tells of the arrangements made at Headcorn, Paddock Wood, and Tonbridge, which had four tracks and wide platforms necessitated by the seasonal fruit and hops industry.

The four tracks enabled Ambulance Trains to carry straight on along the through lines while ‘Dynamo Specials’ alternately pulled into the various stations’ platforms for food and drink to be given to the troops.

The author recalls: “At Headcorn Station, for instance, a large barn had been turned into a catering headquarters.

“Forty to fifty local women worked eight-hour shifts for nine days cutting up over 22,000 loaves of bread. Nineteen stoves brewed tea around the clock. At times, even beef was roasted on spits alongside the railway tracks.

“In one period of less than twenty-four hours 15,000 rolls, sausages or pies were eaten. Eggs were shelled 5,000 at a time.

“Local canning factories supplied cans, since insufficient cups could be found.      

“It took forty soldiers to dish-out the food.

“After a regulatory eight-minute stop, the order was given: 'Sling 'em aht!' — whereupon hundreds of cans cascaded on to the platform. Before the next train they were collected and washed by an army of helpers. In this way, 145,000 troops had their first decent meal in days.”

After the Dunkirk evacuation, the government’s Director of Statistics told one newspaper editor: “The Dunkirk episode was far worse than was ever realized in Fleet Street. The men on getting back to England were so demoralized they threw their rifles and equipment out of railway-carriage windows. Some sent for their wives with their civilian clothes, changed into these, and walked home.”

In private, Winston Churchill told his junior ministers that Dunkirk was “the greatest British military defeat for many centuries”.

No news of the events at Dunkirk was released until the 18.00 BBC news on 30 May, five days after the evacuation had started and when nearly three-quarters of the troops were already back in Britain. The public was then told: “Men of the undefeated British Expeditionary Force have been coming home from France. They have not come back in triumph, they have come back in glory.”

On the night of 3 June a final effort was made using British, French, Belgian and Dutch ships to bring out as many of the French rearguard as possible. Over 26,000 were saved.

The next afternoon—4 June—Winston Churchill was able to tell a packed House of Commons: “When a week ago I asked the House to fix this afternoon for a statement, I feared it would be my hard lot to announce from this box the greatest military disaster in our long history.”

Instead, he was able to tell MPs of the “miracle” of Dunkirk and the evacuation, in which over 338,000 troops were brought back — the whole of the BEF at Dunkirk plus 139,997 French, Polish and Belgian troops, and a small number of Dutch soldiers.   

It was not, for the British at least, a rout. The success of Operation Dynamo was that although the British Expeditionary Force lost all its heavy equipment in France, a quarter of a million experienced soldiers returned to England to fight another day.