During the period from the 1st to the 4th September, about 1,500,000 people were evacuated from larger towns and cities into the countryside. These people were mainly children, pregnant women, the infirm, and teachers. Britain was divided into three regions; Evacuation Areas, Neutral Areas, and Reception Areas. People at risk of bombing were moved from Evacuation Areas to Reception Areas in these three days. Once the Blitz started in 1940, there was a second wave of evacuation, and then again in 1944 when Germany began to use the V1 and V2 rockets.
A few weeks after the war was declared, all of the precautions seemed slightly pointless; there were no air raids and no fighting. People began to leave their masks in their houses, cinemas reopened, and many children returned to the cities. Bu June 1940, 40% of all evacuees had gone home. There was a general feeling that nothing was going to happen at all.
However, in April 1940, the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. This completely changed everyone’s perception of the war. After Holland, Belgium and France were then overrun, Hitler was master of Europe, and the phoney war was a distant memory. In Britain, the most important effect of these attacks was the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, and the appointment of Winston Churchill. To start with there was a huge amount of pressure on Churchill to surrender; in only 10 weeks, Hitler had taken Denmark, Norway, Hungary, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, something which no previous leader had ever achieved.
Churchill, instead of caving in to international pressure on him to give in to Hitler, began to make a series of speeches to raise morale of the British people. The most important of these came at the end of May and the beginning of June, when the 310,000 BEF survivors returned to England from the beaches of Dunkirk and Calais in France without any of their weapons, tanks, of any other equipment. The British attack was a failure, but Churchill made it seem like a victory. It became known as the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’. The Daily Mirror had the headline; ‘Bloody Marvellous’. This complete defiance of the German threat and refusal to accept reality became known as the Dunkirk Spirit.
After Dunkirk, the British army had only 26 trained divisions of men and 12 almost completely untrained. They only brought back 25 out of the 600 tanks they took with them to the French shores. At the start of 1940 there were only 72 tanks in the entire country, and Britain only had 420 field guns and 163 heavy guns with only 200 shells each. There were also only 54 anti-tank guns in the countries. A similar number of lorries and artillery were lost. The R.A.F were husbanded by Doweling because they had returned in such small numbers. The Navy also had several destroyers sunk at Dunkirk, so Churchill negotiated the ‘ships for bases’ deal with America.
After the disaster of Dunkirk, British Factories went into overdrive, producing arms and vehicles 24 hours a day. Women were brought into factories and were recruited as drivers to transport new weapons. The STEN gun was introduced as an extremely cheap and rapid fire weapon that could be mass produced to rival the German sub-machine guns. 500,000 World War I rifles and 900 75mm field guns were bought from America, with 100 shells each. By September 1940 Britain had managed to create 432 tanks.
On May 14th, the War Minister made a radio appeal. He asked to men not already in normal military service, and who were between the age of 18 and 65, to join a new group called the Local Defence Volunteers. Their job would be to help defend Britain if any Germans landed. By midsummer, the LDV had nearly 1.5 million members. It was a part time unpaid force, and although there were age limits, they were rarely checked. At first, there were no uniforms, so they wore armbands instead. There was also a severe lack of weapons due to the losses in Dunkirk. Local people were asked to hand in weapons, and one regiment had 6-foot spears. Later, uniforms and rifles were supplied, but by this time the invasion threat was almost over. The LDV were renamed the Home Guard. Home Guards took their duties extremely seriously. They could shoot anyone who did not stop on demand, and, occasionally, people were killed.
Makeshift defences were constructed across the south coast of England. The 72 tanks and 42 anti-tank guns were spread across the coast, along with the 200,000 soldiers left. Barbed wire and concrete blocks were also placed along the coastlines of Britain, along with mines, railway sleepers, and pillboxes, in the hope of holding back any German forces. Old cars and scaffolding were placed in the middle of fields were put in the middle of fields by farmers to try and stop the Luftwaffe landing on British soil.
The RAF also played a large part in the defence of Britain. In conjunction with Radar stations, and Fighter command, they retained air supremacy over Britain’s skies.
After all of these precautions, Operation Sea-lion, the invasion of Britain, was called off by Hitler. This may have been because he was beginning to concentrate on the invasion of Russia, or because he wished to have air supremacy over Britain. It is quite unlikely, however, that the invasion was called off because of the precautions that Britain took in an attempt to stop the invasion, some of which were simply a waste of time.
