Coursework: Why did the British Government decide to evacuate children from Britain's major cities in the early years of the Second World War?

The first 200 words of this essay...

History Coursework-Evacuation

Assignment B: Britain in the Second World War

Why did the British Government decide to evacuate children from Britain's major cities in the early years of the Second World War?

As soon as war was declared the British government expected the Nazis to launch massive air attacks against Britain with its major cities as the prime targets. Britain knew how disastrous such attacks would be, in both loss of morale and loss of life, after seeing how devastating the bombing raids had been in both Shanghai in 1931 and later in Guernica in 1937 where German planes had been used. To avoid enormous casualty numbers the government planned to evacuate large numbers of children from cities to the countryside for the duration of the war.

The British government's greatest fear was that as soon as the air raids started children, as some of the most vulnerable people in the cities, would make up a large percentage of the death toll. To avoid the calamity of losing such a large proportion of the next generation the government decided to remove children and other vulnerable people, such as pregnant women and disabled people, from cities