Why did the British government decide to evacuate children from Britain's major cities at the start of World War 2?

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Why did the British government decide to evacuate children from Britain’s major cities at the start of World War 2?

In Spain, 1937 the German air force obliterated the whole city of Gernica in less than 4 hours “The Condor Legion attacked in daylight and flew as low as 600 feet as it had no reason to fear any form of defence from the city”. It was attacked because it was a key city in the Spanish civil war. Hitler let his air force be used so he could try it out, to see what destruction could do. Over 1500 people were killed and almost three quarters of the city was destroyed. This scared the government as it showed what would happen to Britain the impending war with Germany. They were scared because of the huge death toll and knew that it wouldn’t be easy to avoid. The reason that that was possible was that there had been a huge leap in development in plane technology since ww1 from only being able to go 60 miles an hour to over 200 miles per hour in 1939 for fighter planes and over 100 miles per hour for bombers. This also meant that the range was be bigger so they could get all the way to major British cities.

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The government decided to launch operation “pied piper” in which the whole country was split into 3 different areas there was “reception” areas where evacuees were sent. These places were mostly safe and were normally in rural areas away from big cities or major army bases for example Holsworthy. There were the “neutral” areas where no one went in or out because it was not an obvious target that made it fairly safe for example Credition. Lastly there were the “evacuation” areas that were a high risk, obvious target like a city, port or military base, where the evacuees ...

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