Another reason is that the children were the most vulnerable to bomb attacks as they were the least able to fend for themselves. During bombing raids they would be scared and unsure of what to do as a result of this fear and may get under the feet of other, more important people, trying to escape to the nearest Air Raid Shelter. Without them there would be fewer casualties, not only because there were fewer people, but because they would not be there to slow down the escape of others. As they were the most vulnerable it was presumed that there would be more deaths of children, and as they were the next generation of soldiers, politicians and business men and women, they were very important to the development of Britain.
The threat of invasion was also very real to the British people and if it did come there would have to be a large scale resistance in British cities and coastlines and so with children around there was a great danger of many being killed in cross-fire. It was essential to keep this danger as low as possible and so if children were in safer areas where there was little threat of gun battles.
Every argument to why children were evacuated boils down to the fact that either; they were too much of a distraction to more important and helpful people who could make a difference to the war effort, or that they were in too much danger to be kept around.
What were the differing reactions in Britain to evacuation in WW2?
There were a number of different reactions to evacuation in the Second World War, ranging from excitement from the children to a feeling of a loss from parents, who more often than not would never see their children again. At the end of the war there were over 2 million children left unclaimed due to death of parents and parents who were unable to find their loved ones. Evacuation took place from train stations which were to be the last sight many children would ever have of their parents, and one child recollects his ‘crying buckets of tears,’ at the sadness of it all. But, even with the sadness of the departure, the child still managed to speak of his enjoyment at his adopted parent’s home due to how well they were treated. Shamefully this was not always the case with the children and many found life in the safe countryside worse than in the city as a result of awful treatment from the country folk. The adopting parents also often found it hard to accept the children. They were used to having children who never swore, were clean and followed God’s laws which was the complete opposite to the city children. Many people reported the children to be disruptive, often swearing, infested with head lice and generally uncontrollable. They were unused to this and many took violent action against the children, beating them, and, in some cases, locking them up in animal cages with only water to drink and bread to eat. These children told tales of woe years later of how they always wanted to run back to the city so as to feel safe with their parents again.
In the countryside there was without a doubt a feeling of uncertainty and unwelcoming within the society of the small villages and a great air of tension when the evacuee’s reached their destinations. There were many people who thought that the children had no right to be intruding on their life and that the children should be somewhere else. There was also an idea that all children from the cities were thieves and scum and had to be treated as such so as to make them into the ideal citizens. There was anger amongst a large proportion of the adopting families. The children felt the same a lot of the time. They wanted to be back with their families and felt that they were being unfairly treated by the adopting families and thought that the children that called the countryside ‘home’ were being treated as ‘more equal than others.’ They were ‘alone, far from home,’ as one child put it.
The parents of the children felt a great loss at their children being taken away from them. They didn’t want them to go but they knew that it was safer in the countryside and they wanted their children to survive more than anything. They needed the feeling of security in the knowledge that their children were safe from all the bombing raids of the Nazi’s. They had possibly the hardest role as they were forever worrying about the people they loved the most being so far away from them, living in the fear of being killed and never seeing them again, but at the same time had to accept it as part of their lives as otherwise their children would be part of a torment adults should not see, let along young children who would be scarred forever if they managed to survive the bombing raids and the mass killings that happened every day.
The feeling among the public was one of acceptance yet misery at the Governments plans to evacuate children. They didn’t want it to happen, none of them did, but they knew it must and that everyone had to be part of the war effort if the allies were to win against the force that was so forcefully put to them as ‘fascism.’
