Why Did the British Government decide to evacuate children from Britain's major cities in the early years of WWII?

AS and A Level Psychology

Al Barnes History Coursework

Britain in the Second World War

The Evacuation of British children

Why Did the British Government decide to evacuate children from Britain’s major cities in the early years of WWII?

The evacuation of Britain's cities at the start of World War Two was the biggest and most concentrated mass movement of people in Britain's history. Only Children and teachers were evacuated and were only taken from the likeliest German targets. The first children to be evacuated were taken from their families on the 31st August 1939. In the first few weeks nearly two million children were evacuated. Usually when children were evacuated they went with their school teacher and the children they were familiar with. About 100 000 teachers ended up also being evacuated. Evacuation didn’t just happen once in the Second World War their were two major times of evacuation

Children were only evacuated from Major cities but deciding what is a major city can be quite controversial. It was not just the highly populated cities that were evacuated; it was also the cities of strategic or military value such as Coventry and Liverpool. The reason why children were chosen for evacuation was because they were of no use to the war effort. It would be a huge moral boost if the parents of the children knew their children were safe and happy in the country. It would also be easier for the emergency services if buildings were bombed ...

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Children were only evacuated from Major cities but deciding what is a major city can be quite controversial. It was not just the highly populated cities that were evacuated; it was also the cities of strategic or military value such as Coventry and Liverpool. The reason why children were chosen for evacuation was because they were of no use to the war effort. It would be a huge moral boost if the parents of the children knew their children were safe and happy in the country. It would also be easier for the emergency services if buildings were bombed because their would be less people to save.

The reason why evacuation took place was the fear of a mass bombing. This new technique was first adopted by Germany in the Spanish civil war. The heaviest bombing In this war was the attack on Guernica, a city in the north of Spain, which came to symbolize the horrors of aerial bombing. For three hours on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, planes from the Condor Legion dropped 100,000 pounds (almost 91 million kilograms) of bombs on the city and shot all the citizens in the street using machine guns. Republican sources reported 1,500 dead. The only military target in town, a bridge, remained untouched. It appeared to many, including a London Times reporter, that "the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civilian population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race."

Winston Churchill feared that Britain would suffer the same treatment so felt that children would be safer and possibly less of a nuisance out of major targets.

After these raids didn’t come children started creeping back to their city homes. This period of bombing drought was called the ‘phoney war.’ The government ran a big campaign to stop this but was not very successful. Mothers felt that their was no need for their children to be away from them when their was no bombing. Some foster parents also felt that the evacuees were a needles burden on them. After Hitler failed to defeat the RAF in the battle of Britain he changed his tactics, he decided to start heavily bombing British cities. The second wave of evacuation started when ‘The Blitz’ began this wave was not anywhere near as successful as the one the year before, which is ironic as children were actually in danger this time.

In Conclusion I think that their were several reasons for the evacuation of British citizens but some were far more important than others. I think that the most important reason was for the welfare of the children, I think that all the other reasons were just bonuses. I think if that situation arose nowadays the British government would do the same thing for the welfare of its children.