Sam Johnson History
History Essay
Introduction (Section 1)
In 1939, Britain was preparing for war. The Germans were rapidly growing in power, and as were the air force, Specifically, Fighter planes and bombers. Their aim was to bomb London and other major British cities such as Liverpool and Birmingham and destroy British morale. Britain was prepared when the bombers came. They had blacked-out windows and a bomb shelter in nearly every person’s garden. But some of these preparations could only do so much, and millions would still die or become homeless from the range of bombs the Germans dropped. People’s houses would be destroyed and the residents would have nowhere to go. The weak would not survive living on the streets, due to cold and night after night of bombing. The government foresaw that so many people would die, so they used the process of evacuation.
Evacuation, was used to basically, get people out of the targets of the German air force. Prior to the start of The Blitz and even prior to the war, the government began to evacuate people. Mainly schoolchildren, mothers and school teachers were evacuated. Other vulnerable people were evacuated as well, such as blind and disabled people and also pregnant women. According to source 2, 827,000 Schoolchildren were evacuated from the major cities of Britain, in September 1939. The sums of 1,474,000 people in total were evacuated in that one month; to the countryside and other rural areas, highly unlikely to be bombed. Some of the areas, as quoted from source 3 are: “Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Sussex, and All of Wales”. The Countryside dominates. The evacuation areas are also out of the way of industrial towns and cities. Although in Lincolnshire, one of the evacuation areas, the biggest, most productive steel works in Britain, Scunthorpe was one of the targets of the Luftwaffe, but only suffered minor damage due to inaccuracy.
