The reason for this was to prevent children from dying in the expected bombing from the new technology of bomber aircraft.
In September 1939, Germany started the war and the Britain evacuated about 1.4 million kids, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the government decided to begin moving from Britain’s cities to the designated reception areas. Some people were reluctant to move and 47% of the school children, and about one-third of the pregnant mothers went to the designated areas. This include 827 thousand school children under school age, 13 thousand expectants mothers, 103 thousand teachers and 7 thousand handicapped people.
When the expected bombing of cities did not take place in 1939, parents began to doubt whether they had the right decision in evacuating their children to safe areas. By January 1940, an estimated one million evacuees had returned home this shows that parents did not like evacuation and doubted the danger.
In April 1940, another plan was made, this was due to France been invaded by Germany in May, children who had sent to areas within ten miles of the coast in East Anglia, Kent and Sussex were transferred to South Wales. By the end of July nearly half of the population of East Anglian’s coastal towns and two-fifths of the inhabitants of Kentish towns on the coast had left for safer regions of the country.
When the Luftwaffe began bombing Britain in July 1940 another major evacuation took place. In few weeks 213,000 unaccompanied children left Britain’s largest industrial cities. The reason for this was because the bombing started and we wanted to keep women working in the factories. Women might not have left children at home, so they were sent to the country side so that the mothers would go to the factories to build the aircraft to help Britain’s war effort.
The British got beat up by the Germans, than we ran to Dunkirk, and evacuated a million kids because Germany will bomb us. Churchill had to get us to surrender, so he did the evacuation of children partly to make people willing to keep fighting. However the main reason remained to protect the children.
On the 7th September 1940 the German air force changed its strategy and began to bomb London and other British cities such as Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth and Coventry. Parents now were desperate to get their children out of target areas and between September 1940 and December 1941, over 1,250,000 were helped by the government to leave the cities.
The government also set up a children’s overseas reception Board (CORB) which arranged for children to be sent to USA, Canada and Australia. In the first few months over 210,000 were registered with the scheme. However, after the city of Bernares was sunk by a German torpedo on 17th September 1940, killing 73 children, the overseas evacuations programme was brought to a halt.
In 1944 another wave of evacuation took place because of the V2 rockets or buzz bombs, which were destroying London. Therefore there were many reasons for evacuation, to protect the kids and to keep up morale. These changed as the war went on. Politicians would have had lots of reasons which might have changed as the war went on. For example, a politician may have started wanting to evacuate if a war started to protect children but once France fell he may have needed to keep up morale so that Britain wouldn’t surrender.
