How far do I agree that evacuation was a success

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How far do I agree that evacuation was a success ?

Firstly I will say what evacuation is and what it supposed to achieve. The meaning of evacuation is to move large numbers of people away from a certain area. All evacuations require a lot of planning and the evacuation of cities up and down the UK during the Second World War was no acceptation. The preparations where being started as early as 1936 when members of the public where shown footage of the German led raids on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, during which many Spaniard lost their lives. Around the same time the city council of London began its preparations for the mass evacuation which would take place three years later, the main thing that they planned was the transportation of children to the countryside and how they would be distributed amongst the people who currently lived in the areas they where being sent to. By 1938 from the evidence the government had collected from the Spanish Civil War they expected that 10,000 people would die during each air raid, so now it was imperative to make sure the evacuation went to plan to reduce the amount of casualties once the war had begun. The main things that the evacuation was to achieve was; to keep the casualty count down, to get children out of the way and finally to keep morale high amongst the working people, this could be achieved more if child deaths where at a premium.

Now I will proceed to answer the title of the essay, I can learn from the evidence available and my own knowledge that is possible to both agree and disagree with the statement " Evacuation was a great success" I will now go into detail for both sides of the argument and make my own conclusion.

During the evacuation approximately 1.5 million people,730,000 where children traveling alone had been evacuated from all the major towns and cities across Britain. It is obvious to see that without careful planning it would not be impossible to carry out an operation of such magnitude. The thing that makes this a point for me agreeing that evacuation was a success is the fact the government did not rush into evacuation it was only undertaken after months, even years of careful planning to maximize the benefits. Also with 3.5 million people out of the way during the air raids in the British cities it would help keep the loss of life down and also raise morale for the people working on the home front, they would no longer have to worry about the more vulnerable people in the community. The next reason that has me in favour of the statement given above is the fact that quite a lot of children actually benefited from evacuation, the reason for this is because despite the fact the war was just beginning it was an exciting time for the evacuees, mainly the children, from the sources I have came across whilst researching for this essay I have discovered that before the evacuation the majority of children where smiling and looked rather excited about the prospect of taking a leap into the unknown and moving to a place they have never been before. Once in the countryside a lot of varies activities awaited them, for example in one such account a young girl spoke of her joy of fishing for the first time, " I remember it like it was yesterday, when I caught my first fish it was as if I had just been given a new toy". That joy was repeated on numerous occasions across Britain and it was one small positive of the war. In another such source I came across a young girl spoke about her time in the countryside in a letter, she spoke about the fact they had good rations and of the adventures she had, such as getting lost for three hours in the countryside, this is more proof of the benefits of the evacuation on young peoples lives. Now I will expand on the points I have already made and also make some new ones by talking about some of the sources I came across during the research I made for this essay. As I have already said, the children mostly had smiles on their faces when being taken to the train station to be sent of to `somewhere safe`, as they where told at the time. The second and final thing I came across in my sources was on the large part how well the evacuees where treated, they were usually sent to middle class middle aged families who easily had the potential to look after them and treat them well, in the words of one young boy, " It was like I had been sent to stay with the king" That also gives a good impression of how different living in the inner city was to living in the relative luxury of the countryside, also from a different source from the government I noticed how much safer the children would have been in the countryside and how grateful the government where for the people who took in the children, with quotes such as ` you will be doing a great service to your nation` showing how important a job they where doing. That concludes my view of all the things that would make me agree with the statement " Evacuation was a great success"
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Now I will talk about the disagreeable points of evacuation, the first big point I quickly became aware of was the cost of the evacuation, the money could have been spent on other aspects of the war such as provided weapons for the armed forces to help win the war against the German lead enemy or being invested to make more protection available for when the air raids finally began in the summer of 1940. The second major negative of the whole mission was the fact that the government significantly over estimated the amount of casualties that would ...

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