The evacuation plan was code named operation pied piper on September the 1st 1939 when on the first three days of evacuation the government had managed to move around 3.75 million people to safe zones out in the country side.
The reason children were moved from major cities like London, Glasgow and Liverpool is because these would be a key target for the Germans. The Germans were looking to destroy Britain’s industrial areas so places with big industrial areas would not be safe for children.
If the Germans destroyed a lot of industrial targets it would cause an economic crisis in Britain.
The reason it was mainly children been evacuated was because parents would be needed to help in the war effort mothers would work in munitions factories and doing all the jobs that men were doing before they went off to war.
Plus children were the future generation without them the country would not be running today.
It wasn’t just children that were evacuated it was mothers with children under 5, pregnant women and some disabled people as well.
Britain’s reaction to Hitler’s threat of war was to start making plans for the evacuation process they mainly did this because in the first world war Germany was able to get over to England an do aerial bombing raids these were mainly round the coast thought as the zeppelins could not make it into the main land but during the time between World War 1 and World War 2 Germany had made many technological advancements meaning they had aircraft that could make it into Britain and cause mass death and destruction.
On the 1st of September 1939 Britain demanded that Hitler is to stop invasion of Poland.
Britain started to get serious on evacuation.
Aaron Locke
Evacuation coursework question 1
In 1940 evacuation started again in response to the blitz many people did not think that war would reach home so many people came back only to be confronted with the blitz this called for many evacuees to go back to the neutral zones.
The Luftwaffe were now focusing many of its attacks on industrial areas and airfields Adolf Galland one of Hitler’s advisors began to argue that the Luftwaffe needed to change to a more defensive strategy this is why the Luftwaffe started targeting airfields to prevent the royal air force from operating causing more of a threat to people in major cities as the RAF would not be able to act in the situation of an air raid.
People were worried about gas attacks because mustard gas had been dropped in Abyssinia. Hitler had leased Mussolini weapons and money to win the war this showed Britain that Germany had chemical gases and they weren’t afraid to use them so the British government provided gasmasks for everybody they had to carry them round every were they went.
My conclusion to the question “why the British government decided to evacuate children form Britain’s major cities in the early years of the Second World War” is that the British government was trying to protect young children because they were the future generation and they could not be rebuilt like industrial areas could these were young lives in danger so I think it was a good idea to introduce evacuation.
