Why did the British government decide to evacuate children from Britain's major cities in the early years of the Second World War?

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Why did the British government decide to evacuate children from Britain’s major cities in the early years of the Second World War?

        In 1940 German air raids started in Britain.  Children were evacuated as early as 1939 from the fear of being bombed.  There were four main reasons for the children being evacuated so early; the safety of the future generation, boosting the populations morale, freeing mothers to work for the government and giving the children better opportunities to learn about personal hygiene and develop agricultural skills.

        One of the reasons for evacuation was the safety of young or pregnant mothers and also to protect the future generation.  Even though they were evacuated in 1939 the air raids did not start until September 1940.  This led to women and children being brought back home and then sent away again.  The time when the German bombing started was known as the “Blitz”.  Before the Blitz in the summer of 1940 the Germans had planned to invade Britain but were stopped by the Royal Air Force.  On the 7th September 1940, when the Blitz began, London was bombed 75 out of 76 nights in a row.  Other British cities were also hit.  An example would be Coventry on the night of 14th September, Coventry was bombed for 10 hours.  A third of the city’s buildings were destroyed and over 4000 civilians were killed.  Altogether the bombing raids had killed over 60,000 British civilians and over 2 million people were left homeless.  The evacuation was necessary to preserve as many lives as possible.  Therefore the British government decided to evacuate the children to ensure the safety of the future generation.

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        Another reason for evacuation was to boost the population’s morale.  The population’s morale was very low in that time because many problems happened to the country.  In 1939 Hitler had defeated Poland using his tactic called the “Blitzkrieg”.  He attacked with air attacks and heavy artillery in a huge surprise attack.  After that the time between September 1939 and April 1940 was known as the phoney war because there was no war.  But in April 1940 Norway was conquered.  Also only one month later Luxemburg, Holland and Belgium were also conquered.  The Germans attacked France.  The British troops tried to ...

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