Although the reason above makes evacuation sound like a last minute remedy, that is far from the truth. Britain had been worried of a second war as soon as Hitler came into power in 1933, and feared that British towns and cities would be the targets of bombing raids. The Government had begun planning the process of evacuation from as early as 1934 – six years before the process began!
The difference between the First and Second World War is that during the small time between them technology had made huge advancements. This meant that instead of only the army being involved in the war, the entire nation was involved in the war effort as they too were in danger of attack – this is known as total war.
Sea warfare such as the submarine and Dreadnought could travel longer distances, were faster and had more accurate and destructive guns. They could also fire deadly torpedoes which could travel up to 8km. The seas were also defended by mines which could do great damage to ships. Land artillery - for example tanks - had dramatically improved. They were stronger, faster and more deadly. Finally, aircraft was now far more accurate and could drop bombs and torpedoes which caused incredible damage to its area of impact. This is the form of technology most relevant to evacuation.
The Government feared that Germany would make aerial attacks on Britain’s important areas (factories, harbours, communications systems and major cities), and they were correct in thinking so. On the first day of the London Blitz 430 people were killed and 1,600 were badly injured. Hitler planned to literally bomb his enemies into surrender in a “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war), so action had to be taken.
A range of methods were put in place by the Government to defend itself against aerial bombardment and invasion. First of all, blackouts – because German bombers were more accurate, they searched for areas with the most light because naturally, this means there are more people. To combat this, during air raids civilians turned out all of their lights (even if driving!) and used opaqure curtains so German bombers did not know where to attack. This was supervised by the air raid precautions (ARP). As well as this, Britain feared of gas attacks, so everyone was issued a gas mask for protection. There were no gas attacks in spite of this, which was lucky as the gas masks did not actually work!
Originally called the Local Defence Volunteers, the Home Guard were a group of men given the job of defending the country against land attack. They were not allowed to join the army as they had jobs that were necessary to run the country (bankers, railway workers etc.), or were too old/young to join. Fortunately the land invasions never came, so the job of the home guard was to capture the airmen whose planes had been shot down.
Internment was a method used by the Americans where thousands of Japanese civilians living in America were forced to relocate to ‘exclusion zones’ in case they were providing information to the Japanese Government. The process was exceptionally unfair, as out of the 120,000 people moved, two thirds of them were American citizens and half of them were children! The majority of them were kept throughout the war and had a bad standard of living up until 1944 when law forced them to be released.
Finally, the largest scheme of all: evacuation. The plan was to move all of Britain’s vulnerable citizens from the densely packed areas that were likely to be bombed into the countryside which was less prone to be bombarded because there were fewer people. There are a number of reasons why children were evacuated, explained in the paragraphs beneath the source.
The source below shows a primary source of Government propaganda distributed in the US, encouraging people to stay positive during the war, that they are all involved in contributing to the war effort as they are in Total War. Words such as “we” in bold lettering are used to relate to the reader.
Source: Memo. Ev. 4 Government Evacuation Scheme.
First of all, the children in the city were not productive. To be direct, they were economically and militarily useless in the war effort. They were far too young to engage in any type of combat in the war, and were also too young and uneducated to do any type of jobs. The children were a burden which prevented the rest of the civilians from getting on with the war effort, and therefore they had to be temporarily moved.
On the other hand, in the country children proved far more useful. Although not able to fight or help with practical jobs, they could easily grow crops in the country which were useful as Britain had extreme food shortages due to attacks on their transport ships. In the city the children were nothing more than consumers, as they did not have the space nor skills to grow crops, though in the country there was far more room and the host families that they lived with were more used to growing their own food than buying it as their communities were smaller.
To further this point, if children were in the city they were more of a burden not just to the war effort, but also to the Civil Defence Forces – those who had to rescue or prevent people from involvement in dangerous situations. The first reason for this is that naturally, if there are more people their job will automatically be made harder, but on top of this – children are more likely to get into trouble – they would not follow precautions as well as adults and may play in dangerous areas if not supervised.
In my opinion, the main reason for the evacuation of children was to keep up morale. The death of children would be a crushing blow to both the mothers who were contributing and the fathers who were fighting. If news came of children’s death, the country may have lost the impetus to keep on fighting, which may have resulted in Britain losing the war.
Children were vital to morale not only because their parents were concerned for their safety, but because of the psychological idea of children being the future – something that the public could fight for. To elaborate, the public wanted to create a future where the next generation did not have to suffer like they did, so it was important to work hard and stay optimistic to safeguard their future.
Another reason that plays a part in morale was humanitarianism. Terrible stories were going around about the Nazi atrocities, and the innocent children should not be exposed to this. If children were killed, the stories circulating about the Nazi’s would seem far more real.
The final reason that links to morale is that the Government had to seem as if they were doing something. Part of keeping up morale is giving the public the idea that they are directly helping those on the front line. Yet, if the Government are not making any attempts to help the public, why should the public contribute? The Government may have felt that after making such feeble attempts at stopping the war, they had to prove that they were willing to take drastic steps, and this is why such a tremendous amount were moved.
Following the reasons above, the Government began Operation Pied Piper. This was the first major evacuation of British civilians when up to three million (a quarter of the British population!) were evacuated in four days. Children were “labelled like pieces of luggage, separated from their parents and accompanied instead by a small army of guardians - 100,000 teachers”. You can see just how complex this event was simply by looking at the amount of teachers taken. The Government had anticipated this huge amount, and had therefore provided 100,000 teachers so there were a sufficient amount of them to continue to educate the students (around 20 per teacher).
Obviously places for the children to learn would have to be organised, as they were not enough teachers for them all to be taught privately. On top of these places, reception centres, trains, escorts, destinations, host families, the children themselves, all needed to be organised! In hindsight, it is truly amazing when considering the maths that would have been done behind the scenes to make sure there was enough of each aspect listed above for everyone who was evacuated.
It is evident that a huge amount of effort went into the scheme of evacuation due to amount of people that resolved to move. Sending your child to the country was entirely optional, and naturally it would take a large amount of convincing to tear a mother apart from them. This is why the Government had to use propaganda campaigns to not only get them to send their children away, but to get them to leave them in the countryside.
The source below shows four posters of Government propaganda. This photo was taken by me at the Imperial War Museum as I felt it was an excellent way of portraying how desperate the Government was to influence their people to act in the way they want – helping out with the evacuation process or keeping your children in the country.
Source: Range of propaganda used by the British Government.
Some families, instead of leaving it to the Government plan of evacuation, decided to use private evacuation. This was where children were sent to families that their parents knew rather than a host family that the children had never met before.
Although many believe that evacuation was a process that only happened once evacuations were continuous throughout the war. By early 1940 1.2 million evacuees had returned from the countryside to their city homes due to the “Phoney War” – for the first six months of war being declared there had been no attacks on Britain. This led mothers to believe that there was no threat and their children would be better off returning home. However after the fall of France in May 1940 the evacuees returned to the countryside after the Government announced fears that now France was conquered, Germany would finally turn its attack towards Britain.
The image below is a primary resource showing the reasons why parents should evacuate their children which was given to the British public. This is a form of propaganda as, although it does not directly tell the parents to evacuate their children (or talk of children at all), it scares mothers into doing so.
Source: Broadcast by Minister of Health, Mr Malcolm Macdonald, May 30 1940.
Following this the Government began to support overseas evacuation. Their reasons for this was that it was safer abroad in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and America, none of which were yet involved in the war. The second reason for this was that Britain was still becoming increasingly short of food, and less people meant less mouths to feed, less people to worry about, and less children being taken back into the city (because it was harder to return them once they were abroad).
Nevertheless, the Government soon changed its mind after realising the negative impacts that sending children abroad was having. Overseas evacuation meant ships were needed to transport them, and at the time Britain was short of ships already because of the German attacks on them. Overseas evacuation either meant giving up battleships or food transport ships, as you can guess, both were an impossibility. As well as ships being given up, people also had to be taken from helping out in Britain to escorting children, this proved to be a problem.
Unfortunately, the official scheme was brought to a complete halt on the 17th September 1940 after the evacuation ship “City of Benares” was sunk, causing the deaths of 77 out of 90 children and an additional 179 lives. Despite this, an additional 11,000 children were sent overseas to through private evacuation, though parents were warned that they were doing this at their own risk.
The final series of evacuations took place towards the end of the war (1944-45) when the V1 and V2 rockets were invented. These were the most dangerous aerial weaponry to be built yet and were boasted by Hitler of being the weapons that would win the war. Their full name is “Vergeltungswaffe” meaning ‘vengeance weapon’. This caused widespread fear and the last wave (though smaller than the other two) of evacuations in Britain before the end of the war.
In conclusion, the reasons for the evacuation of children were vastly varied, and the Government had to fuel the process with vast amounts of effort and propaganda. The two main reasons of evacuating children was that they were safer from aerial attack in the country than in the highly populated cities and that morale was kept high in the knowledge that the innocent future generation was secure. Evacuation was put into place because Britain was unprepared and underarmed for the war, so had to take a defensive position rather than offensive. Today - even with more advanced forms of transport - it still leaves some in shock that such a mass movement of people could occur in such a small space of time. Although it had some problems (i.e children leaving and returning to the countryside), evacuation has proved to be one of the key factors of Britain’s success – it both sustained morale and worked as an excellent form of protection for the British youth.
