why did the british government evacuate children from major cities in the early years of the 2nd world war?

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Jake Aston

 History coursework draft

 Ww2 Evacuation

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

Why did the British government evacuate children from major cities in the early years of the Second World War? Throughout this assignment I am going to investigate this question. The term “evacuation” came from the mass movement of children from major cities to rural areas of Britain by the government. I will evaluate both the long term and short term reasons to why the British government evacuated children from major cities, and how the results of this affected the British people.

The potential of mass bombing was first realized just after the armistice of the First World War when the British fighter command was set up, an aerial unit of fighter aircraft to protect the British Isles in times of possible future conflict. These expectations of the effectiveness of bombing were proved valid when the Chinese saw whole cities flattened by the Japanese 1931-36. Between the establishment of fighter command and the mass bombing of china, military aircraft progressed enormously, By the early 1930s, aircraft design and construction technology throughout the world had advanced to the point where it was possible to mass-produce all-metal airplanes. There had been an all-metal plane as early as World War I, but it was an exception. Most airplanes of the WWI period and the 1920s had been primarily of wood and fabric construction, although many later ones had tubular steel fuselage frameworks. The potency of new metal frame fork meant they could accommodate supplementary weight. This increase in load capacity saw more powerful engines with large fuel tanks being installed in aircraft giving them greater speed, range and better defensive capabilities. The us B-9 bomber was the first mass produced practical long range bomber. It had a top speed of 186 mph and could outrun the fighters of the day by 5 mph. The monoplane bomber reached this speed although it had a five-person crew (in open cockpits) and carried a 2,400-pound bomb load. The design of bombers progressed from this and became faster; more heavily armed, had a higher ceiling and overall had a longer range and larger bomb loads. This progression in bomber efficiency led to the statement of Arthur Balfour, “the bomber will always get through”. This shows at an early stage even before the war, people had begun to realise what a threat heavy bombing held to national security, this realisation was proved correct when the Spanish city of Guernica was flattened by German dive bombers in the civil war, news reports of this shocked the world into complete comprehension of the threat of bombing.

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Following Hitler’s aggressive actions in Austria and Czechoslovakia the British home secretary sir john Anderson ordered the construction of air raid shelters (later to be named “Anderson shelters” after him), this more that anything reveals the governments comprehension of mass bombing to come when war when forecasted.  

On March 7th 1936 German troops marched into the Rhineland. This was Hitler's first illegal act in foreign relations since coming to power in 1933 and it threw the European allies, especially France and Britain, into bombed should a war occur with the ever growing power of Nazi Germany. The following military ...

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