Was Evacuation A Success

Authors Avatar

 

Was evacuation a great success?

Throughout the Second World War, evacuation was introduced on 1st September 1939 to keep children, pregnant women and teachers away from danger and mainly to save their lives. They were taken to the safe countryside from the dangerous cities and ports which would have been the first places to be invaded.

For my History Coursework, I will be researching and looking at various sources in connection to World War II to will help me determine and answer the aim of my coursework; ‘Was Evacuation a Great Success?’

Source A is a photograph of Evacuees walking amongst the streets to the train station in London with their class teachers and parents who are walking them to the station. From looking at the photograph, the children seem to be very happy and everyone are waving and smiling directly at the camera. This suggests evacuation was a great success as everyone is enjoying their time making the source reliable. The source is also useful because it is taken from the time of evacuation on September 1939. This photo is very good propaganda for the government. Just looking at this picture, it gives me the impression that evacuation was a great success. However, in this source, we can also question the reliability of it because you can only see a small sample of evacuees; this may not mean that every single evacuee was happy and cheerful; Most of them may have been upset. Also, it is only a snapshot taken by a photographer, the people involved in the photo could even be ‘posing’ for the camera and from my own knowledge, many children would normally be extremely upset to leave their own homes and families behind to other foster parents for periods of time, this makes the source limited.

The second source I will discuss is Source B which is an interview from a teacher telling her story about how she was evacuated with other children from her school during the year 1988. Source B shows it is a very reliable source because of the fact that this person is a teacher, suggesting they should be reasonably intelligent and well educated therefore she would identify and know many things.

She talks about her experience of the day she looked after other school pupils and she states how the children were feeling at the time. ‘The children were too afraid to talk.’ She explains that the children were too terrified of what they were going through that they were too scared to even talk. Most of the children probably did not know what was going on and where they were going, the majority of them were too young to even fully understand what would have been going on. She provides useful facts and information on how the parents reacted to their children leaving, such as ‘The mothers pressed against the Iron Gate calling Good-bye darling’ that tells us there were a lot of mothers were so afraid of letting their children go and shouting ‘Good-bye darling’ tells us that the mothers were saying good bye to their children for the last time. The source is useful because the teacher has first hand experience and was there at the time so she knows what occurred at the time. On the other hand, this source can also be defined as limited because the interview is only from one person’s opinion and memory. It was also in 1988 when the interview occurred which was approximately 50 years later after the war and evacuation so it is not taken from the time and the teacher may have forgotten many important details. It is also only an extract from the entire interview, only a small part and therefore it is unreliable.

Join now!

The third Source I will be looking at is Source C; it is an extract from a novel called ‘Carrie’s War’ based on facts which is written for children about evacuees. Because it is a novel, this means it is a story based on knowledge of the evacuation and she has made it easier to understand, especially for children so it should be mainly true but could have been enhanced to make it more interesting and appealing to children. Source C gives an example of many successful evacuee experiences, ‘Not a speck of dust anywhere.’ From this, I can ...

This is a preview of the whole essay