By looking at these facts we understand that this was planed by the Germans to achieve their plans and they were very successful in the bombing of the Great Britain: The scale of devastation in civilian areas was totally unexpected and that brought the people of Great Britain fear.
- Describe the effects of the Blitz on everyday life in Britain.
After reading about and learning about the Blitz we see that there obviously were effects of the bombing.
Everybody knows that the war has an affect on the economy and it is usually negative. The Second World War was no exception.
By looking at what happened during the Blitz we can assume that everyday life in Britain was damaged and made almost impossible in some places. We can learn that houses and other buildings like factories were destroyed so the Government had to spend a lot of money repairing everything.
Also it is very important to understand that transport was destroyed or delayed, Postal and telecommunications services disrupted, ports (which were extremely important at the time) e.g. Liverpool disrupted. One of the most important facts at that time was that war work got harder day-by-day. We can see that from the sources of information that we learn history today from.
By looking at the numbers of houses in Britain we can understand that people were evacuated and they couldn’t live with their normal lives.
London was divided into six areas to make it easier for the Government to evacuate people.
Also it was very upsetting but important that military industry was destroyed. Economy got a lot lower then it was before the Blitz. We can see this from bombing London and Westminster, which caused problems to banks. Again bombings of East Anglia destroyed the airbases.
By looking at British productivity we see that it got lower which was very important at the time.
By looking at the total devastation we can learn that it was totally unexpected as the bombings flattened many cities.
From that we learn that people stopped working as normal because they had to work for the country.
As the people didn’t have an idea when the war is going to finish all the people were recruited to be firemen, factory workers, cable repairers and so on.
By looking at the day-to-day life in Britain we can see that people couldn’t eat or spend as much as they used to.
The hospitals were crowded as people got injured during the day.
The main effects were also that the cities were flattened, for example Coventry; cities like this were easy to destroy because they were geographically small and compact. As people, particularly in London where it was more common became used to the Blitz more people stuck to businesses as usual however the loss of working hours was very big.
By looking at the infrastructure of a country we see that it is mostly its communication. It is the way things (people, goods, letters, ideas) got from one place to another. The Blitz seriously damaged the infrastructure of Britain: Letters took weeks to get to their destinations, Major ports like London and Liverpool were destroyed, big trades centers like Manchester had their entrances cut off.
People couldn’t travel anywhere or even contact their friends and families. The life in Britain was destroyed…
-
In what ways did the British government attempt to hide the effects of the Blitz from the people of Britain?
During the Blitz the British Government was shocked by the effort from the Germans to destroy British life.
Of course the government tried to hide the effects of the Blitz from the people of Britain.
The Government had to watch everything in the country and take it under it’s own control.
Examples of this are that the newspapers were controlled by the Government as not as much truth was allowed to be printed there as it used to be. The Government spent a lot of money and effort to make people think that if their houses were bombed they were just unlucky and they are the only ones who this tragedy happened to.
Also by looking at the newspapers and listening to the radio at that time people couldn’t know the true situation that was going on because the Government lied to people about everything, the number of British soldiers that were killed during the Blitz was a lot bigger then the Government said it was, and the number of enemies killed was made a lot bigger then it really was.
Also it is now clear that the British Government was weaker then the German government but still people were forced to think that the British were more powerful then the Germans.
One of the most important things that the government was lying about to make people believe in the British victory was that the government told people that Britain is going to win the war and every day brings it closer to its victory which in the reality was completely different.
