The Evacuation of British Children in World War II

The Evacuation of British Children in World War II

The evacuation of Britain's cities at the start of World War Two was

the biggest and most concentrated mass movement of people in Britain's

history. Only Children and teachers were evacuated and were only taken

from the likeliest German targets. The first children to be evacuated

were taken from their families on the 31 st August 1939. In the first

few weeks nearly two million children were evacuated. Usually when

children were evacuated they went with their school teacher and the

children they were familiar with. About 100 000 teachers ended up also

being evacuated. Evacuation didn’t just happen once in the Second

World War their were two major times of evacuation

Children were only evacuated from Major cities but deciding what is a

major city can be quite controversial. It was not just the highly

populated cities that were evacuated; it was also the cities of

strategic or military value such as Coventry and Liverpool. The reason

why children were chosen for evacuation was because they were of no

use to the war effort. It would be a huge moral boost if the parents

of the children knew their children were safe and happy in the

country. It would also be easier for the emergency services if

buildings were bombed because their would be less people to save.

The reason why evacuation took place was the fear of a mass bombing.

This new technique was first adopted by Germany in the Spanish civil

war. The heaviest bombing In this war was the attack on Guernica, a

city in the north of Spain, which came to symbolize the horrors of

aerial bombing. For three hours on the afternoon of April 26, 1937,

planes from the Condor Legion dropped 100,000 pounds (almost 91

million kilograms) of bombs on the city and shot all the citizens in

the street using machine guns. Republican sources reported 1,500 dead.

The only military target in town, a bridge, remained untouched. It

appeared to many, including a London Times reporter, that "the object