World War II - Evacuations of Children

tabby · Post by **tabby** » Fri Nov 18, 2011 5:25 pm

I watched a good movie this week called "Carrie's War" which told the story of a young London girl evacuated to safety in the Welsh countryside during WWII. The mass evacuation of civilian children wasn't something that was done here in the USA because clearly there wasn't the same imminent threat of bombings on the mainland. My mother remembers the blackouts at night and having the dark covers put over windows but thankfully nothing ever came of it as far as needing that particular preparation, at least in southside Virginia. How many of you in the UK had a family member who remembers the bombing and do any of you have family members who were evacuated to the countryside as children?

theia · Post by **theia** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 12:45 am

My aunt lived in central London during the Blitz. She would tell me about the bombings and how they would often have a sleepless night in a shelter and then, in the morning, walk to work, often through the rubble of nearby buildings that had been destroyed.

gmc · Post by **gmc** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 3:46 am

tabby;1376133 wrote: I watched a good movie this week called "Carrie's War" which told the story of a young London girl evacuated to safety in the Welsh countryside during WWII. The mass evacuation of civilian children wasn't something that was done here in the USA because clearly there wasn't the same imminent threat of bombings on the mainland. My mother remembers the blackouts at night and having the dark covers put over windows but thankfully nothing ever came of it as far as needing that particular preparation, at least in southside Virginia. How many of you in the UK had a family member who remembers the bombing and do any of you have family members who were evacuated to the countryside as children?

You would be hard pushed to find someone of the baby boomer generation who didn't have a relative that remembers the bombing or who was involved in the war in some way or another. I had only one adult male relative of fighting age at the time who was not in the armed forces because he was in a reserved occupation. It was so commonplace and affected everybody that people tended not to talk about it except in passing and in later life when they began to realise people were forgetting. Everybody was a veteran in a way it's almost part of our psyche. I had relatives that lived in prefabricated houses (prefabs, aluminium houses built as a quick way of dealing the the housing shortage after the war ) until the sixties. You can still see them around in some places. There was a second blitz as well when hundreds of V1s and V2 rockets fell on london and the south east. Hitler was a hairsbreadth from having intercontinental missiles.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 7:17 am

My Dad was a Boffin and my uncle (too old but volunteered) was in the Pay Corps in India. The family lived in a small town about 20 miles from Leicester and only got one bomb in the whole war - about three miles out of town. My aunt told the tale of the time the salt and sugar rations got mixed together and they spent ages sieving to separate them. With very moderate success!

My understanding was that the US blackout was to stop ships being silhouetted against the brightly lit shore at night, thus making them easy targets for U-boats. It wasn't about planes.

gmc · Post by **gmc** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 8:08 am

Clodhopper;1376163 wrote: My Dad was a Boffin and my uncle (too old but volunteered) was in the Pay Corps in India. The family lived in a small town about 20 miles from Leicester and only got one bomb in the whole war - about three miles out of town. My aunt told the tale of the time the salt and sugar rations got mixed together and they spent ages sieving to separate them. With very moderate success!

My understanding was that the US blackout was to stop ships being silhouetted against the brightly lit shore at night, thus making them easy targets for U-boats. It wasn't about planes.

Yo're right i think, they called it the second happy time.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 8:37 am

the second happy time.

That was the phrase. The first was before the convoy system had enough escorts - and especially planes - and the Germans could operate from the French Atlantic ports without having to get out through the North Sea. I think the Germans had broken the Navy's code and were able to guide wolfpacks onto convoys very accurately. Came near to starving us to defeat.

The way I heard it, Admiral King (Head of the US Navy) hated the British so much that he initially refused to operate the convoy system, because it was a British suggestion. He argued they did not have enough escort vessels, the Brits said convoys were better even without enough escorts as their experience in the last war and the first three of the current one proved. After a few hundred sailors (many of them American) had paid for his hatred with their lives the convoy system and blackout were introduced and the number of sinkings dropped off sharply.

It's hard to believe something so childish could be true, but stressed out tired people do strange things at times.

Post by **LarsMac** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 9:29 am

I once worked for a chef who grew up in Anglesey, during the war. He told me that the Irish refused to participate in the blackout. They could see the lights of Ireland across the water. and the German bombers could line up on the lights to guide them over London.

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 9:52 am

The Irish Free State was less than 25 years old and De Valera would not ally with the British for any reason. They stayed neutral and had no reason to black out. Churchill resented it immensely and probably had a point when he said a lot of allied merchant seamen died because we could not use the Irish ports.

But I doubt bombers over London would get much benefit from the lights of Dublin. If the curvature of the earth didn't block their line of sight, even at 20,000 feet (and they bombed much lower than that), then the nights when there was no cloud anywhere between London and Dublin would be few and far between.

The Germans did bomb Ireland a few times by accident. Though it's hard to understand how the pilots could not tell the difference between an unblacked out city and a blacked out one. At the time the British were sometimes in effect "bending" the radio beams the Germans were using to guide their bombers to the target and it wouldn't altogether surprise me if Churchill wasn't quite happy if the beams could be bent as far as Dublin on a night when the Germans intended to bomb Liverpool or Belfast. I have no proof of that, though.

edit: They might have got some help from the lights of Dublin when bmbing Liverpool though...

gmc · Post by **gmc** » Sat Nov 19, 2011 10:08 am

LarsMac;1376177 wrote: I once worked for a chef who grew up in Anglesey, during the war. He told me that the Irish refused to participate in the blackout. They could see the lights of Ireland across the water. and the German bombers could line up on the lights to guide them over London.

They were neutral why on earth should they have a blackout? Besides if you look at a map if they were flying near ireland to go to London it meant they were rather lost. They did bomb Belfast and Barrow in Furness so maybe it helped there. At least they wouldn't bomb them by mistake.

Post by **Bryn Mawr** » Sun Nov 20, 2011 4:29 pm

Growing up in the shires most of our family stories are of receiving the evacuees or of the prisoner of war camps than of being evacuated but several of our friends were Londoners and were evacuated to avoid the Blitz.

Evacuation started even before the official declaration of war (if only by a couple of days) and was done on a wholesale basis.

fuzzywuzzy · Post by **fuzzywuzzy** » Sun Nov 20, 2011 4:36 pm

there's a very good doco on the kids who came to Australia and a museum here dedicated to them . most were told they are going on holiday then to be told they were orphans when they weren't . Horrible time .

Post by **Bryn Mawr** » Sun Nov 20, 2011 4:58 pm

fuzzywuzzy;1376345 wrote: there's a very good doco on the kids who came to Australia and a museum here dedicated to them . most were told they are going on holiday then to be told they were orphans when they weren't . Horrible time .

There has been a growing realisation over the past decade of the forced emigration of tens of thousands of our children, mostly to Oz, NZ, Canada, during the 1950s and 1960s and the details are only slowly trickling out.

tabby · Post by **tabby** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 6:33 pm

I didn't know they evacuated children to Australia during WWII. Assuming they went by ship, it seems like they would have had to travel through dangerous seas to get there. Wasn't Australia in as much danger from bombing by the Japanese as the British were by the Germans?

tabby · Post by **tabby** » Mon Nov 21, 2011 6:41 pm

Bryn Mawr;1376350 wrote: There has been a growing realisation over the past decade of the forced emigration of tens of thousands of our children, mostly to Oz, NZ, Canada, during the 1950s and 1960s and the details are only slowly trickling out.

Why would they have been sending the children at that point in time?

Post by **Bryn Mawr** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:24 am

tabby;1376503 wrote: I didn't know they evacuated children to Australia during WWII. Assuming they went by ship, it seems like they would have had to travel through dangerous seas to get there. Wasn't Australia in as much danger from bombing by the Japanese as the British were by the Germans?

It wasn't evacuation during the war, it was forced emigration and continued into the 1960s.

Up to one hundred and fifty thousand poor and or orphaned children were affected with many being sent into what amounted to little more than slavery.

Britain's child migrants lost their childhoods to years of hard labour | Society | guardian.co.uk

Post by **Bryn Mawr** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:29 am

tabby;1376506 wrote: Why would they have been sending the children at that point in time?

They thought they were doing good?

Poor and orphaned children running round our streets were a moral hazard and the Church thought it better they worked for a living overseas?

Clodhopper · Post by **Clodhopper** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 3:04 am

a very good doco on the kids who came to Australia and a museum here dedicated to them . most were told they are going on holiday then to be told they were orphans when they weren't . Horrible time .

Good Lord. I never knew about this. I was adopted in 1965, and it sounds as though I might just as easily have been exported!

I might have had to support Aussie Cricket and Rugby?

The horror. The horror.

Seriously, that's just awful. I think Bryn is probably right and it was felt a chance in the colonies was better than certain poverty in Britiain. And that also is an appalling inditement of the attitudes of some in the '60s. Thank god for Flower Power.