evacuated worldwide. Most people were busy focusing on the war efforts and total war, but others worried about the children and women who did not help during battle. The question I am focusing on is, during such a drastic battle time, was it the right choice to use men as evacuates for the children, or should the men have been out at battle serving their country like the other soldiers? If the children stayed in the war zones, many would have died and therefore the future generations might have been delayed or very scarce. The few men that served as evacuates were worth the lives of the many children that were saved. Evacuations were not only unsafe for the men who evacuated the children and women, they were dangerous for the children especially. Host families on the countryside who took in the children during these times of evacuation did not take as well of care to the children as their parents did. They returned back home much lighter and shorter than the other children who did not get evacuated. Body infections were also very common, this was all a cause of lack of nutrition and gave the government incentive to do something when the warfare ended. Some places that children and women got evacuated were underground with hundreds of other people, that was just about as fatal as having them stay at home, but still they did not have the risk of getting bombed or having fatal gases around. Evacuation also was a hard time for the families that the mothers decided to stay at home, the kids became so homesick and their parents missed their children a lot. Most of the evacuations were to keep the children and women safe from Nazi bombings. Propaganda was put up to encourage evacuation, nearly two million children were sent away. Soldiers and war fanatics did not approve of the propaganda being posted about evacuation because they thought it took away from the total war propaganda that they spent so much time on. Before the phony war was when Britain had one of their biggest evacuations and after it was apparent that there would be no bombing going on, all of the children were sent right back to where they just recently left. This made mothers and teachers question how necessary the evacuations were. "I have had few worse hours in my life than those I spent watching the school being taken off in drizzling rain and gathering gloom to those unknown villages, knowing I was powerless to do anything about it."- Dorothy King, Teacher.
There were many bad things about evacuations but in the long run it was done for a good reason, to preserve future generations and keep the children safe and alive. The evacuation in all of Britain's largest and most popular cities was the most effective. If the children were not evacuated during this time thousands of them would have died leaving future generations less populated. Being woken up in the middle of the night is terrifying to adults, young children would be scarred for life if they made it out alive after a bombing. Though the war was heavy, one must always think of the future and how war is impacting it all.
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Your arguement that the men were needed to help evacuate women and children for future generations was clear. However I think fighting for our country for the future generations is just as important. A good solution would have been to split them men equally to where some would be fighting in war and some would be helping evacuate.
ReplyDeleteI understand why people began to question how necessary the evacuations were. However i agree that the evacuations were more important than sending the few men to war because with so many people dying in WWII, it seems important to save the children in order to prevent that generation forom becoming scarce.
ReplyDeleteBombing became very popular in WWII becuase of the knew technologies in aircrafts and weaponry. All countries needed to prepare for an attack on their largest cities. It would have been considered murder if the citizens were not given the opportunity or even pushed into evacuation. Also, the men should have been out on the battlefield. Woman could have handled the evacuation job.
ReplyDeleteI think that even though it was dangerous to evacuate women and children I think that it was also a good thing to get them out of the war zones. Because children are the future. Even though evacuating people caused the women to get sick and things i think that it is not as bad as them dying in the actually war by being around everything.
ReplyDeleteIt would have been horrible as a mother or father to think that children would have been left in a war zone, so evacuation was the only right decision. I think it was right to have men doing the evacuations because woman's roles were different back then. Yes, women would be capable of doing that job today because the role of men and women have changed. But in '40s, I don't think it was possible.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sidney Houghton because those children are the future and no matter what, they will be scared being evacuated or being in the war zones. Im positive everyone was scared, so the safest thing for them to do was to just evacuate them and get them out of the way so the men can do there job and fight for their country.
ReplyDeleteYou said that the children were often malnourished and came back in worse shape than before they evacuated. Would that not mean that they were most likely better off staying at home? It is like a double edge sword affect. The children were in danger in either of the locations with the starvation or bombings. During the war, there was no "safe place".
ReplyDeleteI think it was very important to evacuate children in World War II. My grandma was a child who was not evacuated and lived in London during the bombings. To this day she still remembers the horrors she saw of the buildings being bombed, and all of the friends she lost. Her best friend in school lost her whole family to a bombing. Luckily, my grandma made it, and I am here today. However, many future generations, kids our age today, would have existed if more children had been evacuated to the countryside.
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