- As the last days of peace ebbed away in 1939, more than
3.5 million children were taken from their homes as part of the largest
mass movement of people ever seen in Britain.
-
- A new book is now questioning whether the evacuation
of so many five- to 15-year-olds was a necessary evil or the over-reaction
of a British Government with ulterior motives.
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- 'The evacuations were planned against a series of hugely
exaggerated estimates of the potential effects of the German bombs,' said
Stuart Hylton, author of Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the
Home Front 1939-1945 .
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- 'The sub-text to this was the political battle being
fought by the fledgling Royal Air Force to retain its independence as the
third armed force,' he added.
-
- Other war experts have supported Hylton's claims. 'The
overseas evacuations were an absurd scheme, hopelessly confused, ridiculously
ambitious and part of a British policy to woo the USA to fight against
Nazism,' said Mike Fethney, an evacuee and author of The Absurd and the
Brave, an account of the evacuations.
-
- According to official, pre-war calculations, more than
100,000 tons of German bombs would be dropped on Britain in the first two
weeks of the war alone. In fact, less that 65,000 tons were dropped throughout
the entire war.
-
- The likely impact of the bombing was also wildly misjudged:
official calculations were that that every ton of bombs would result in
50 casualties, whereas the true figure turned out to be nearer one casualty
per ton.
-
- 'The Government was scared that, if the people were subjected
to enough bombing, they would demand peace at any cost,' said Hylton. 'This
was the context in which the idea of evacuation evolved.'
-
- Evacuation plans were developed by the Government in
secrecy, with very little consultation with local authorities or families.
'Many of the mistakes that were made might at least have been identified,
if not necessarily overcome, by obtaining these views,' he added.
-
- While the years of evacuation were the happiest in the
lives of many poor inner-city children, for thousands they meant physical
and sexual abuse, severe neglect and deep unhappiness.
-
- The Children's Overseas Reception Board (Corb), drawn
up in June 1940 by Geoffrey Shakespeare MP to coordinate the evacuation
of 275,000 children, was considered to be the jewel in the crown of the
Government's evacuation plans.
-
- But far from being welcomed by the Prime Minister, Winston
Churchill strongly resisted the scheme, only letting it slip through after
he was distracted by news of France's surrender, brought to him in the
Cabinet Room as the evacuation scheme was being presented.
-
- John Capel was five when he died of exposure after the
ship on which he and his 12-year-old brother, Derek, were being evacuated
was torpedoed by a German submarine.
-
- The tragedy, which brought the Corb programme and all
state-sponsored overseas evacuation to an abrupt end, convinced Capel that
the scheme was little more than a propaganda tool.
-
- 'Parents were manipulated by the Government into believing
evacuation was the best thing for their children,' he said. 'But it was
more or less a propaganda ploy to pressure other countries to help us.'
-
- The ship on which the Capel brothers were travelling,
the City of Benares, was 600 miles into the North Atlantic when its Navy
escorts turned back to Britain, unable to accompany the ship further because
of a lack of seapower.
-
- 'We woke up to a deafening bang and the walls and ceilings
collapsing around us. All the lights went off and the ship was lit only
with the blue emergency lights,' said Capel. 'I was split up from John
and mine was the last lifeboat to leave the ship.
-
- 'I remember people shouting, bodies floating and a sea
so rough we couldn't save them. As we watched, the tail end of the ship
went down, still with a few lights blazing,' he added.
-
- Only 12 of the large number of children aboard the Benares
were rescued, and by the time Capel's lifeboat was picked up eight days
later the six boys were suffering from frostbite, trenchfoot and malnutrition.
'We had been given up for dead,' said Capel. 'It was only later I discovered
that John had died from overexposure and been given a sea burial.'
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- Martin Parsons, Britain's leading authority on evacuees
and the author of three books on the subject, rejects Hylton's claims.
'Evacuation was certainly not a knee-jerk reaction by the Government, and
if you look at it in terms of lives saved there's no question that it was
a success,' he said.
-
- 'That's not to deny that there were hidden agendas on
the part of the Government and, although it saved lives, one has to look
at the experiences of some of the evacuees and ask; at what cost?'
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- http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,518526,00.html
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