A Sandwich for the Journey - The Story of a London Evacuee

CHAPTER TWO

OPERATION PIED PIPER

The Phony War

With Neville Chamberlain’s failure at the Munich Conference and the subsequent German occupation of Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1938, it had become brutally apparent that all efforts to “appease” the enormous ego and ambitions of Adolf Hitler through the conventional avenues of diplomacy had been in vain. Reluctantly, the government of Great Britain began to brace itself for the inevitability of war on its home front with the German Third Reich, and all that implied in terms of safeguarding its civilian population—especially the children. Author Niko Gartner describes the British government’s unprecedented undertaking in his book, Operation Pied Piper: The Wartime Evacuation of Schoolchildren from London and Berlin 1938-46: “During that summer, preparations were evident all over London: houses were made ready for blackouts, sandbags were piled outside municipal buildings, and Anderson shelters were delivered and set up.”1 With dreadful anticipation, the people of Great Britain began to wait for Hitler to make his next move.

As things turned out, they were in for a long wait. The eight-month period between the conclusion of Hitler’s “lightning” Polish campaign in mid-September 1939 until the invasion of France in May 1940 found the war settling into what was essentially a waiting phase for the two world powers that was aptly coined: “The Phony War.”2 Eventually the German Blitzkrieg arrived in Western Europe as it came crashing through the Ardennes Forest into France during the late spring of 1940.

The Battle of Britain was soon to follow. Finally, for the subjects of King George VI, the wait was nearing its end.

Preparations for Evacuation

Initial preparations for a possible evacuation of a large portion of the civilian sector of Great Britain began in 1931 with the creation of the Imperial Defense Committee’s “Evacuation Subcommittee”—an organization whose activities greatly accelerated in the mid-1930s in response to the rather alarming buildup of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. During the summer of 1938, plans were further developed by the Anderson Committee and were subsequently implemented by the Royal Ministry of Health. This is the same Sir John Anderson to whom the completion of thousands of “back garden” bomb shelters owe their collective names. Anderson’s scheme called for the Island Kingdom to be partitioned into three zones, each comprising roughly one-third of the nation’s population. Each zone was to bear the classification as either “evacuation” (large urban centers), “neutral” (areas equally positioned between a rural area and a populous urban center), or “reception” (strictly rural areas). In effect, the zone’s designation was dependent upon its likelihood of becoming a viable target of the German bombing campaign, as the aerial bombing was the greatest perceived threat to the civilian population, at that time. Try as they might, no safeguarding measures could hope to be 100% effective as a spokesman of the British government relates in author Carlton Jackson’s study of Operation Pied Piper, “In a country the size of England, there is, in the condition of modern war, no place of absolute safety.”

The majority of the children who were earmarked for evacuation by the government were born between the years 1924 and 1938 putting them roughly between the ages of one and fifteen years of age. Categories of priority for evacuation were established as follows: Category “A” was comprised of school children between the ages of five and fifteen. This group was to be evacuated en masse, by school, accompanied by their teachers who had them well prepared through the constant evacuation drills they rehearsed over and over. This category accounted for some twenty percent of the children who were evacuated during the war. Category “B” was the most problematic as it consisted of children under the age of five. As such, these children had never attended school. Therefore they had never been exposed to the drills the older children experienced in preparation for the evacuation. This almost complete lack of preparedness led to disorganization that sometimes bordered upon chaos when the time came for these youngsters to be evacuated. Further, the government encouraged the children’s mothers to accompany them, making things more difficult for the hosts in the reception areas. If these children were placed in their reception families unaccompanied, the head of his or her new household was given what amounted to parenting authority sanctioned by, and under the close supervision of, the local authorities. This category comprised almost eighty percent of the total. Category “C” was created for sightless children who were scheduled for second-day evacuations due to the time-consuming policy of informing their parents of their imminent evacuation in person rather than over the wireless. This was done for security reasons. Finally, Category “D” was reserved for expectant mothers. They too were scheduled for evacuation on the second day. Provisions were made for these women and their unborn children in terms of evacuation prioritization dependent upon their varying stages of pregnancy. More often than not, pregnant women evacuated to “neutral sites” to provide for their safety while allowing them proximity performed to medical centers.3

The government preferred that the plotting of the routes between the schools and the train stations (or other “control points” that were earmarked for embarkation) be performed by teachers and headmasters.4 For the sake of British morale, and in an attempt to deprive Herr Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment) of any additional fuel for his already well-running propaganda machine, mass rehearsals of thousands of children were avoided, at all costs. This was part of the government’s policy of practicing what came to be termed “rehearsing without rehearsals.” Police cars laden with loudspeakers were deployed, pamphlets were distributed, and posters were put up to spread the message throughout the urban neighborhoods to parents alerting them to the impending need to evacuate their children.

The message was also quite effectively conveyed via speakers who frequented public gatherings delivering a government-approved “set speech” that encouraged thousands of parents to sign up their charges.

Suppose war was to come…what would you do with your children? We have to assume that bombers would come over and certainly they would carry and drop a far greater load of bombs than in the last war. Moreover, big and crowded cities offer tremendous temptation to a ruthless enemy. Would you not prefer to entrust your children to their teachers, to take them to some safer place?5

By war’s end, this massive undertaking eventually saw the evacuation of nearly four million people (mostly children) to the relative safety of the English countryside and to a lesser degree, to the nations of the British Commonwealth and the United States, making it the largest and most concentrated mass movement of humanity in British history.6

The First Wave: September 1939—January 1940

One fact that has been somewhat lost to history is that the first significant evacuation actually occurred in 1938—well before Great Britain’s declaration of war. This mass movement of humanity saw the evacuation of over 4,000 physically handicapped London children to the safety of the English countryside. This, however, proved to be a drop in the bucket when compared to what was soon to come. The ambitious evacuation program that followed was, somewhat ironically, code-named Operation Pied Piper after the rather disturbing German folktale of the same title. Evacuations of Britain’s large urban centers began in earnest with the activation of the governments “Clean-Out scheme,”7 when Hitler’s armed forces, without provocation, boldly invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. Two days later, Great Britain formally declared war against Nazi Germany World War II had begun.

On this fateful first day of wartime evacuations, parents were notified by local war information messages (LOWENS) to send their children to school as normal, bearing suitcases and or knapsacks packed with whatever they deemed necessary for the journey to the reception areas. Open arriving at school they were, as rehearsed, formed into squads of fifty students and marched by their teachers to the nearest railway station for evacuation to the reception zones. Secrecy was paramount to the British government, therefore most children (and their parents) had no idea where they were, or where they were going. Many children were told they were going on a great adventure—a holiday. Some were even given pails and shovels by their parents, after having been told they were off to the seashore. German spies were also a concern, so workers were hired with instructions to tear down all the signs bearing the names of the railway stations in route to the reception areas. Some of this was done on the day the trains were passing through.

When one considers the plethora of challenges inherent with an evacuation of this scope, one has to conclude that this initial wave of Operation Pied Piper was nothing short of astounding success. 1,473,391 evacuees had made it safely to the reception areas, without incident, in a span of just four days. Less than...