Evacuees of the Second World War

Description

During the last days of peace in 1939 nearly two million people, most of them children, were evacuated from British cities, towns and ports to the countryside, or across the Atlantic to the USA and Canada. Whole schools were evacuated together and found themselves billeted in large country houses. Others were sent off individually or in small groups to whoever had space to accommodate them. It was a time of great upheaval and the transition from city life to countryside, or from one region to another, often proving extremely stressful. This is a concise history of British evacuation during the Second World War, including the unimaginable upheaval suffered by the inhabitants of the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, who were evacuated to mainland Britain. Beginning with the uncertainty of the Phoney War and the making of plans, this highly illustrated book looks at the experience of evacuation up to the homecomings of 1945 and the aftermath.

Mike Brown is an authority on the British Home Front in the Second World War. He has written several books and acts as a historical advisor for this period. He is also the author of the new Shire title Wartime Childhood (Shire 2009).

"Evacuees of the Second World War was one of those 'change of pace' books I like to check out every so often to provide a reminder that WW2 was not just about the tactics, the machines, and the maps. The wars that made up WW2 changed the lives of families all over the world, and this book provided insight, albeit somewhat cursory, to one of those personal topics in the World War that could be so impersonal." --C. Peter Chen, World War II Database, ww2db.com (December 2009) "Relying very much on leaflets and newspapers from the war years, Brown does a remarkable job of piecing together the planning and implementation of the various evacuation plans...Evacuees of the Second World War is a gratifying contribution to a little-considered aspect of the war." --David Mitchell, BiblioBuffet (November 2009)