Operation Pied Piper, London bombs

 In 1939, a year before the Blitz started, the government knew Greater London would become an air-raid target. The media pred­ic­ted 4 million people could die in Lon­don, so the gov­ern­ment collected coffins and plan­ned a mass evac­uat­ion. The evacuation early in WW2 was the most concentrated mass movement in British history. Just in early Sept 1939, 3 mill people were transported from endangered urban areas.

Still in London, all school children were fitted with gas masks and ran raid drills. 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

Parents lined up waving to their children packed on the trains in Paddington Station.

Credit: The Daily Mail. 

Children wait for the next trains in Paddington Station.

Credit: Imperial War Museum 

 
Sin­ce many par­ents had to continue working, only their children could be sent away. The military beg­an Operation Pied Piper when 100,000+ tea­chers gath­ered millions of child­ren in/near Lon­d­on, putting them on trains. It was a huge, logistical issue of co-ordination and control, backed by the government order of late Aug 1939.

BBC announced the school children were aged 3-13. Each child car­ried a gas mask, food, clothing and neck tags with nam­e and addres­s. There were far too many children to leave in the same evacuation day, so police and LCC school off­icials saw that an avenue to their plat­form was kept free for the children. 10,000 children left New Cross Gate Southern Station, Aldgate Metrop­olitan or Paddington.

Middle-class families had already arr­an­g­­ed to send their chil­dren to live in their summer cottages, with friends and family. Or to boarding schools. But nearly everyone else had very sad memories when they left! To avoid pan­ic, parents were ord­ered not to tell the young child­ren the truth, so the kids thought that they were just going on a short school trip. Music teach­ers lightened the mood when the child­ren sang cheer­ful tra­v­el songs eg Doing The Lambeth Walk, Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye.

This was followed by evacuation of toddlers and their mums, expect­ant mums, blind and any physically handicapped peop­le who’d rec­eived their evacuation instructions. Hospital evacuat­ions also went smoothly. Along St Thomas' Hospital corridors, medical st­ud­ents wheeled 70 patients who were not seriously ill in their beds to two centres on stretchers. And many babies were among the first batch of patients removed from Guy's and Charing Cross Hospitals.

Evacuation of London schoolchildren went quite well. They cheerfully left their parents and jumped aboard for unknown but adventurous dest­inations. Once they arrived in their new towns, bill­eting officers lined the children up against a wall in the vill­age hall while local women walked around, until the children were all chosen to stay with foster parents.

Children arriving at their destination, carrying their belongings in suitcases. 

Credit: Defence Media Network. 

When children first arrived in the new town, they were fed in community centres 

Credit: The History Vault 

With such a massive operation, naturally not ev­ery­thing was perf­ect. Parents assumed that the government had already arranged foster homes, but they really had no idea where their children would be liv­ing. Thus the children were urged to write letters as soon as poss­ib­le. And even though all the chil­dren eventually learned that their parents had sent them away for their own safety, they still had to live with the fear that the family left behind in London might die.

Some of the local women sent to select foster children were apathetic, doing it only as their duty. Some foster child­ren were given food to eat and a place to sleep separate from their new families. Some families physically ab­used foster children or stole their ration-cards. Thankfully research suggested only a small min­or­ity (12%) was ill-treated.

Many of these children spent 6 years of their young lives, living away from home with strang­ers. As it happened, many Lon­don children settled happily and maintained those links long after the war ended. Going to the cinema, learning to bake bread and camping.. remained fond memor­ies. For many it was a life-enhancing, mind-broadening experience.

The first bombs to drop on London landed in Aug 1940, affecting Har­r­ow etc within the London Civil Defence Area. London’s docks suff­er­ed from Day 1 of the Blitz, when German planes drop­ped 337 tons of bombs. Throughout the Blitz, ending in May 1941, the poorest families of the East End suffered the worst, from bombs and from fires. 448 civ­il­­ians were killed that last day.

Towards the end of the war, during 1944/45, London came under heavy attack again by pilotless rockets, fired from Nazi occup­ied Europe. V1-2 flying bomb-drones landed in Mile End in June 1944 and continued for months. Thousands of Londoners were killed.

By Oct 1944 the government were planning for the Oper­ation Pied Pip­er children to return home to London and their own parents. Had the danger had passed yet? It took months to create the Op­er­ate Lon­don Return Plan when the Ministry of Health had to arrange free tran­s­p­or­t­­at­ion in trains. They were given health check-ups and food ration cards. Some of the children had grown into teenagers, and they needed to be set up with jobs when they returned home. Bec­ause of all this planning, the return of evacuees was only approved in June 1945, officially ending March 1946.

Some toddlers were only 2-3 years old when they had left their own par­ents, so they had grown up feeling as if their rural foster fam­ily was their real home, and they did not want to leave. For these child­ren, the government put an emphasis on programmes like the Boy and Girl Scouts to help them re-adjust back to big-city life.

Children running towards their parents as they returned home to London. 

Credit: Getty Images 

Post WW2, the government failed to locate the par­ents of 13,250 evacuees in London, most likely because they died during the war. And sadly, for the 15% of children who were abused by their foster famil­ies, there was no plan to get them professional help. Only later did ther­apists realise just how traumatic the experiences had been.

Conclusion
Casualties estimates in 1939 were over-exaggerated, so Government propaganda caused panic, not controlled move­ment. But Oper­at­ion Pied Piper was very successful, saving thous­ands of lives. And while the children who escaped had to endure their own traumas, mostly they enjoyed a better education and quality of life com­pared to what they would have enjoyed in London in the war. Credit: Operation Pied Piper: Mass Evacuation of Children in London in WW2 by Shannon Quinn for the history and photos