Evacuees of the Second World War (Shire Library)

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 put them up. It was a time of great upheaval and the transition from city life to countryside often proved 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 of evacuation.