Everything you
were taught is a lie.

Babies were grown in incubators
and sent out West to repopulate
abandoned Tartarian cities.

The “Cabbage Patch Kids”
were sent on orphan trains
and distributed as free labour
to farms and factories.

  Video: Tartarian Babies

Operation:
Pied Piper

The evacuation of around
three million people (children)
to rural locations during WW2

The only information we can find is
from the ‘official’ reports and videos
produced by the government.

You’ll have to decide for yourself
their authenticity.

Seems if 3 million children was re-located
there’s few, if any, reports
from any of them about their real experiences.

One would think if it was such a successful
operation governments would be
 broadcasting details everywhere
and parading successful evacuees
in front of every camera.

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Operation Pied Piper was
planned long before war was declared.

Seems the operation had little to do
with the safety of the children and
more to do with allowing mothers
to be available to work in war factories.

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The evacuation of around three million people to rural locations beyond the reach of German air attacks deeply affected the nation.

This was the first time an official evacuation had ever been deemed necessary and the experience of mass evacuation – the biggest and most concentrated movement of people in British history – remains uppermost in the minds of those who lived through the war.

The majority of people who were evacuated were children and, for that reason, the operation was codenamed Pied Piper, fittingly named after the rather menacing German folk character.

Planning the evacuation

The scheme had been planned before the outbreak of war.

A committee led by Sir John Anderson was set up and met for three months from May 1938, consulting railway officials, teachers and the police.

Local billeting officers were appointed to find suitable homes for evacuees and they set about interviewing possible hosts.

Following selection, a host was compelled to take an evacuee; those who refused faced the threat of a fine.

In return, hosts could expect to receive payment via the Post Office.

A Phenomenal Undertaking

The organisation required to undertake the task of moving three million people around the country was phenomenal.

For four days the country’s major train stations provided a route out of cities.

Operations were coordinated by teachers and volunteers.

Children were tagged and allowed to carry a stipulated amount of luggage along with their gas masks.

They did not have an allocated foster family to meet them and were hand-selected on arrival, which led to the agonising experience for some of being chosen last.

Evacuation didn’t just take place from major cities, nor did all evacuees stay in the UK; some travelled abroad.

Britain also feared invasion from the sea and the eastern and south-eastern coasts were particularly vulnerable.

Heavy-Handed Propaganda

The first day of the evacuation was portrayed in the national press was a great success and an example of the people’s optimism, strength and commitment to the war effort.

But many witnesses remember only chaos and confusion, and parents were heartbroken to see their families divided.

And the process wasn’t always the answer to securing children’s safety.

In the same account of an evacuation from Norfolk, it was recorded that: ‘[The children] sailed from Scotland and, after a week, we were awakened early one morning by the telephone to say that the ship had been torpedoed, but that our girl had been taken by a tanker to Glasgow.’</span

A life-Changing Event

For some children this was their first taste of living in the countryside or abroad; not all of them found the change easy to adapt to.

Some children were treated badly.

Others, however, found new friends and enjoyed new experiences and, when the war came to an end, the return to city life was equally emotional.

A short documentary was produced in 1939 called ‘These Children Are Safe’ which showed how Operation Pied Piper was helping to settle children into their new safer homes.

This documentary as a piece of research cannot be trusted entirely, whilst it gives details of the exact events that occurred, it goes to great lengths to persuade us that these children were living happy lives.

This is clearly a piece of war propaganda
designed to ease concerns of parents
who’s children had been sent off
to the countryside areas.

This second documentary titled ‘Operation Pied Piper – Evacuee Stories’ supplies us a much better view of what this time period was like for the civilians involved in the evacuation.

The piece has several accounts of events during the war from the children of the evacuation, it tells us more about the terror suffered during the beginning of the aerial raids and the reality of how children and women were treated in their various accommodations across the countryside.

Not all evacuees had it bad though during Operation Pied Piper, and the youthful optimism of children prevailed through this trying time. They would find pleasures in the little things in life.

In one account of a girl named
Enid’s tale of her time as an evacuee she states:

“We lived on the flat part of the valley and had small mountains both sides.

Evacuees had never seen such scenery before so after school we would race over the railway lines, through a broken fence and up the mountain.

The best part was running as fast as we could downhill, often falling on the grass until we reached the road.”

 Enid’s story
click image or see below

“Torpedoed as they clutched their teddies:

The harrowing story of how Nazis sunk a ship carrying 90 children from the Blitz to America.”

During the beginning stages of the Evacuation our interviewee was due to be transported away to Canada but before they could get there the boats were blown out of the water by German U-boats.

This was a key moment in our interview as we established from previous conversation that Maurice found telling this particular story was quite saddening for him.

‘Enid’s:
story

Three new sisters

I was born in 1934 and lived with my aunt and uncle in a valley in Wales.

I knew my uncle had an important job because we were the only people in the street who had a telephone.

My uncle Tom was a Relieving Officer for our area; this means that when people got into trouble with money, or they would go barmy, they would come to our house to ask him to help them.

So one day my aunt told me that there would be three sisters coming to stay with us from Hanwell, just outside London because England was at war with Germany.

She called them evacuees – I never heard the word before

It was my Uncle’s job to meet these children and teachers at the station and one by one show them the houses they were to stay in.

I remember looking down the street at these strangers walking towards us clutching their gas masks, suitcases and food bags, looking very tired.

They had left their mothers at Paddington Station in London to travel down to our village…

I felt very excited about having girls my age living with me.

Can you imagine what they felt like?

They walked into the living room and stood looking at a big coal fire burning in the grate.

I remember wondering why they stared at the fire but after getting to know each other, they told me they had never seen such a fire before and Diane, the youngest said when she felt the warmth, it made her feel very happy after such a long journey

Diane the youngest was a year older than me, Audrey, two years older and Jil about ten, known as the Aylott family

In the beginning I found their accent hard to understand and they said we talked funny!

This difference in accent -although we were all English – became a problem at school because one day I was in a class of thirty – the next sixty!

Can you understand what it felt like to my school-friends to try learning with accents in a very crowded classroom

We lived on the flat part of the valley and had small mountains both sides.

Evacuees had never seen such scenery before so after school we would race over the railway lines, through a broken fence and up the mountain.

The best part was running as fast as we could downhill, often falling on the grass until we reached the road.

The girl’s mother worked full-time so they had been brought up to carry out tasks for themselves and around the house; polishing shoes, making their own beds, laying out the supper-table.

I found this very strange as our mothers never worked so we never had to do any jobs at all

The girls stayed with us for about a year and went back to London but returned a couple of years later when the bombing became bad.

Diane and Audrey came back with their friend Gretchen who lived across the road from them in London.

I didn’t like her because she was jealous of our friendship.

I also didn’t like her mother who was not very nice to my aunt, but I did like Mrs Aylott.