I first posted it a while back on one of the silly threads, but have always been too uncertain of it, felt like it could easily be a modern manipulation. Now pretty convinced it can be filed under 'Soviet spectacle'.
my nan and other older family members had gas masks etc,but us kids were brought up not to worry about gas,bombs etc,all pragmatic really,its in the pyche of the nation imo.yours,4th wilts The only bombs I grew up worrying about were the ones that sprouted mushrooms. Like 4th I don't worry about terrorists (of course here in the home of the broke and land of the freaked were supposed to be afraid Be very afraid) but then unlike you Brits we haven't got the experience have we? Afterall geting blowed-up and blowed up good was a far greater risk during the (centuries long?) flap with the Irish then here on the Big Water where I dock. The picture that always is the hardest for me to see is the one of the little chinese infant crying sitting on a road surrounded by flame and destruction. I only hope that the git who snapped that film picked the wee bairn up and took it to safety after getting that heart rending shot. "When Elephants fight. Ants die." Merlin
The comment about the little Chinese girl reminded me of the saddest picture I've seen. It's of an American soldier trying to comfort an Iraqi boy who has just witnessed the killing of his parents. What the hell do you say even if you can speak the language?
I have a vague memory too of running o school with the bag containing gas mask bobbing up and down on my back. But probably no idea of what it was for. And von Poop - sitting in a tank was pretty tame compared with some of the things we got up to in those years. Hardly any parental supervision etc. I never saw a tank - but a small German plane was forced to land and was displayed in the market place of our small town. (So I was told, never saw it.)
The King's certificate to children of the war. Something from my Dad's papers I recently came across:
Facebook said this man was named Federico Antonio Maldonado Claveria. I put his name into Google and found this article: https://www.library.ucsb.edu/special-collections/cema/claveria
The idea of hitting cities with weapons of mass destruction first appeared in a novel written by H G Wells which predicted a World War using a form of nuclear bomb. In this in 1945 Germany nuked Paris and Japan sneaked in and did the same to San Francisco. Unfortunately for his sales "The World Set Free A Story of Mankind, Macmillan & Co. London" was published in 1914 just before the real world became distracted with a real war. The idea of bombing cities with poison gas was promulgated by an Italian general Giulio Douhet at the end of WW1. He justified this with the concept of "the knockout blow" in which wiping out a couple of cities could bring about a surrender thus avoiding a longer and bloodier war. Although "Command of the Air" was not published in English until the 1930s its conclusions were set out by Brigadier-General P.R.C. Groves writing in the Times in 1922. In 1934 Churchill warned that casualties in London in the first ten days, following the outbreak of war, could be between 30,000 and 40,000, with millions fleeing to the countryside.[1] The British press began running articles illustrating the calamitous impact of massive air raids, these were not confined to descriptions of possible damage to London but also included the provincial cities – the Daily Mail ran a story about Liverpool, predicting the total destruction of the docks and subsequent starvation in wide areas of the country as vital food imports were blocked.[2] Wells repeated his warning twenty years later with ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ with cities across the world destroyed by high explosive and poison gas.[3] This became the basis of the popular film ‘Things to Come’ released in 1936. Although as early as 1922 the British government had begun to give thought to the dangers to the civilian population from large scale air raids in the event of another war, with Germany forbidden an air force by the Versailles Treaty there does not appear to have been much urgency involved. It was not until 1934 that the Chief of the Air Staff produced an estimate of the likely impact of war based on the possibility of German bombing. This was greatly increased in 1937. The Air Ministry vastly overestimated the tonnage of bombs the Luftwaffe could and would deliver in the first fortnight of war whilst the ARP Department further inflated the casualties each ton would produce. Evacuation planning began in 1933 but by 1938 exactly who should be evacuated was still undecided. It was not until early 1939 that a decision was taken to limit this to school children, younger children and their mothers, pregnant women, blind adults and cripples who could be moved. Details of the evacuation plan could then be released in the areas expected to receive evacuees so that volunteers to house them could be sought. Air Raid Precaution (ARP) preparations began in early 1938 but according to a number of sources was not taken seriously in most towns and cities until after the Munich crisis and indeed not until Hitler broke the Munich agreement in 1939.[5] These included the issue of gas masks, training in their use and training of wardens in how to detect gas. 1 Hansard vol. 295 col. 859, 28 November 1934 2 Daily Mail, 1 February 1935 3 H.G.Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, Hutchinson, London, 1933 4 Richard M Titmuss, History of the Second World War Problems of Social Policy, HMSO, London.1950 5 Robin Woolven, Pre War Preparations, in A Brief History of Civil Defence ed Tim Essex-Lopresti, Civil Defence Association, Matlock, 2005
Six-year-old Austrian boy “Werfel” receiving a new pair of shoes at the Am Himmel orphanage, donated by the Junior Red Cross in America. Published in the LIFE Magazine in 1946, photo by Gerald Waller.
BEF withdrawal to Dunkirk I heard the king speak tonight on Empire Day, I stood with a group of officers in the courtyard of a French farm. I met some refugees, mostly children, who had cycled miles. They had been machine gunned for a few miles coming here and were still terrified at the sound of an aeroplane. Lt DCL Shepherd 67th Fied Regt Letter Posted 25th May 1940 The Day that Boulogne fell
Remarkable clip of kids on a pilgrimage to their fathers' graves in the Netherlands. 1955. https://x.com/battlefieldexpl/status/1710242343725433117?s=20