Children with cardboard luggage tags tied to their coats and gas masks in little boxes crowded smoke-filled platforms in September 1939 as Britain moved almost 1.5 million people out of its cities in a matter of days. This episode explains the interwar terror behind the scheme: memories of Zeppelin raids, newsreels of Guernica, and Committee of Imperial Defence projections of 600,000 deaths in the first 60 days of war. The Anderson Committee divided the country into danger, neutral and reception zones, surveyed spare rooms door to door, and legally compelled rural households to billet strangers.

The logistics were chaotic: Anglesey expected 625 children and received 2,468 because trains were dispatched by capacity, not manifest. When the Phoney War brought no bombs, 87 percent of evacuated women and 44 percent of children went home by Febru ...