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 February 1940, only to flee again when the Blitz began. We examine the cattle-market selection in village halls, the culture shock between slum children and rural hosts, the neglect and abuse that flourished without oversight, the Children’s Overseas Reception Board and the torpedoing of the City of Benares, the surprising success of institutional camps, the Titmuss theory that evacuation catalysed the welfare state, the 1943 Our Towns report, and the second trauma of returning home to parents who had become strangers.

• How casualty projections and fear of mass panic drove the government to empty its cities
• Why the billeting system broke down during the Phoney War and again after the Blitz
• The tragedy of the City of Benares and the end of overseas evacuation
• Why children in unheated holiday camps often fared better than those placed in private homes
• The Titmuss theory, its critics, and long-term studies on attachment among former evacuees