The Evacuation of British and Finnish Children in World War II

In recent decades, a good deal of research has been conducted on memories of World War II. The focus has changed from war history to collection of oral histories and experiential narrations.

This growing interest is worldwide (e.g., Young 1993; Edkins 2003; Till 2005; Till and Kuusisto-Arponen 2015). Several societal developments have led to this interest: the end of the Cold War and other geopolitical shifts in the world order, the release of classified files in several national and military archives, and the generation of the war veterans passing away. Simultaneously, the experiences of children and youth during the war have attracted more attention. In contemporary research, these former war children are not seen as silent victims of war, who should not recall their wartime experiences, but as active subjects in their own life: then and now. This was not the case in the immediate aftermath of the war, when many experiential and autobiographical memories were suppressed by official geopolitical discourses of postwar societies all over Europe. This social and political silencing equally applied to former war children, now in their 70s and 80s, who after the war were marginalized through two different practices. First, children and youngsters were rarely asked by adults how they had experienced their wartime displacement. Second, these war children often assumed that taking up these issues was not a good idea in war-torn families. Thus, it is only quite recently that nonfiction, memory anthologies, and autobiographies on children's war experiences have been published (e.g., Goodman 2005; Nare et al. 2007). In addition, peer groups and local associations for World War II children have been founded both in Great Britain and Finland during the 1990s (Evacuee Reunion Association in Great Britain and Sotalapset-Krigsbarn in Finland).

The term war child (kriegskind) was established after World War I when many Austrian and German children were sent to neighboring countries due to poor living conditions and lack of food in their home regions.

Also, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), children were sent to France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union, and Mexico (Legarreta 1984). In this chapter, war child refers both to British children who, mostly without their parents, were sent either to the countryside or abroad and to Finnish unaccompanied children who were sent to other Nordic countries during World War II. During the Winter War (1939-1940) and the Continuation War (1941-1944) in Finland, about 70,000-80,000 children were sent to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Kaven 1994/2003). These war children were relocated to foster families or children’s homes. In the United Kingdom, 1.5 million British children were sent to the countryside. In addition, the British Government established the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB), which organized 2600 child evacuees to be sent to Commonwealth countries (such as New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Canada) and the United States. This scheme operated for only a few months during the summer and fall of 1940 and was called off because SS City of Benares, one of the evacuation vessels, sank when torpedoed by a U-boat (Fethney 1990/2000). After the CORB scheme was canceled, most of the British overseas evacuations were privately organized, and an estimated 17,000 British children were sent abroad (Parsons 1998, pp. 169-171).

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

The Evacuation of British and Finnish Children in World War II

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