We shall fight them on the beaches;
Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain, 1940
we shall fight them on the landing grounds;
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets;
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender!
After the first world war, they said it must never be repeated…
But it was. Just 21 short years later, the world was again at war.
Germany, suffering defeat and humiliation in 1918, was struggling to rebuild itself.
Leaders played on the German people’s feelings of loss to build a sense of national pride. People felt they were being treated unfairly as a result of World War One, and that Germany needed to regain the lands that it had lost.
And so a leader came to power who even today, 80 years later, symbolises the very worst of humanity. He used people’s fear, jealousy and desires to persuade them that the only solution to their problems was to take back their country and make Germany great again.
Allies or Enemies?
Can you guess who was on the side of the Allies during the war, and who was in Axis?
Drag the flags onto either Churchill or Hitler to find out!
What happened when?
Let’s take a closer look at when the major events happened during WWII:
The front lines
When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, everyone knew what was coming:
Conscription.
During WWI, the army had asked for Volunteers to go and fight. But as the was intensified, and more and more soldiers were killed, they introduced conscription. When WWII was declared, men were conscripted from the start.
That meant that unless you were sick or disabled, had a job that was too important to leave (farmers, engineers, doctors, bakers etc.) you HAD to join the military, whether you wanted to or not.
Every healthy man between the ages of 18 and 41 was “called-up”, and would be arrested if they did not go!
Fighters and Farmers
Men were sent to the front lines to fight, but warfare was very different than it had been in 1918.
The trench warfare and poison gas were replaced by tanks and machine guns. The war took to the air with bombing raids on cities, and merchant ships were attacked by submarines, cutting off vital supply lines between countries.
There was also a new kind of fighting: the sneak attack. Instead of thousands of soldiers deadlocked in trenches, smaller groups were tasked with specific goals: knocking out enemy installations, sabotaging equipment and raiding supply outposts. For each major battle, there were hundreds of smaller operations undermining the enemy’s strength and ability to fight back.
From 1941, women were also conscripted, as long as they were not married and had no children.
Women did not fight as soldiers, though they worked as engineers, nurses, radio operators, and other support staff. Some also fought in the “secret army”, as undercover agents tasked with discovering plans and working with the resistance behind enemy lines.
Women who were not sent abroad to support the military worked in operations centres, or worked in the Women’s Land Army.
The Women’s Land Army kept food and supplies flowing, as the enemy was attacking the ships bringing food from abroad. WLA “girls” farmed crops and animals, worked in dairies, managed wood & timber production, and caught rats and other vermin.
A letter home
One of the most important weapons in any army’s arsenal is morale.
Morale means the confidence and enthusiasm that you feel in a situation. For example, a football team’s morale would be high if they were confident of winning their match.
But morale is not just what you get from winning, it helps you to win. If you are feeling down in the dumps and convinced you’ll lose, then you’ll never win. If you feel like you could win, then you just might!
If soldiers on the front line lost morale, they might give up instead of fighting. That’s why it was so important to keep morale high. One of the best ways to do this was for soldiers to be able to send and receive letters from loved ones back home.
Censorship
While it was important to let soldiers send letters home, it was also dangerous. Download the activity to find out why, and what you can do about it!
When you’re done, you can download the answers to see if you were right: A Letter Home: Answer Key
Top Secret!
Download the activity to learn two ways of sending secret messages: making Invisible Ink, and making a Cypher Wheel!
The home front
Recycling
Everyone had to help with the war effort. Women who were not called-up went to work in the factories, doing the jobs the men had left behind.
Even children were expected to help! Collecting scrap metal and waste that would otherwise have been thrown away was a vital part of making sure the troops had enough supplies.
Metal was turned into weapons and ammunition, cloth into uniforms and tents, and even bones left over from your dinner could be ground up and used in making explosives.
If you think recycling is a new thing, think again! During the war everything was recycled!
Rationing
Recycling alone was not enough to keep the army and the country supplied. People were encouraged not to use more than they needed, and the most important items were rationed.
Rationing meant that everyone was issued with a book of vouchers. Those vouchers allowed you to buy a certain amount of something per week, and no more.
Rationed items included food, clothes, fuel, and even soap!
How many rationed items can you find in the grid?
For more about rationing, and some tasty recipes that you can try out in class, download the Rationing activity below.
The war effort
The government knew it was very important that everyone, not just soldiers, did all they could to help win the war.
Here are some of the posters they used to encourage people to reduce, reuse and recycle.
On the right is a poster featuring the “Squanderbug“.
To squander something means to waste it. The idea was turned into a character to help get the message across that people should save everything, including their money.
If you look carefully at the Squanderbug, he has Nazi swastika symbols all over him, and he’s got Hitler’s haircut. He’s a bug, which is an irritating creature that gets where it shouldn’t be, and he has a forked tail like the Devil. What do you think the artist is trying to tell people about wasting things?
The government issued special savings certificates called War Bonds that people could buy. This helped the government raise money to pay for the war. When the war was over the government would pay people back.
They needed people to save the money and buy war bonds instead of buying themselves the little treats that they were used to buying before the war.
As a class, group or on your own, design a character to represent part of the war effort
- What will your character represent?
- What will it look like?
- What sort of personality will it have?
Evacuation
The big cities and industrial towns were under constant threat of attack from enemy bombers. To keep children safe, they were sent to live in the country with families who volunteered to look after them while the war was on.
Children were collected up and put on trains to go and live with people they had never met before! They had no choice in who they got to stay with, and while many had a great time in the country, for some the experience was not so good.
Many city children had never even seen a cow or a sheep, and they were certainly not used to all the mud, insects, and funny smells that the country brought. Some children hated it so much that they even tried to escape back home!
Now download and read the details of this true story of a little boy who escaped! Maybe you can even write your own letter or diary account of an evacuee’s experience.
How would you feel, being separated from your family and not sure when or even if you would get to see them again?
Would you try escaping hundreds of miles home?
Below you can find instructions on how to make your own gas mask and case.
After a long 6 years of struggle the Allied forces won. Victory in Europe was declared on 8th May 1945, and was followed by Victory over Japan on August 15th 1945. It was a time of great celebration all over the world, and the start of another long struggle to rebuild countries that had been devastated by the war.
Since then the world has been through a great many changes, and developed amazing new technologies, many of which had their beginnings during WW2. If it was not for rocket technology developed for weapons, we may not yet have made it into space. If not for research to make the atomic bomb, we may not have nuclear reactors to power our cities. And computers may still be a thing of science fiction.
Millions of people died during the war, and their deaths gave us the freedoms we enjoy today. We must never forget the horrors of war but we can honour the sacrifices made by an entire generation by building a better world for the future.
