Torpedoed: The True Story of the World War II Sinking of "The Children's Ship"

“But this summer the war had become real for the British people, like Gussie and her family. The Germans had started bombing them.”

In the first chapters of Torpedoed, Heiligman describes the impact of World War II on ordinary British citizens and how this prompted evacuations of vulnerable populations. In its first year, the war was confined to Continental Europe, and British people could go about their lives largely as normal. However, when the Germans started bombing Britain, life changed overnight. Suddenly, British families were living in an active war zone.

“Most of the homesick children felt better once the excitement took over. Not Joyce Keeley. She did not have fantasies about this kind of adventure, and she was too young to understand why she had to leave her mother. But Jack understood. He’d seen the newsreels before the cartoons at the tuppenny rush, the children’s matinee movie on Saturdays. And he’d noticed the signs of war everywhere: lorries (trucks) with soldiers in the back, their guns pointed skyward, ready to fire on German planes; neighborhood playgrounds dug up and made into air raid shelters.”

The youngest children accepted into the CORB program were five years old, and the eldest were 15. This span of ages meant that leaving home was a very different experience for each child. Some, like little Joyce Keeley, didn’t understand the dangers of war and didn’t want to leave their mothers behind. Older children, like Joyce’s brother Jack, knew more about what was happening; they knew they were in danger at home and that their parents were sending them away for their own safety.

“It wasn’t an easy choice for any of the parents to make: Keep their children at home, a place that was now dangerous, or send them away for nobody knew how long? When war was first declared, many city parents had sent their children to villages in the countryside to be safer. That was a big step, but this, sending a child across the ocean, was more heart-wrenching.”

This passage describes the complexity parents faced and illustrates The Illusion of Safety in Wartime. Children were in danger at home in Britain, but evacuation was also dangerous, and families would be separated, maybe permanently.