Escape From the Cold War: Planning Civilian Evacuation from British-Occupied Germany,1946–55

Abstract

Evacuations, imagined as well as actual, reflect national strategic preoccupations, cultural assumptions and prevailing social values; they also reveal practical strengths and weaknesses in international relationships and in states’ interactions with their own citizens, at home and abroad. But evacuations are deeply symbolically significant too and grounded in far longer, intertwined social and strategic histories. Using the remarkable case study of Operation Chivalrous, the first plan devised for the evacuation of British military families from early Cold War Germany, this article uses evacuation to throw light on the changed relationship between British citizens and the state after 1945. The plan and planning revealed not only the renewed significance of the family in the post-war world, but also the tensions in the new welfare state. But, more broadly, this article argues that Britain's Cold War planning was closely linked, both practically and symbolically, to its responses to the end of empire and the domestic aftermath of the Second World War. In unpacking the intricacies of a proposal that was never used, for a war that was never fought, this article underlines the wider historical value of unrealised plans in revealing ‘ideational contexts' and social attitudes.

In August 1948, as West Berliners remained cut off by the Soviet blockade, Philip Antrobus (German Section, Foreign Office) expressed his disquiet about another potential disaster. As the Foreign Office fielded queries from across the world about its evacuation plans from Berlin, Antrobus raised the prospect of a much larger evacuation:

[W]hat could be done if, in an emergency, all the Rhine Army families had to be evacuated from Germany at short notice [?] They [the War Office] calculate that of roughly 9000 Army wives and children in Germany, about 6000 would be without homes in the UK. That would present the War Office with a problem of a magnitude quite outside anything they can meet with their existing hostels which were established for coping with a similar problem when we evacuated India last year, since these hostels are still nearly full. ¹

Antrobus worried what would happen to the ‘Rhine families' – the British military families who had been living in the north-west zone of Germany since 1946 – if they had to leave ‘at short notice’, an oblique reference to the much-feared war with the Soviet Union. ² But his letter also highlighted the conditions that would await families in post-war Britain. Many did not own any property, particularly among the rank-and-file soldiers who made up the majority of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). ³ Post-war Britain faced acute shortages of accommodation and government officials worried that housing military families ahead of civilians, who themselves had just lived through a war, would cause resentment. ⁴ War Office officials also stated privately that they did not want military families aggregated with the many millions of ‘ordinary war refugees' displaced across Europe; as Jordanna Bailkin observes, places like ‘camps might be appropriate for “true” refugees, but not for British citizens who were simply temporarily displaced.’ ⁵ British military families evacuated from India had accordingly been specially housed in military hostels, but in August 1948 these were now ‘nearly full’.

In the end, British authorities resorted to a fail-safe plan: head to the seaside. The famous Butlin's holiday camp chain agreed to take families evacuated from Germany at its Filey, Skegness, Clacton and New Romney sites. ⁶ British military families would thus see the grim denouement of the Cold War from the oddly cheery beach huts of the English riviera. Yet other deeper questions assailed the plan: when, for instance, would an evacuation take place? Too early and the ever-fragile relations between the Soviet Union and the West might break down further; too late and British families might not escape in time. ⁷ The families’ route out of Germany also depended on international relationships, like that with Denmark, holding firm during a Soviet invasion. ⁸ How much should plans involve local Germans or military families themselves? And how best to do that without training them first, something that might cause panic among ‘women and children’ or, worse still, alarm the ever-watchful Soviet intelligence services? ⁹ This evacuation would therefore see the collision of some of the most urgent difficulties facing post-war Britain and Europe: widespread displacement, the slow pace of reconstruction, the contraction of imperial bureaucracies and militaries, and, of course, the politics of the new Cold War. How this potentially problematic plan – known as ‘Operation Chivalrous' – was conceptualised, what it meant for the relationships between European allies, between military and government officials, between state and citizen, and for post-war Britain more broadly are the central research questions of this article.

Evacuations, imagined as well as actual, reflect national strategic preoccupations, cultural assumptions and prevailing social values; they reveal strengths and weaknesses in international relationships and in states’ provision for their own citizens, at home and abroad. ¹⁰ With extraterritorial evacuation, plans further reveal states’ and citizens’ understandings of belonging, race and identity. ¹¹ But evacuations are also symbolically significant and grounded in far longer histories than just the moment of flight itself: they are not ‘episodic and unrelated emergencies', but embedded in structural contexts. ¹² In uncovering the links between Chivalrous (which has till now merited little more than a footnote in histories of the British occupation) and longer histories, this article analyses how these other contexts, particularly imperial settings during and after the Second World War, shaped Cold War planners’ attitudes to new threats. ¹³ Through the intricacies of one plan and ‘a half-forgotten army’ that spent its time waiting for a war that never happened, this article argues that Cold War contingency planning in Europe was imbued with imperial precedent. ¹⁴ In the wake of unsuccessful British wartime evacuations from Hong Kong (1940) and Singapore (1941–2), and post-war evacuations from India (1947) and Palestine (1948), British officials had learnt the hard way that evacuations held symbolic power as well. In contrast to these setbacks, Operation Chivalrous must, military and political authorities argued, be conducted in an orderly manner, not least because families failing to escape in time could have ‘fatal results on the subsequent operations.’ ¹⁵

But it was not only international concerns that shaped evacuation planning: during the first half of the twentieth century, European states repeatedly assessed, categorised and organised their populations in response to total war. In doing so, they revealed their values, but also potentially reorientated the relationship between state and citizen. Citizens living overseas too increasingly expected a form of evacuation, even whilst states continued to be selective in their decision making, prioritising some groups above others. For instance, the family unit – which sat at the core of Chivalrous – dominated much of twentieth-century evacuation planning, reflecting, as Tara Zahra and others have observed, a wider fixation with reuniting, repairing or creating families. ¹⁶ Yet the military family also posed challenges for post-war Britain, particularly when their needs competed with those of civilians. So whilst Richard Titmuss famously claimed that wartime evacuation had expanded the British state's remit and its mechanisms, this case study questions such a neat chronology of the emergence of the British welfare state and highlights the tensions that evacuation planning still posed for the state and its citizens after 1945. ¹⁷ It complicates Cold War chronologies too, seeking to move our focus away from the superpowers alone and to understand the Cold War's ‘pluralist’ history’; in short, by placing social and strategic concerns alongside one another we can, as Odd Arne Westad argues, create ‘a much bigger canvas for studying the Cold War than we have hitherto had’. ¹⁸

There are undoubtedly methodological difficulties in studying a plan that was never used, but important possibilities too. Andrew W.M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen argue that, looking at such material, ‘historians all too often fall into traps set by knowing how the story ends'. ¹⁹ Writing about unrealised plans can also distance us from the people who would be affected by them and we end up following the to-and-fro of official arguments alone. ²⁰ But, owing to the extent of the disagreements about Operation Chivalrous, the plan left a large body of archival material, scattered across different government departments. As Smith argues, these remnants are imbued with the ‘ideational context’ of the time and reveal wider social assumptions influencing decision-making processes. ²¹ It is this ‘ideational context’ that this article seeks to explore above the internecine wrangling of Whitehall committees, balancing their views with life-narrative sources from base residents themselves, in order to recreate the social world in which evacuation would take place. In doing so, this article seeks to offer a new perspective on the existing history of the British occupation of Germany, bringing it together with British social history, the history of empire and diplomatic history.

The article begins by examining the key strategic considerations at stake with Chivalrous and its greatest problems: timing; who had the authority to shape and enact the plan; and how to ensure it remained ‘orderly’. Whilst the first and second issues were firmly rooted in the Cold War, I argue that the third problem was shaped by the perceived danger of a hasty retreat in an era of imperial withdrawal. The second half of this article examines the impact of past evacuations further, particularly how evacuations might have changed the relationship between citizen and state, with ramifications for Chivalrous and subsequent evacuation planning. It also underlines the significance of ‘the family’, both to planners and to the post-war world more widely.

Given the national priorities embedded in evacuation planning, there is an unavoidably national skew to this article. ²² Before the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 and integrated alert systems, most plans were drawn up by individual European nations. Even after 1949, NATO was largely content to let national authorities plan their own civilian evacuations, albeit in collaboration with other allies and under NATO's integrated alert system. ²³ And evacuation planning perhaps also exposes the already separate lives many British civilians lived in Germany more broadly: many rarely interacted with their German neighbours beyond shops and local services, living in British ‘cantonments' or ‘mini-Englands', however uncomfortable a fact this was for military leaders, or historians. ²⁴ Operation Chivalrous thus also sheds light on the social history of this sometimes overlooked community on a Cold War frontier.

Much of Britain's Cold War took place in Germany. Initially stationed there as a post-war occupation force, the rapid souring of relations with the Soviet Union after 1945 meant that it was not long until British troops were posted across north-west Germany (and Berlin) as a Cold War military, designed to face the Soviet Union and its allies. ²⁵ Despite the considerable size of BAOR, their odds were not favourable, as Soviet forces would heavily outnumber them and so in the immediate post-war period British forces planned to withdraw from continental Europe in the event of invasion. ²⁶ But this plan, unpopular with Britain's allies, was steadily revised in the light of growing alliances, as western nations drew together, first under the umbrella of the Western Union and from 1949 under NATO. ²⁷ The problem remained though that British forces still could not offer a formidable enough defence to stop the Soviet advance: military planners decided the only option was that British forces would have to practice a highly mobile form of warfare, known today as ‘manoeuvre warfare.’ ²⁸ Before the early 1950s, planners still largely focused on conventional warfare planning, though they were increasingly aware of the nuclear threat and its possible use in a Cold War confrontation. ²⁹ BAOR was thus set to conduct a particularly mobile war in western Europe, one contingent on the arrival of effective reinforcements from the UK, on a quick deployment and on working closely with other western allies.

But British servicemen were not alone in Germany: in late 1946, the authorities gave in to considerable pressure from families and commentators alike who felt that family reunion was vital to post-war reconstruction in both Britain and Germany. ³⁰ Military families arrived under ‘Operation Union’ which permitted ‘any member of the Service and CCG to bring his family into residence in BAOR provided that he has 1-year expectancy of service.’ ³¹ By June 1950, officials estimated that there were over 30,000 family members in Germany, 27,670 in the wider British zone and 2174 in Berlin. ³²

But the deterioration of the western allies’ relationship with the Soviet Union, culminating with the Berlin crisis in 1948–9, showed officials the need for a realistic and comprehensive plan to evacuate British civilians. Drafted first in 1948, Operation Chivalrous stated that British Forces in Germany would be responsible for evacuating all military and civilian BAOR and Control Commission Germany (CCG) families. The plan had three different evacuation cases – A, B and C – each of which entailed different warning and movement schedules. Case A would take place over 30 days, with 7 days’ warning beforehand; around 1000 evacuees would sail from the Hook of Holland to Harwich each day. Case B would take place with 24 hours’ notice and over 7 days evacuees would arrive at Harwich at a rate of approximately 4500 a day. ³³ Case C was for an evacuation ‘without warning in the shortest possible time,’ with passengers arriving at Harwich, Dover and Folkestone, potentially with some travelling on commercial shipping from Denmark to Hull. Early versions also included the use of German Service Organisation (GSO) staff, driving British civilians to ports. Case C was, in short, for ‘circumstances of dire emergency.’ ³⁴ Berlin, ever an outlier, would not be evacuated under Chivalrous but from April 1950 was covered by Operation Pickle and from 1954 the more internationally collaborative Operation Triple-Play. ³⁵ There were also plans to evacuate about 2000 prominent Germans and German members of the extended British Royal Family, as well as the parallel United States ‘Operation Whizzbang’, potentially involving UK ports. ³⁶

Military authorities in Germany were thus working closely with Foreign Office officials to develop several interconnecting evacuation plans, each with their own diplomatic difficulties. For instance, before NATO was established, there was some uncertainty over Denmark's involvement. In Chivalrous’ ominous Case C, it was anticipated that the route out of Germany for those in the Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein areas would be cut off, meaning that families would need to leave via Denmark. ³⁷ In March 1949, Robert Hankey, later Ambassador to Sweden, advised Antrobus that Danish officials would likely ‘let them pass and to be repatriated by any means' available, but that time would be of the essence: ‘Once the Russians occupy Denmark, which they are likely to do pretty quickly after the outbreak of a war, I do not think any British subjects will be allowed to get out.’ Yet it was impossible to sound out the Danish government thoroughly, as Hankey felt such discussion would mean they would ‘be frightened out of their wits and perhaps even discouraged from joining the Atlantic pact.’ ³⁸

This reticence to share details with allies reflected a broader balance British authorities tried to strike with all their evacuation planning: provide too little information and the plan was at risk of failing; provide too much and allies and enemies alike would be spurred into unwelcome action. It was a balance that extended to the people at the heart of the plan too: in 1951, the Foreign Office and military authorities were adamant that ‘no publicity should be given to Chivalrous and that families should not be made aware either of its existence or its details'. ³⁹ It was not until the mid-1980s that formal Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) evacuation plans and handbooks were distributed to families, mirroring a broader shift in civil defence. ⁴⁰ Prior to this not much was known about specifics and residents varyingly asserted that they would be evacuated by rail or bus, via the Hook of Holland or Channel Ports. ⁴¹ This mixture of secrecy, rumour and knowledge characterised British attitudes to the Cold War, as did the clash of what Jonathan Hogg terms ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives, leading to a ‘contested terrain of meaning’ surrounding threat and the prospect of survival. ⁴²

The timescales also raised the question of how much warning British forces would have. Cases A, B and C were supposed to address the varying possibilities, but the Commanders-in-Chief of British Forces Germany were deeply opposed to Case C, the ill-defined ‘dire emergency’. As early as 1949, the Chiefs of Staff reported to the Minister of Defence that military authorities in Germany felt that evacuation must take place before any such emergency, stating that ‘a hurried last-minute evacuation of families and surplus personnel would place heavy demands on transport, manpower and other administrative resources in Germany and may upset the planned operations of our forces.’ ⁴³ By February 1952, their dissatisfaction had grown. In a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff (who shared or, at least, aired their concerns), the Commanders-in-Chief in British Forces Germany first opposed the use of local German staff in Case C, questioning their reliability: ‘even if they carry out their Chivalrous task and move families west of the Rhine, it is doubtful if they will return to the essential part which they must play in operations.’ ⁴⁴ Elsewhere, the Assistant Chief of Staff stated that ‘it is quite clear that no great degree of reliance can be placed on their [German Service Organisation] loyalty and willingness to carry out this task.’ ⁴⁵ These statements highlighting how thin German commitment to a British evacuation might be are significant, as more publicly at this time Germans were now being described as allies. ⁴⁶ A new war and evacuation might, some felt, reveal how weak these new alliances could be on the ground.

However, after expressing their distrust of the GSO, the Commanders-in-Chief actually launched a more existential criticism of Case C itself:

We appreciate the decision to order the evacuation will always present many political difficulties. The very fact that a plan such as Chivalrous Case ‘C’ exists, irrespective of the practicability of that plan, will tend dangerously to delay the decision. … we believe that it would be better for families to be removed several months before operations start rather than run the risk of a Case ‘C’ evacuation. For these reasons we consider that the Chivalrous Case ‘C’ plan should be abandoned; it should be formally accepted by the Government that the evacuation must be ordered in sufficient time for it to follow the lines of either Case ‘A’ or Case ‘B’. This proposal pre-supposes a gradual deterioration of East-West relationships. Our intelligence information leads us strongly to believe that this is the most likely way in which war will come to Central Europe. ⁴⁷

This source is revealing in several ways. First, its blunt yet entreating tone shows that it was still the government and not military authorities who had the ultimate authority to order an evacuation: Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin made it clear in 1950 that ‘save in immediate emergency[,] they [the Commanders-in-Chief] must obtain political approval before taking steps which could have serious political consequences.’ ⁴⁸ In other words, unless absolutely impossible, they had to obtain approval from the government before evacuating families, as it was deemed a political decision in the Cold War context, not a military one. But, second, despite military opposition since at least 1949, political authorities were clearly more willing than military ones to have a civilian evacuation plan for ‘dire emergencies'. Military planners implored Whitehall to give them sufficient notice of the decline in the political relationship with the Soviet Union, thus negating the need for Case C. Not only did the military feel that a ‘gradual deterioration’ was more likely, but it was the only way for the evacuation to be carried out properly.

The Foreign Office disagreed. Northern Department diplomat Nicholas Henderson (much later British ambassador to the United States under Margaret Thatcher) called the military memorandum ‘dubious', particularly their distrust of the GSO as the reason for revising ‘the whole basis of Chivalrous'. He also felt something bigger was at stake:

… it would be quite wrong to suppose that the Soviet Government could not in present circumstances launch an attack without our having any prior notice. Nor must we forget the political considerations which are likely to prevail in a time of tense East-West relationships. Logically at such a moment it may seem sensible to remove as many dependants from Germany as possible just in case war eventually occurs. However, it may at the same time be though that action of this kind only exacerbates the political situation and that the risk of leaving dependants to be evacuated until the last moment is the better course to adopt. For these reasons I think that we must urge the Military to face the fact that they may have to evacuate the dependents at short notice and to continue to have preparations for Case C of Chivalrous. … Our view in the Foreign Office has always been, I believe, that Case C of Chivalrous is much more likely than either of the other two cases. ⁴⁹

From the Foreign Office's perspective Case C was not only necessary, but it was the most likely outcome given the nature of the Cold War, a view that directly contrasted with the military opinion that relations would decline gradually.

But why might an emergency evacuation under Case C have caused military planners such concern? The main reason they gave was military effectiveness and morale: the Chiefs of Staff insisted that Case C would result in a disordered evacuation which could affect the efficacy of the fighting force. ⁵⁰ Even worse, an incomplete evacuation could have propaganda value for the oncoming Soviet enemy: the Chiefs of Staff argued that ‘in a war against Russia it will be particularly desirable that British nationals should not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. It is therefore prudent to plan in peace for their timely evacuation.’ ⁵¹ And there was a chilling precedent for the capture of civilians not evacuated in time. During the Second World War, in Hong Kong and Singapore, some officials and their families who had purposefully managed to bypass evacuation; in Hong Kong, despite the direct order from the War Cabinet to evacuate almost all women and children ‘of European race’ (excluding Hong Kong's other British subjects), many residents and even some officials themselves questioned the legitimacy of the Emergency Regulations Order to force them to evacuate to Australia. ⁵² The subsequent Japanese invasion – lasting only 16 days – thus led to the internment of thousands of allied civilians. ⁵³

But evacuations from India (1947) and Palestine (1948) were even more recent and pressing reminders of the cost of disorderly evacuations, not least because British evacuees still filled military hostels when Chivalrous was planned. As with Chivalrous, an orderly withdrawal was bound up with questions of timing and who knew about the plan. In India, in the run-up to independence, the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was adamant that the soldiers on any ships diverted to the area to help evacuate British citizens must not be told ‘that an emergency evacuation of British civilians from India was being carried out’. It was important, he maintained, that they ‘should not create an air of panic.’ ⁵⁴ Any potential disorder had been compounded by an initial confusion over the numbers of British civilians in India to be evacuated: in June 1946, the Viceroy had estimated that there were 44,537 civilians, yet within 2 weeks this had been revised to 96,081. Prime Minister Clement Attlee retorted that: ‘I cannot understand the possibility of error of this magnitude, if the Government of India had any degree of efficiency.’ ⁵⁵ Accurate records were key to a successful evacuation and the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, Tedder Cunningham Simpson, noted prophetically that ‘this is only one of the many evacuation plans' that might need to be used in the post-war period. ⁵⁶ And as violence increased in India and Pakistan, it was again the orderliness of evacuation that became the most common topic on newsreels, the British evacuees depicted as cheery and sensible whilst the situation worsened around them. ⁵⁷

The same emphasis was placed on such conduct in Palestine with ‘Operation Polly’. At the start of February 1947, the Palestine Government issued orders for the immediate evacuation of ‘non-essential’ civilians and military families from the region, amid rising violence and the ending of the Mandate in May. Families would go to Sarafand or Haifa, then onto Egypt and most to Britain. ⁵⁸ During the evacuation, officials recalled directly the evacuations of the last war, highlighting the extra costs they entailed and, again, the need for orderliness. ⁵⁹ Some felt the evacuation from Palestine followed those ordered lines and reflected well on the British as a result. ‘Hundreds' of wives expressed gratitude for the care shown to them during the evacuation and General Officer Commanding General Gordon MacMillan stated it was conducted with ‘dignity, with precision, without incident and entirely according to plan.’ ⁶⁰ The last High Commissioner of Palestine, Alan Cunningham, described it as a ‘melancholy business presiding over such an occasion, but I sincerely trust we can feel we left with dignity.’ ⁶¹ As Elizabeth Buettner has argued, it was often the last British residents who set the rhetorical tone towards the end of empire: their detailed descriptions of evacuations convey a sense of wistful finality and regret, but also of a ‘job well done.’ ⁶² ‘Dignity’ and ‘order’ were used repeatedly when praising Operation Polly, cementing the kind of language used to describe the end of empire by many Britons for decades to come.

Not everyone felt the evacuation from Palestine symbolised ‘British’ order though. Many residents and journalists took considerable offence at being deemed ‘non-essential.’ ⁶³ Some disliked the actual task of evacuation and what it signified for British power: Sir Henry Gurney, the last Chief Secretary of the Mandate Government of Palestine, wrote a diary for the last 60 days of the Mandate, filled with simmering resentment at having the job of dismantling British rule. ⁶⁴ Archaeologist Robert Hamilton was more blunt in a letter to his wife about the evacuation: ‘What a culmination of twenty-five years of British administration for a British government to proclaim publicly that it cannot be responsible for protecting its own women and children!’ ⁶⁵ For Hamilton, the evacuation was a tacit acknowledgement of Britain's lack of control in the region and that it could no longer protect its extraterritorial citizens. Attitudes to gender too potentially shaped this response, as ‘women and children’ were again deemed the most vulnerable British citizens and in need of protection. The evacuation stood as a mournful sign of decreasing British power, influence and imperial endeavour – made worse by the hasty pace at which they withdrew. ⁶⁶ Evacuation thus had a symbolic power, to both the outside world and for the British themselves; if evacuation looked like a defeat in some way, then the only way to soften the blow was for it at least to be conducted ‘with dignity’. These precedents can then, to some extent, reveal the ‘ideational context’ in which plans like Chivalrous were devised and the meaning already invested in evacuation. ⁶⁷ They also had a direct practical impact too: in 1949, such planning came under the auspices of the Evacuation from Abroad Sub-Committee, its terms directly referencing the failures of wartime and end-of-empire evacuations from the Middle East and East Asia. ⁶⁸

The relevance of the end of empire to the British mission in Germany was one deliberately made at the time too. Britain had cast for itself the role of tutor for the post-totalitarian population: British military families were supposed to provide a ‘moral example’ to their neighbours, through their behaviour, their contacts and even how they maintained their houses. ⁶⁹ As with their American allies, British family life was, rather grandly, meant to stand as an emblem of the democratic ‘way of life’ on a Cold War frontier – and in the British case, as Attlee put it in a memorandum to service chiefs, as ‘representatives of the British Empire’. ⁷⁰ One British military newspaper expanded on this further: ‘Britain ranks high in colonial administration. Now she has been given the greatest test, the “passing out” examinations, that is, to administer a very highly cultured and very highly organised European community.’ ⁷¹ According to this source, the ‘passing out’ examination was to guide a ‘cultured’ community to a more democratic and ordered way of life. The ‘civilising mission’ message at the heart of many British imperial projects was echoed in post-war foreign policy but, as this newspaper shows, also by British communities themselves. In 1946 CCG employee, Mary Bouman, noted that: ‘Some, but by no means all, of the people in the Mess are rather conventional, many having served in India and no doubt Poonah and regard Germany – rightly or wrongly – as a sort of British Colony and the Germans as a species of rather inferior native.’ ⁷² This imaginative connection between Britain's imperial past and Germany was reinforced on a very practical level too, as Germany was part of a broader pattern of colonial deployment and remigration, with former employees from across the receding colonial world taking up civilian occupation posts. ⁷³ Antrobus, whose own father had been Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, had himself served on the 1938 Committee on the Defence of India (the Chatfield Committee) tasked with considering the strength of overseas garrisons in India. ⁷⁴ Some Germans reportedly saw the British presence in their country as some sort of ‘substitute for the Raj lost in 1946.’ ⁷⁵ The recent imperial past yet again shaped British attitudes toward the Cold War and they tell the historian something about how communities regarded themselves. Furthermore, any hasty or disorderly evacuation in the face of a Soviet invasion potentially put such a post-empire mission and message in jeopardy, certainly if the population was looking to them as an example.

So whilst many objections to Chivalrous were couched in terms of military practicality, the memory of recent evacuations and the wider socio-cultural context of the end of empire shaped military authorities’ and British residents’ attitudes to their presence in – and potentially even their exit from – Germany. But some of the most difficult issues posed by Chivalrous were not those concerned with strategy or international standing, but with what evacuees could expect, particularly from the British state, in times of peril. Had the evacuations of the ‘total wars' of the last century changed citizens’ expectations of the state and the state's views as to who constituted its citizens? And if so, what was the impact of those changes on Chivalrous and Cold War planning?

Evacuation planning throughout the twentieth century was closely connected to the newly expanded parameters of warfare. Changes in military technology in the early 1900s exposed a far greater percentage of civilians to wartime violence than ever before and mobilised them too. ⁷⁶ Total war also involved far more direct management and organisation of populations, with citizens potentially interacting more with the state. ⁷⁷ With its citizens in the line of fire, states developed new suites of ‘passive civil defence’ measures to protect their populations, including evacuation. ⁷⁸ Evacuation was not, of course, solely the by-product of total war: Laura Lee Downs has highlighted the case of French children evacuated from urban settings after the First World War over health concerns. ⁷⁹ But in Britain, evacuation only became a central plank in civil defence planning during the interwar period: in 1924 the Committee of Imperial Defence created a subcommittee to review civil defence policy, which in turn quickly created its own subcommittee on evacuation, chastened by the projected casualties in a future aerial war. By 1935, the Home Office had created the Air Raids Precaution (ARP) Department, led by Wing Commander John Hodsoll, himself the organiser of the lauded evacuation of British civilians from Kabul in 1929 (another imperial precedent). ⁸⁰ When war broke out in 1939, evacuation formed a major element of the government's response, with the initial evacuation of children to the countryside under Operation Pied Piper attracting the most attention, at the time and since. ⁸¹

These wartime policies continued to influence planning in the Cold War period, such as the evacuation of ‘key men’, children and mothers, set out in the 1948 Civil Defence Act and even in Sir William Strath's grim 1955 report on the effects of a nuclear attack – indeed, Strath and his colleagues suggested that pre-emptive evacuation needed to take place on an even greater scale than ever before. ⁸² Matthew Grant suggests this faith in civil defence measures at this early stage of the Cold War indicated a confidence that Britain could survive a nuclear attack, which ‘undercut the apocalyptic nuclear culture which emerged elsewhere’, owing largely to the nation's ‘gilded memory’ of its survival of the Blitz of 1940–1. ⁸³ Even in 1963 the government-issued Householders Handbook on what to do in the case of a nuclear attack contained evacuation guidance, though by 1980 it was noticeably absent from another government guidance document, Protect and Survive. ⁸⁴

But had these evolving evacuation policies led to lasting change in the relationship between states and their citizens? Following Richard Titmuss’ argument, Travis Crosby has argued that evacuation put a strain on the concept of voluntarism, so integral an element of British social policy in the early twentieth century and prevailing attitudes towards welfare. ⁸⁵ This change was evident to Operation Chivalrous planners even in 1948, when it was noted that voluntary billeting, relying on such principles, would no longer work for evacuated military families, even with the pressures on housing. ⁸⁶ But some felt the expanded influence of the state could not be relied upon either. In 1948, it was assumed by military and Foreign Office planners that, as with the previous cases of military homelessness, the Ministry of Health (MoH) would again take responsibility for Chivalrous evacuees. However, to the planners’ alarm, the MoH stated that they really could not provide any accommodation: ‘if an emergency were declared they would have powers to requisition; otherwise, all they [MoH] could do would be to add the names of our people to already over-long waiting lists.’ The MoH argued that the Local Authorities should take responsibility, but Local Authorities stated that they would need at least 3 months to provide any housing. ⁸⁷ So whilst the reach and responsibilities of the state had certainly grown larger during the previous war, these harried discussions show that the implications of this change had yet to be fully worked out.

But even if the mechanisms of state were not necessarily expanded as Titmuss suggested, it heightened expectations citizens had of the state and their own ‘social rights', with implications for post-war politics, social policy and even citizens’ very sense of themselves – as numerous post-war historians have observed. ⁸⁸ The expectations were evident in evacuation planning after 1945. For example, with evacuations from India in 1947, the UK High Commissioner to Pakistan, A.C.B. Symon, was especially displeased with the special arrangements to assist British nationals leaving the hill station at Simla, ‘particularly since the main reason appears to be to ensure they get their baggage safely[.] … We are in great danger of becoming a Cook's Agency. We must avoid this at all costs.’ ⁸⁹ Symon did not dispute the need to evacuate British citizens but refused to take responsibility for their wider belongings and arrangements beyond the immediate emergency. But evacuees not only expected this support as part of their extraterritorial status, but help back in the UK too, as there were already rumblings that there might not be sufficient accommodation for them, complaints which increased in volume after Operation Polly. ⁹⁰

Throughout the Cold War, most British families in Germany expected that they too would be evacuated if in danger. In later oral history interviews conducted about the social history of base life, some knew exact details, largely because they had been involved in shaping policies or were assigned roles in a potential conflict. ⁹¹ Others recalled that there were briefings for families later in the period and, even among those who expressed doubts that evacuation would actually work, there was a widespread faith that a plan – however rudimentary or ridiculous it might seem decades later – did at least exist. ⁹² These expectations, however hazily expressed, marked a significant change from the attitudes adopted by British residents in Hong Kong in the run-up to the Japanese invasion but a few years earlier. ⁹³ These examples suggest that, as well as there being a strong official and military response to the raft of evacuations that had taken place over the previous decade – some successful, others partial or failed – there was potentially a social and personal one too.

But evacuation was never simply a humanitarian exercise: a successful evacuation ensured the protection of economic resources and vital personnel, needed to maintain the country's infrastructure and war effort. It could also bolster political power, demonstrating the state's ability to restore security and order. ⁹⁴ Julie S. Torrie describes evacuation as delicate balance as ‘on the borders between state paternalism, coercion and public tolerance.’ ⁹⁵ Nor was evacuation planning ever universal, as not all citizens were necessarily included. Evacuation affected citizens differently, in some cases demarcating the very category of the citizen itself. Rebecca Manley, for instance, has shown how Soviet evacuation policies prioritised specific groups deemed integral to an ideal future society, such as the young, workers, party officials and leading scientists and teachers. ⁹⁶ Vivian Kong argues that the 1940 Hong Kong evacuation deliberately used a narrow definition of British subjects ‘to justify the racist and pragmatic exclusion of other communities', especially those British subjects ‘domiciled in the colony’ who were not ‘European’. ⁹⁷ So, according to Manley and Kong, evacuation policies were at their heart exclusive and selective, either by necessity or design, and embodied state priorities and prejudices. And whilst evacuation reveals the expanded reach of the state in the mid-twentieth century, it also points to the uneven history of state–citizen relations and the differences between citizens in their expectations of and treatment by the state.

British evacuation planning was selective from the start too, with interwar plans prioritising key sectors, employees and children. ⁹⁸ This continued after 1945: Attlee had written to the Minister of Transport, Alfred Barnes, as early as June 1946 to express his concern that women and children's passage from India be ‘expedited’ where possible, given the ‘considerable risks to Europeans in India’ …India. ⁹⁹ Again, ‘women and children’ were seen as particularly vulnerable to danger in evacuation situations. Others were against such prioritisation, the Foreign Office pointing out that this policy could be criticised as an example of ‘racial discrimination’, which might affect the movement of Indian students to Britain. ¹⁰⁰

With Chivalrous, its selective nature emerged though its focus on ‘the family’. Britain was certainly not the only European nation to value the family in its evacuation deliberations, but this marked a change in emphasis, certainly in new recognition of the importance of the family to military personnel. ¹⁰¹ The Commander-in-Chiefs’ 1952 criticism of Chivalrous made clear that the modern soldier would not be able to perform his military duties until his family had been safely despatched from Germany. ¹⁰² Families were integral to life in Germany. In June 1948, one of the Military Governors of the British Zone, General Brian Robertson, stated that:

it is practically impossible to persuade a man to serve in Germany unless he is allowed to bring his family out here. … The presence of families in Germany is a vital factor in sustaining morale and a most important safeguard against some of the dangers which service in Germany entails. ¹⁰³

Robertson was perhaps referring to the ‘dangers' of relationships or fraternisation between British men and German women, revealing not only attitudes to gender and evacuation, but to sex and sexuality in the occupied zones too. ¹⁰⁴ But his statement also echoed the wider significance placed on families, family reunion and even ‘active’ fatherhood, which were circulating more broadly within Britain and Europe at the time. ¹⁰⁵ As Zahra has observed, family reunion became a central ideological plank for Western European nations during the early Cold War, at once repudiating a totalitarian past and projecting a vision for the reconstruction of European democracy. ¹⁰⁶ Of course, military life and bureaucracy meant that few social groupings other than the ‘conventional family’ were permitted to live in Germany and many family members felt like they were not truly welcome, but the family remained at the centre of evacuation planning nonetheless.

But whilst the family might have been an emblem for new post-war Britain – and even for the post-war British soldier – evacuation policy pitched one type of family against another. Wartime urban damage, the rising birth rate and timber shortages in Britain had severely reduced housing stock, meaning many British families were without homes of their own. ¹⁰⁷ The 6000 potentially homeless military families were therefore not unusual in this regard, but the plans to provide them with emergency accommodation ahead of those in Britain made some planners uneasy. Moving recently demobilised civilians from military housing had proved distressing in some cases. For example, the tenants of Stillington Street, London, wrote to the Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, highlighting the plight of 240 people who had been given ‘heartless notices to quit’ and would now face homelessness, including many of those who had served in the armed forces during the war. In a collective letter they wrote: ‘It is ironical that we who fought to save our homes from Hitler should now be deprived of them by the very branch of the services in which we served.’ ¹⁰⁸ One Ministry of Housing official noted that, in such a climate, ‘there would be altogether too much public feeling if there were a special provision not open to other inadequately housed persons.’ ¹⁰⁹ It would be easy to dismiss the debates about Chivalrous as simply about housing shortages, but this wider context reveals an underlying tension in post-war Britain between the ideals of new welfare state and the awkward demands raised by the ‘warfare state’. ¹¹⁰ It also shows a society where many, if not most, had recent war experiences that they felt deserved recognition. The would-be homeless of the Cold War would therefore have to wait their turn.

This often-under-acknowledged clash between welfare and warfare in post-war Britain was, unsurprisingly, not fully reconciled within the pages of Chivalrous. The makeshift solution of using Butlin's holiday camps was built on Second World War plans when Skegness had been repurposed for Belgian sailors. ¹¹¹ Billy Butlin and his board were further induced to help military planners by a holiday slump in 1947, although a resurgence in seaside holidays the following year with a ban on foreign travel probably made Butlin's executives fairly apprehensive about the prospects of a Soviet invasion of mainland Europe. ¹¹² Filey, Skegness and Clacton would take the largest number of families (over 12,000 people between them) and the camps would provide weary travellers with food, cash and accommodation in its chalets - both ‘transit’ housing (for those planning to stay with relatives or make their own arrangements) or a far less well-defined ‘temporary’ accommodation for those with no home to go to in the UK. The camps would keep the War Office informed each day of vacant beds and nominal rolls of all the homeless families still at the camps. ¹¹³ As a solution it satisfied most of the parties involved; indeed, holiday camps or caravan sites were used throughout the twentieth century for emergency housing, though many were far from idyllic settings. ¹¹⁴

Operation Chivalrous thus embodied much of the change that had occurred in the previous half-century: the use of evacuation as part of civil defence measures; the growing expectations of citizens to be evacuated by the state in times of crisis; the dwindling power of voluntarism; and the family unit (minus serving personnel) as the basis of evacuation planning. But the plan also reflected the awkward tension between military interests and civilians in the immediate post-war period, as well as the continuing selective nature of evacuation, demarcating who merited rescue and who was someone else's responsibility.

Operation Chivalrous had a short and controversial life. It was superseded by Operation Drape in 1951–2, a reputedly simpler system, albeit one still based on three scenarios, but more clearly linked to the Alert system in Europe and NATO. The Soviet Union's development of their own hydrogen bomb by 1955 pitched all plans into confusion, as the technology could potentially destroy infrastructure in Britain and halt the mobilisation of reserve forces bound for Germany, and families trying to head home. ¹¹⁵ By November 1955, by which point the formal British occupation of Germany had ended, all ‘Case C’ planning had been suspended. Plans were steadily revised considering the technological change in weaponry, and instead involved keeping combatants’ families on the continent for as long as possible, concentrating them in West Germany and Denmark. ¹¹⁶ But these plans also reflected growing uncertainty as to the benefits of evacuation itself, an issue that British planners would continue to confront in civil defence planning for the remainder of the Cold War. ¹¹⁷ Simon Moody has argued that British nuclear warfare planning was dogged by an overarching ‘cognitive dissonance about the unwelcome realities of nuclear warfare’, unable to leave behind some of its assumptions and conventional ways of working. ¹¹⁸ Whether established principles and plans would work on a nuclear battlefield was much-discussed within the military. ¹¹⁹

This article has shown that evacuations, and even unused evacuation plans, reveal not only strategic and military preoccupations, but they also shine a light on both planners and (would-be) evacuees themselves and their ‘ideational context’. ¹²⁰ This particular evacuation plan exposed the collision of post-war reconstruction, the Cold War and Britain's contracting empire, as well as the cultural power of recent evacuations in shaping the attitudes and priorities of future plans. But Chivalrous was not just a story of continuity: post-war evacuation planning revealed the changes that had taken place during half a century of total war in the relationship between state and citizen. Although still deeply influenced by a particular state's priorities and categorisations of its citizens, successive evacuations during the first half of the twentieth century had nevertheless increased the expectations citizens had of their states. Evacuation also further enshrined the family as one of the primary social units in post-war Europe, though not without tension or inconsistency.

Yet, the intertwined social and strategic histories revealed by evacuation planing also suggest it merits greater attention in more contemporary periods too. Between 1945 and 2016, there were approximately 20 British overseas evacuations and since 2000, David Bond argues that there have been more overseas evacuations than British military campaigns. ¹²¹ By the early 1980s, British planners adopted the US abbreviation NEO and, under this banner, governments and militaries have tackled ever more complex evacuations, especially as the label of ‘non-combatant’ has become potentially more complicated. ¹²² Commentators suggest that the citizens’ expectations to be evacuated now outstrip the capabilities of even the most advanced modern military states, with one analyst in 2010 estimating that 5.5 million Britons lived abroad. ¹²³ Worries over the unsustainability of this realigned relationship between state and citizen had their first airing in the post-war period, but these remained throughout the Cold War and influenced British foreign policy into the twenty-first century. The panicked scenes of people trying to board western evacuation flights at Kabul airport in 2021 demonstrated the sobering reality of evacuation planning gone awry, its often-exclusionary nature and its symbolic significance for local populations and foreign powers. Evacuation itself, but also its planning and wider contexts, thus remain a powerful and important way to explore national priorities, international allegiances and domestic problems in the contemporary world.