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

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 unrealized plans in revealing ‘ideational contexts’ and social attitudes.