I’m assuming that at some point it simply wasn’t practical for German and Japanese children in World War II to go to school any longer, due to the nature of war ravaging closer and closer to home. At what point did they still go to school, and when did it end?
Maybe they already stopped going to school around the beginning of the war, or didn’t stop going to school until mid-war, say, 1943?
The British often used schools are targets during the bombing of Germany. Here is one mother outside a school which got hit.
One of the major public buildings near the bombs detonation in Hiroshima was a High School. many of whose students survived as they were at morning assembly.
Why would you assume what you do? Its not like there was fighting on every inch of a combatant nations’s territory, every day of the war. You might go months or years in-between raid or battles.
Cite please - schools were undoubtedly bombed, as they are in every war. But that does not mean they were “targets”.
And quite how would a bomber flying at night, at 16000 feet be able to target a school anyway?
This is one of the things that makes me doubt the whole genre of post apocalyptic sci-fi.
The fact is right to the end of WW2 Axis society did NOT collapse. The destruction Germany and Japan went through was just intense as many apocalypse scenarios described in fiction, but society didn’t collapse. The schools ran, local governments continued to function.
This is going by a book I read on Bomber Command back in the day, but basically the technology of the time meant that for city targeting, landmarks which are prominent from the air, Cathedrals, Sports stadia, academic institutions, bridges etc were typically what the bombers aimed for. If your are looking to kill and house a population and have trouble navigating and getting precision targeting; a school (and the others) is a very good sign that population is nearby.
Or just dumping everything anywhere in a panic to get back asap.
Hardly, by the end Bomber Command had some very sophisticated operating procedures. Some of the things include
The first aircraft dedicated to targeting AAA Defence networks; previously it had been a grin and beat it policy.
Time attack’s to make sure that first responders and civil defense guys were killed, one particularly nasty way was to drop aerial mines, these would go off after the period between the first wave, when firetrucks and ambulances would start to move.
Attacks on water mains, to reduce water to put out fires.
Bombing of civil defense points stations, like yes, schools.
Getting back to the OP, schools generally kept operating pretty much all throughout the war. Towards the very end, many schools did close down as the Allied forces occupied German cities and the administration was reorganised along the lines of the military authorities, but reopened relatively quickly after the war came to an end - it was, in fact, not until early 1945 that the front actually reached the territory of mainland Germany.
During the war itself, there were certainly many restrictions on the way schools were running their business - the general scarcity of a lot of respources (e.g. fuel for heating) as a result of the wartime economy made it difficult to keep things running, and many younger teachers were unavailable since they had been drafted. There was also an impact on the curricula of schools - since the German forces were eager to draft school graduates as soon as possible, many schools switched to a Notabitur programme (“emergency abitur”, with abitur being the German high school diploma which is necessary for attending university) that had an abridged curriculum so that students would graduate faster than under normal circumstances. But a complete shutdown of schools did generally not happen until 1945, and, as said above, was followed by a relatively quick reopening once the war was over.
Yes, German and Japanese schools kept running until the end of the war. There was a documentary a few years back on Hiroshima which showed an interview with a survivor who had been in class with all his friends the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. Most of his schoolmates died.
That seems an unneeded procedure. If you can see a school then you’re also going to be able to see if it’s in the middle of a city or not.
My understanding is that bombers used to look for landmarks like rivers and highways and would then follow them into a city. Once a bomber reached a city, it might use prominent buildings as landmarks to find a target within but not as a target itself. Putting aside any humanitarian concerns, bombing places like schools, churches, and hospitals was a waste of resources. Why drop bombs on something that had no military value?
Bombers would be given aim points which were things that were (relatively) identifiable to lead them to their targets. Schools are usually distinctive enough from the air to be identifiable.
That said I have no clue if they intentionally aimed for schools. They may have used schools as something to help the air crews find the real target but I would be surprised if they were ever the actual target.
I think night bombing was never precision bombing (or what passed for precision bombing in WWII) where they were going for a specific target. In WWII I think night bombing was basically carpet bombing a whole city to rubble. Even in daylight they had a really bad time hitting specific targets. At night…forget it. They were probably lucky to just hit the city.
Doubting this book or your exact interpretation anyway. In bombing a city visually obviously the a/c would look for evidence they were near the target, pilotage, looking for notable landmarks on the ground. Later on radar did the same thing, but the resolution was such that the ‘landmark’ would be even larger, like a river or whole of city skyline of buildings. In neither case was it likely a particular school would be the landmark, just practically. And in the second half of the war Bomber Command pathfinder* a/c were often using radio navigation systems like Gee or Oboe which didn’t require seeing the ground or detecting it with radar.
Likewise the stuff about bombing particular water mains or civil defense points: the circular error probability of the bombing was too large for that to be practical, even with the best technology the British fielded by late in the campaign. Both the British and the Germans often dropped long delay fuse bombs, that’s true.
The timing of attacks of particular bombers was also not mainly a deliberate way of increasing bomb effect. Rather, the bombers striking a particular target at night had to fly in a ‘stream’, not a close formation as in daylight, or else the risk of collision would be too high. So naturally the bombs would keep falling longer than in an attack by a daylight formation. Also the timing and separation of multiple streams was mainly to try to confuse the night fighter controllers. German night fighters were the principal menace to Bomber Command especially later in the campaign when the bombing had become heavy (as in multiple streams) and accurate enough to have much real effect on the Germans.
This is just on the technical aspects, aside from the never ending debate of relative morality of the mainly British area attacks on German cities (or US ones on Japanese cities in 1945). If targeting a city even for military purposes, obviously schools or their students within the city would be affected.
*in the period of the war where the RAF bombing had much effect, a separate force of a/c found the targets and marked them with coded color marker incendiary bombs. The average ‘Main Force’ bomber crew was looking for the markers, not the target. The Pathfinder crews might in some cases use their eyes, but more often (in the later effective period of bombing) radar or new forms of radio navigation which were more accurate than any method of looking at the ground.
I understand that the german reaction to the bombing of civilian targets was similar to that in the UK:
Firstly a drive to evacuate children to the relative safety of the country and providing shelters in schools where possible.
This followed by school closures if they were damaged, which meant that large numbers of children were free to cause problems. My brother-in-law was at school in London, and he said they had the time of their lives playing in bomb sites, looking for bomb fragments and valuables to sell and a good deal of vandalism (breaking windows etc).
The authorities soon started to get schools going in whatever buildings they could requisition and many of the evacuees began drifting back to the family and familiar streets.
The big difference of course, is that there was no actual fighting on English soil.
The British bombed at night and resorted to area bombing, not precision bombing. I have no doubt that the British did not specifically target schools, though some were no doubt hit. Hell, at times they were lucky their bombs fell in the city they were targeting.
Yeah, I’m wondering where you got the idea that German and Japanese kids stopped going to school during the early stages of the war, they were both convinced that they were going to win and were waging aggressive war in other people’s land. The Doolittle raid was a symbolic attack on Japan, and there was some earlier British bombing of Germany, but it wasn’t until 1944 that serious bombing of Germany started or non-raid bombing of Japan, and not until 1945 that Germany proper was experiencing land attacks (Japan itself wasn’t invaded at all). Germany from 1939-1944 and Japan from 1931-1944 were militaristic powers engaged in wars for gain in foreign territory, not countries disrupted by war.
And there wasn’t any actual fighting on Japanese soil either, and there was only fighting on German soil after late 1944. Sure, Japan and Germany were getting bombed more heavily than the UK, but there were no enemy troops on their soil until the war was over for the Japanese, and nearly over for the Germans.
Schools: trainer of the youngest and most vigorous fighters in just a few years. Remember the war went on for 6 years, and those innocent boys in high school at the start were tank gunners and fighter pilots before long.
Churches: demoralizing – your god can’t save you now.
Hospitals: recuperating soldiers won’t be returning to fight if they are dead.
Yep, I’d say schools, churches and hospitals are prime military targets.
At Hiroshima (and perhaps elsewhere) if you were really in school or not depended on your age group. Anyone from roughly 13 on up was technically still in school but was actually doing war work in class groups - at war factories, tearing down houses to create fire breaks, etc. Many of the deaths at the hypocenter were these ‘mobilized students’ working on fire breaks. THIS ARTICLE discusses the situation a bit.
Interesting responses, thanks. My assumptions were far off then. I would have thought that it would be difficult to focus or concentrate with a war going on, or that parents wouldn’t want their kids going to school - want to keep them close nearby, etc.
How was wartime curriculum different than pre-war curriculum? Did German and Japanese kids get a daily talk about how the war was going, was there stuff like “How to hide in a bomb shelter” or “How to survive this-or-that?”
