The Search for Civilian Safe Spaces: Re-evacuating Nord and Pas de Calais in Response to British Bombing, September 1940-March 1941

Abstract

Air warfare dramatically reconfigured traditional relationships between the geo- graphical and psychological spaces of war during the twentieth century. Most crucially, this change expanded civilian noncombatants’ vulnerability to wartime violence.¹ Urban-based families especially suffered as victims of the collateral dam- age accompanying the bombing of legally “sanctioned” strategic military targets near industrial centers. With an evolution in states’ understanding of collective psychology, bombing campaigns have also intentionally targeted civilian centers as a strategy of psychological warfare. Many historians tracing the history of warfare in the twentieth century have inaccurately partitioned the study of war into two distinct spaces—home front and battlefront.²