Most people who lived through it were not soldiers
This was a war that arrived at home. During the BLITZ, German bombing killed around 43,000 civilians in Britain and destroyed or damaged more than a million houses in London alone. Families slept in cellars, in shelters dug into gardens, and on Underground platforms, then went to work in the morning.
The EVACUATION moved about 1.5 million people, mostly children, out of the cities in the first days of September 1939 — labelled, carrying a gas mask and one small case, sent to households they had never met. Some were treated kindly and some were not, and many drifted home during the quiet months before the bombing started. It is one of the few parts of the war that a primary class can hear about from someone's great-grandparent.
Rationing lasted longer than the fighting
Britain imported most of its food, and the SUBMARINE campaign in the Atlantic was an attempt to cut that off, which is what the CONVOY system existed to prevent. RATIONING began in January 1940 with bacon, butter and sugar, and a weekly adult allowance eventually came down to figures like one egg, about 50g of cheese and a small amount of meat.
It worked better than expected. Because everyone got a fixed share and bread stayed unrationed during the war, the poorest people in Britain ate better in 1944 than in 1939, and child health measurably improved. The system did not end with the war either — meat came off ration in 1954, nine years after it finished, which surprises people who assume victory meant an immediate return to normal.
Radar and the code breakers
RADAR gave Britain about twenty minutes' warning of incoming raids and, just as importantly, a system for using it: the Dowding system fed radar and Observer Corps reports to a central room that directed squadrons by radio. It meant the SPITFIRE and Hurricane squadrons could be sent where the attack actually was rather than flying constant patrols, which no air force could afford.
At Bletchley Park, thousands of people — around three quarters of them women — worked on intercepted German signals. Alan Turing's team built machines to attack the Enigma settings, and the intelligence produced is generally credited with shortening the war. The work stayed secret for about thirty years, so many of those involved never discussed it, including with their families.
Numbers, and what should not be lost in them
Estimates of total deaths run between 70 and 85 million people, most of them civilians. The Soviet Union lost perhaps 24 million; China's losses were comparable in scale. Among the dead were six million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust, alongside Roma, disabled people, Polish and Soviet civilians, political prisoners and others — a deliberate, organised programme of extermination, and the fact from this war that matters most to teach accurately.
The grid holds the more familiar landmarks: DUNKIRK, the NORMANDY landings that began the LIBERATION of western Europe, the PACIFIC campaign, the RESISTANCE movements, the BOMBER war, CHURCHILL, the BUNKER, the INVASION, the ALLIES and the eventual VICTORY and TREATY. Our world war one page covers the conflict whose unfinished business led here.