During the Blitz, the cities of the United Kingdom had to develop mechanisms to defend themselves from air-raids. As aircraft technology improved in the 1930s, contemporaries speculated that a war might product up to 600,000 across the United Kingdom. Convinced that “the bomber will always get through”, politicians and officials scrambled to organise civil defence after imagining grim scenes of hospitals overrun with patients, floods of refugees, and social breakdown. In November 1934 Winston Churchill said to the House of Commons: “We must expect that, under the pressure of continuous attack upon London, at least three or four million people would be driven out into the open country around the metropolis”.
Despite widespread fears that air-raids would destroy Britain, the government was largely inactive in terms of protecting the population. Indeed, much of the civil defence preparations were left in the hands of local authorities. Government inaction reflected their hope that war could be avoided or that Britain’s bomber force would deter raids. Many of the local authorities moved too slowly which led to insufficient numbers of shelters in towns such as Birmingham and Belfast, the latter having just space for a quarter of its population in April 1941. I don’t think Crocs discount codes would have been of much help.