Welcome to weekly post number 8. In this week my class covered a lot on WWII and we even started to get going on our WWII podcasts. As you know my podcast is on sports, so I found an interviewee who could give me a perspective on what sports were like around the time of the war. I am not going to give many spoilers in these posts so I won’t say who it is, but just know that it should be an interesting WWII podcast coming up. So with that lets go straight into week eight.

As mentioned my class is now doing a topic on WWII, and so far it has been very informative. I myself do not know the most on the topic but with the help of the last few classes, I have learned what I need to produce a good podcast. We looked at how Hitler rose to power and how to started to take control over Germany. After that we looked at what the consequences of the war was, how so many people were left homeless, how cities were destroyed, and how food became a high price commodity in some parts. I personally wanted to know I little more and I had heard some cool things from my interviewee, so I looked into somethings that people did during the war.

First up was blackout curtains. Today they are known as just thick curtain the prevent light from getting through, but back then they helped save lives. During the war they were used to prevent any light from getting out of houses which prevented German bombers from being able to locate were the mass groups of people were. Everyday people had to prepare their blackout curtains in advance, and since the bombers usually attacked during the night, this was something they had to do during the daytime. On top of that shop owners had to be able to blackout any light in their shops and get people out to safety without any light slipping through. 

As time went on heavier restrictions were put in place and officers known as air raid wardens we put on patrol to look for anyone who wasn’t following the rules. This became to serious as one point that you could get fined for just striking a match or lignin a cigarette. Also cars could only use their side lights so the number of car crashes greatly increased.

Another major thing that impacted citizens of London was the extreme rationing that took place. Before the war started, the UK was importing around 20 million tons of food per year, this included 70% of their cheeses, fruits, and sugars. During the beginning of the war the Germans started to sink in ships that were importing food to the UK in order to try and starve the people. They also targeted fisherman ships which increased the price of fish tremendously. Soon each person was limited to a very small amount of food and in order to make sure this happed each person had to register with a specific shop. At around the peak of the rationing it became illegal to eat more than two courses while in public. 

I knew of course that there were certain measures that were taken during the war in order to support every citizen, however I had no idea it was this severe. I thought there systems and strategies for surviving the war were interesting enough and I enjoyed learning a bit more about what happened.

That will wrap up this post, be sure to look out for the next ones as I will have more information on the podcast.

That’s all for now.