Civilians in Wartime Theme Analysis

Good Night, Mr. Tom reminds readers that while most people think of war as dangerous for soldiers, wars harm and kill civilians on a mass scale too. The novel begins as World War II is breaking out in 1939 with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The novel’s protagonist, eight-year-old William Beech, is evacuated to the English countryside along with many other London children because the English government anticipates that Nazi Germany will bomb densely populated areas in and around London. At first, staying in the rural village of Little Weirwold, William and the people around him feel relatively safe from the Germans—even as they dig bomb shelters. The war affects them indirectly, through the death or capture of Little Weirwold’s young soldiers: the older teenage brother of William’s new friend George Fletcher is killed in action, while the husband of William’s pretty young teacher Mrs. Hartridge is captured and held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Yet as German bombings of London intensify, it becomes clear that English civilians are in grave danger. In early September 1940, William’s best friend Zach, whose father has joined the Auxiliary Fire Service to aid the war effort, is badly injured in a fire that the novel implies started due to German bombing. When Zach travels to London to visit his father in the hospital, he is killed in the subsequent, intense September 1940 bombings of London by Nazi forces. Since Zach and his family are Jewish, their murder by Nazi forces inescapably reminds readers of the Holocaust, the Nazis’ genocidal mass murder of Jewish civilians during World War II. By representing the Nazis’ bombings of English civilian targets—which killed about 40,000 civilians—and indirectly invoking the Holocaust, the novel makes crystal clear that civilians are not safe during wartime.