With Trump comparing himself to Churchill by acting like inaction and hiding the truth is what they did I thought everyone might appreciate some actual history on the subject.
In the first World War Britain was targeted by Zeppelin and later plane based bombings. As a result as they saw the advances in aircraft payloads in the 1930’s they became highly concerned about how civilian bombing would go in a new war. They had established both civil air defense and separated the RAF as an independent military arm primarily because of the panic effect of the bombings in World War 1.
In 1924 an air raid precautions committee was set up and in 1935 it was turned into a department at the Home Office who then set up local committees to train people. Gas attacks were thought to be the most deadly threat so they set up a training school in 1936 and by 1938 had distributed 44 million gas masks to the population.
In 1937 they passed the ARP(Air Raid Precautions) Act which required local jurisdictions to establish civil defense programs against bombing attacks. This was the result of analysis that said given advances in aircraft technology they could suffer 200,000 casualties in the first week of the war.
Each town had an ARP committee made up of the police commissioner, town architect, and town engineer. They were responsible in turn for keeping order, building shelters, and repair and reconstruction. In mid 1939 regional commissioners were appointed to coordinate between the agencies. These organization trained air raid wardens, rescue workers, and first aid volunteers. They also trained both full time and part time firefighters. In 1937 England and Wales went from 5000 firefighters to 75000. By the end of 1940 it was 225,000.
In 1938 they formed a women’s auxiliary that eventually employed a million women.
This is before the war started. They built shelters, they trained volunteers, they employed full time people, they distributed gas masks and taught people how to use them, they evacuated people from cities.
Even then they needed the time between when the war started and when the Blitz did to get fully prepared and once it started they tweaked and added services.
When the war started so did the blackouts. The air wardens patrolled city streets and fined anyone who didn’t have windows and doors blacked out. Air watchers were deployed to roofs to warn people of approaching aircraft(so they could work until the last minute) and were trained and expected to put out or throw incendiary bombs off the roof of buildings. They had people whose job it was to rehouse people who had been bombed out. They had crews to fix houses damaged by bomb attacks. They compensated people for damage.
This was all civilian, on top of the radar warning stations, bristling anti aircraft guns, and seven hundred fighters guarding the English Channel.
That’s the context of “Keep Calm and Carry On”. It wasn’t “ignore this and it’ll go away”. It was “we’ve prepared for this, remember your training, do your part”.
It was government doing it’s job; leading it’s people through a crisis. They wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to hide it, bombs were falling from the damn sky and they had civilians wrapping them in fire proof blankets and tossing them off roofs! 6 million people had done that job by the end of the war.
If there was a larger mobilization of civilians to battle a crisis in world history I am not aware of it.