The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War

Description

The First World War introduced the widespread use of lethal chemical weapons. In its aftermath, the British government, like that of many states, had to prepare civilians to confront such weapons in a future war. Over the course of the interwar period, it developed individual anti-gas protection as a cornerstone of civil defence. Susan R. Grayzel traces the fascinating history of one object - the civilian gas mask - through the years 1915-1945 and, in so doing, reveals the reach of modern, total war and the limits of the state trying to safeguard civilian life in an extensive empire. Drawing on records from Britain's Colonial, Foreign, War and Home Offices and other archives alongside newspapers, journals, personal accounts and cultural sources, she connects the histories of the First and Second World Wars, combatants and civilians, men and women, metropole and colony, illuminating how new technologies of warfare shaped culture, politics, and society.

Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University. Her previous publications include Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (2012), and the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (2017).

'Grayzel's book is a compelling account of the social life of gas masks. She tells the history of war through one object - the gas mask - highlighting the tsunami of emotions it incites, the intensity of people's imagination, and their terror in the face of bodily violence. It is a book guaranteed to destroy any complacency about the inhumanity of war.' Joanna Bourke, author of Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade our Lives 'This book encourages us to think about the idea of total war in the 20th century in new and surprising ways, through the lens of material culture, and the 'weaponisation of the air'. Grayzel illuminates novel ways of thinking about the relationship between individual citizens and states, and the way that war permeated all aspects of life, for both men and women. Britain, and its empire, appear as fresh sites for understanding total war. I expect this will be a landmark book for the social and cultural history of the First and Second World Wars.' Yasmin Khan, author of The Raj at War: a People's History of India's Second World War 'One of the most horrifying strategies of twentieth-century warfare involved poisoning the air. Grayzel's meticulous study of popular and political responses to this awful prospect opens out the meanings and the legacies of efforts to protect the civilian body and offers new ways of understanding modern war.' Penny Summerfield, author of Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War