Defence Against the Indefensible: The Gas Mask, the State and British Culture during and after the First World War1 (2024)

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Volume 25 Issue 3 September 2014 This article was originally published in Twentieth Century British History
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Susan R. Grayzel *

University of Mississippi

*Email: sgrayzel@olemiss.edu

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Twentieth Century British History, Volume 25, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 418–434, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwu035

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07 August 2014

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    Susan R. Grayzel, Defence Against the Indefensible: The Gas Mask, the State and British Culture during and after the First World War, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 25, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 418–434, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwu035

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Introduction: Gas Masks, Civil Defence and Total War

It remains a truism about twentieth-century warfare that its parameters expanded to produce something known as ‘total war’. While historians and other scholars have debated the precise meaning of this term, most acknowledge that it signified the fundamental incorporation of what was labelled the ‘home front’ into the waging of war.2 In practical as well as cultural terms, this produced a newly calibrated role for civilians in modern war. To a great extent, technology enabled and accelerated this transformation. Air power predated the First World War, but its use intensified greatly during the air raids of that conflict, killing and injuring civilians in Paris and London, in the frontier areas of Germany and France, and along Britain’s eastern coastline.

In response to such attacks gradually arose features of what would become ‘civil defence’, a ubiquitous legacy of the First World War. At its core, civil defence accepted that civilian populations had a vital role to play in defending a state whose entirety could now be under fire during wartime. Instead of assuming that building up the military in terms of personnel and/or developing military practices would alone suffice to protect the nation, civil defence reflected the new reality of total war. Everyone had a role to play in the wartime state but, more than this, civilian participation had to be organized and sustained, requiring attention to training and the maintenance of morale as well as to more practical measures.

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