![]() ![]() Colonial authorities in vulnerable places like Hong Kong and Singapore clamored for masks from the British government, but these inquiries largely fell on deaf ears. Millions of Asian, African, and Caribbean subjects never received any kind of protective mask or training to use them. Those colonial subjects who served the imperial project (such as the Indian Army or colonial officials) were entitled to mask protection only after those in the Home Islands received theirs in 1939-40. Government officials refused to shield the people of the empire under hundreds of millions of rubber masks, callously remaking the gas mask into a whites-first form of exclusion. Citizens and subjects were deeply unequal when it came to access to gas protection. Grayzel’s second argument looks at how the distribution of masks was directly related to the paradoxes of empire and imperial governance. Popular media such as Cicely Hamilton’s dystopian novel Theodore Savage (1922) used the gas mask to evoke the futility of war through the depiction of ruined cities and poisoned soil, transforming the green and pleasant land into an infernal landscape from which there could be no escape. To be gassed was to be reduced to the status of animals or insect pests. Gas warfare also touched on a deep-rooted fear of suffocation and poisoning. Bernal saw the government proposals as a “psychological mask” and thus useless for heavy gas bombardment (p. Scientists too were skeptical of official plans to provide gas masks. Many others simply thought of gas masks as a waste of money amid the strained economic conditions of the 1930s. Groups like the Women’s World Committee Against War and the Quakers thought gas masks were illegal and immoral objects laden with malign intent, but also a sign that the public was being lied to by the state. Feminists and pacificists saw government gas mask policy as a hidden sign of belligerency, an unspoken admission that war was inevitable and gas would be used. The public was immediately skeptical of gas masks. Working through the chemical establishment at Porton Down and the Air Raid Precautions Committee (ARP), the British state sought new scientific and technical data to manufacture masks on behalf of the general public. The government’s goal was to protect the body politic behind a layer of rubber skin and purify any poison with charcoal filters. Grayzel sees the British gas mask as the material symbol of the emerging “civil defense state,” an all-encompassing approach to national defense and precursor to Britain’s contemporary “national security state” ( p. Total war methods such as the use of incendiaries and poison gas against civilians, including women and children, would be the new normal in mechanized warfare. The first is that the gas mask is a symbol for the changed character of war. Grayzel’s monograph has two main arguments. Government authorities sought a version of the gas mask for use during a national emergency rather than just by soldiers on the battlefield. Anxieties over the use of gas in a future conflict framed popular speculations about the “next war” and government plans in the 1920s and 1930s. Aerial war made the home front both a direct military target and an invaluable asset for British state authorities to protect. The author traces the beginnings of civilian gas protection with the first use of poison gas by Germany in April 1915 and aerial bombing attacks with high explosives on Allied civilians (first by Zeppelin and later airplane). Grayzel explores the cultural history of the British gas mask and the government’s efforts to prepare the public for chemical warfare in World War II. When we look at an old gas mask what do we see? Is it a grotesque melding of human and machine? Or is it simply a dusty curiosity, an object laden with different worries than our own? Susan Grayzel takes on this question in Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War. ![]() Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse) Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (February, 2023)Ĭommissioned by Penelope K. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terror of Total War. ![]()
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