While the modern military gas mask was first designed by scientists such as Richard Willstätter in order to save German soldiers from chemical death, it ultimately contributed to the escalation of chemical warfare in World War I. New military tactics and advances in chemical weaponry such as gas shells and mustard gas were developed with the express purpose of “breaking the mask.” Thus, the gas mask was part and parcel of both the war of sheer material production and the chemical nightmare on the battlefield that helped precipitate the German defeat in 1918. By intertwining the historical development of gas with that of the gas mask, this chapter highlights moments in which a specifically German “chemical modernity” began to be conceptualized.

The Epilogue traces the complex afterlife of gas masks for civilians in five ways: in popular culture and memory of the Second World War; as a sign of protest against government regimes and in favor of social justice and democracy; as an emblem of the antiwar movement especially during the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003; as an indicator of living during a climate emergency; and in relationship to the face masks of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting with popular memories of the civilian gas masks of the Second World War, this chapter argues that the emergence of this singular, material object signals the arrival of the civil defense state and its accompanying militarization of civilian life. It reveals the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of The Age of the Gas Mask, and shows how the gas mask connects the histories of both world wars, of combatants and civilians, of men and women, of metropole and colony, of the state and the individual, thus shedding new light on total war.

While civilians in the metropole had mixed responses to concerted efforts to urge them to carry their gas masks, popular culture continued to make the gas mask an object of humor as well as something to manage panic or fear. As the war continued, new questions emerged that showed the limits of the gas mask’s reach, notably who was responsible for providing gas masks for internees in camps on the Isle of Man or for colonial subjects in places ranging from Aden to India to Singapore to the West Indies. Those planning for civil defense had not considered provisions for those in Britain’s extensive empire, and those in the colonies came to treat imperial civil defense with ambivalence. As Britain’s access to its overseas empire – and most importantly its source of rubber – shifted by the middle of 1942, so too did its instructions about gas masks. It now no longer asked its inhabitants to carry their gas masks everywhere but instead to ensure that they knew where they were and would keep them in good order. Despite poison gas not being deployed in massive attacks on civilians, as feared in the planning stages, the government continued to provide babies’ anti-gas protective helmets to all infants, and to inspect and repair gas masks for other ages throughout the war. At the war’s end, however, it decided not to collect these devices, just in case they could be of use in a future war.

Responding to imagined threats about chemical weapons delivered aerially, the British government intensified its efforts to create gas masks for everyone, testing fit and designs for those who might be unable to wear standard equipment. It did so in an atmosphere where popular culture continued to offer dire imaginings about poison gas’s potential for widespread destruction and where questions about anti-gas protection in the empire continued to emerge. By the start of 1938, the government’s air raid precautions department had developed extensive plans for how to distribute gas masks in case of an emergency across the United Kingdom. However, as it began to unveil such plans further, it encountered resistance from pacifists and antimilitarists as well as some grudging acceptance. The first significant test of these schemes came amid the Czechoslovakian or Munich Crisis in September 1938. On what became known as “Gas Mask Sunday,” the government asked its civilian inhabitants to line up across the nation to be fitted for gas masks. Although the outbreak of war was avoided, the limitations of anti-gas protection and the lack of suitable gas masks for all would propel this aspect of civil defense to the forefront as Britain’s entry into war seemed more likely than ever.

The civilian gas mask made total war seem normal. As an object that could remind wearers of an existential threat to their lives and families and livelihoods while being carried on the body, the gas mask could encapsulate both the warfare state and the welfare state of the twentieth century. A government that freely distributed civilian gas masks made it acceptable to factor its noncombatant population fully into the waging of modern war.

In the middle of the 1930s, Britain released its first formal statement about air raid precautions (civil defense) and acknowledged that it could offer no guarantee of immunity for civilians in a future war that might involve both air power and chemical weapons. At the start of the decade, Britain had begun to create civil defense for chemical warfare by cultivating first aid for civilians facing chemical arms and continuing to test both chemical weapons and anti-gas protection. It had not yet decided whether to provide gas masks to its entire civilian population. The official release of civil defense measures in 1935 led to vocal opposition from a variety of groups including feminists, socialists, scientists, and religious pacifists like Quakers. Then, the return of the use of chemical weapons in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 dramatically altered the public conversation about the use of such weapons and the devices to protect against them. The return of aerial bombardment to Europe with the Spanish Civil War alongside the use of chemical arms served as a catalyst for developing anti-gas protection as a key component of civil defense preparations for the war to come.

Chapter 2 shows how the arrival of lethal chemical warfare at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 led to the invention of anti-gas protection. It traces the crucial role played by women in this initial process and how the prospect of gas masks for civilians slowly emerged during the First World War and then continued in the war’s aftermath. The prospect of a future war of aero-chemical annihilation motivated feminist antimilitarists and others demanding the curtailment of chemical arms. Nonetheless Britain continued in both the metropole and empire to develop both such weapons and equipment to protect individuals from poison gas. Chemical weapons also had defenders, and the debate over their legitimacy played out in public even as government officials, who were inventing civil defense in secret in the 1920s, incorporated individual anti-gas protection into their calculations.

The trial run of civil defence and the gas mask in September 1938 yielded several important lessons for the government. One was that it urgently needed to solve the absence of anti-gas protection for infants and toddlers, which it did by the time Britain entered the Second World War in September 1939. Until the outbreak of war, it continued to encounter resistance to these measures, and when war broke out, some conscientious objectors used their refusal to accept their gas masks as a sign of their commitment to oppose all war. As for the majority who accepted the mask as the gift of a benevolent state, the issue became whether or not they would follow instructions to carry them whenever they left their homes. The government soon came to see gas mask carrying not only as a mark of good morale, but also as indicating whether or not someone was being a good wartime citizen, willing to follow instructions in order to keep the entire civilian population safe. Mass Observation delegated respondents to survey who carried their masks, and they recorded these efforts as mapping onto attitudes towards the war effort. When the worst of the Battle of Britain had subsided with a decrease in devastating aerial attacks by April 1941, the government launched a concerted campaign, using posters, film, and staged gas mask drills to encourage the population to remember that “Hitler Will Give No Warning,” so everyone had to accept the obligation always to have a gas mask at the ready. Carrying and caring for the gas mask became a sign that you accepted your duty to participate in the war effort.