6 - Facing Wartime

Summary

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.