Susan R. Grayzel, "The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
The Importance of Civil Defense in the Second World War
The lack of protection for colonial civilians may have contributed to the large decolonization effort that happens right after World War II. The gas masks and you deal with this in chapters three and four where they're not viewing the imperial subjects as worthy of the protection except in very strategic areas like Singapore which you later say those masks actually never got to them. There is really interesting discussions in the middle 30s about using coconut as one of the ways that you could possibly have filters in gas masks. They're very much not sourced from within Europe and certainly not sourced from the British Isles but when again in the middle of the second world war there are officials reaching out to colonial and imperial spaces saying how many
