The Gas Mask

In Behind the Gas Mask, Thomas Faith offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service, the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War One. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, he explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles. As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.

With more than 650 photographs, this book provides in depth information and a reference guide for identifying 53 common American military gas masks and it also includes information about another 43 uncommon military, special purpose and civilian American gas masks. The book is easily usable by a novice military collector that knows little or nothing about American military gas masks and at the same time, provides a useful quick reference book for the advanced collector. It covers American gas masks and accessories used during the Great War of 1917-1918 to the modern day M50 series Joint Service General Purpose Masks. Additional collector information is included about the quantities of masks manufactured for or procured by the United States military, manufacturing date markings on masks, fakes and reproductions, items issued with gas masks, hints for easy gas mask identification and historical information relating to collecting of American military gas masks.

Uncovers how a material object - the civilian gas mask - can reveal the power and limits of the modern state facing total war.

"Gas Mask Nation explores Japanese daily life during the widespread culture of civil defense that emerged through fifteen years of war, beginning with Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and only ending with Japan's decisive defeat in WWII. This fifteen-year period involved intense social mobilization and the militarization of citizens. As in nearly every war since the invention of the airplane, surveillance, secrecy, and physical safety became visual symbols of national preparedness and anxiety. Everybody was vulnerable, always. And everybody had a role to play. Prevailing scholarship tends to portray the war years in Japan as a landscape of privation where consumer and popular culture were suppressed under the massive censorship of the war machine. Weisenfeld claims otherwise: while not denying the horrors of war, she shows that pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present. Even amidst the fear, tasty caramels were sold to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and popular magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashions to futuristic wartime weapons. Gas Mask Nation examines the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable culture of civil air defense through a diverse range of art works and media including experimental and documentary photographs, newsreels, popular magazine illustrations, advertising, cartoons, and state propaganda"--