A group of children riding their bikes while wearing gas masks, late 1930s.
By the time 1939 rolled around in Britain somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 million gas masks had been delivered by hand to homes in the event of a gas-related attack. On September 1,1939, Germany had invaded Poland leaving Britain and France with little choice but to declare war on Germany in order to help stop the advancement of Hitler’s military.
The masks were made to be portable, a rather terrifying aspect of what had become a way of life in Britain during wartime. In order to try to take away some of the fear regarding the omnipresent notion that bombs full of toxic gas could at any moment start raining from the sky to the din of air raid sirens, masks for children were manufactured to be more appealing to kids. In addition to making colorful masks Walt Disney even got in on the gas mask game and designed a “Mickey Mouse” gas mask in 1942. Only about 1,000 of Disney’s offputting Mouse masks were made.
During wartime it was also commonplace for schools to run emergency drills and there is almost nothing more chilling than the photographs taken during such drills that show children, some still clearly in diapers holding hands while wearing gas masks. Unless of course you consider that hospitals would also run drills and were instrumental in helping teach caregivers and parents of how to put their infants into special “baby gas respirators” that covered everything but the baby’s legs.
An image of a baby enclosed within the confines of a gas mask can never been unseen. So as crazy as this world has gotten over the course of this last year or so, the photos in this post are a somber reminder that things can always be (and used to be) much worse. Have some perspective.
Nurses in Britain helping test out gas masks for babies (under the age of two), 1940.
A group of mothers with their infants inside their gas masks.
Walt Disney showing his ‘Mickey Mouse’ gas mask to Maj. Gen. William Porter, the chief of the Chemical Warfare Service (pictured on the right), 1942.
A gas mask designed by Walt Disney in the image of Mickey Mouse.
A ‘colorful’ child-sized gas mask and its carrying case.
A photo captioned ‘First War Baby gets his Gas Mask’, taken in September 1939 by Harold Tomlin for the Daily Herald. The baby, Neville Mooney, was barely a month old when this image was taken.
British rocker Luke Haines gets his gas mask on in this new video for “Smash the System”:
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The sexy, porny nose art of WWII combat planes
Sex workers of Montreal’s WWII era Red Light District, a collection of mugshots