English Historical Review: At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz , by Susan R. Grayzel

The title of Susan Grayzel’s book cleverly encapsulates the basic thesis of her compelling study of the role of aerial bombardment in British culture between the First World War and the Blitz. By exploring how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare, Grayzel demonstrates how the extension of the battle zone to the home ultimately obliged the state to consider the domestic sphere as a fundamental element in the national war effort. The state’s recognition that civilians mattered as never before in mobilising a nation for war led to the creation of an apparatus of civil defence provision that required both an enlarged conception of state power and the necessity of voluntary participation by the home-front population. The prospect of attacks on women and children in their homes had to be rendered quotidian, a process that effectively amounted to ‘domesticating the air raid itself ’. Read the entire review.