This detailed, well-written book chronicles the cultural transformation wrought by the air raid, in reality and in the British imagination, between the early Zeppelin raids of the First World War and the end of the Blitz in the Second. Grayzel suggests that a gender-sensitive reading of how civilians understood the phenomenon of the bombing of cities reveals a deeper shift in perceptions of the nature of the state and war in the mid-twentieth century. The core argument is that the civilian reaction to bombing, especially in the First World War, eliminated the distinction between home and war fronts, and understanding the domestication of war helps explain both the rise in concern over the potential of bombing in the interwar years and the reaction to that bombing during the Blitz. Aerial bombardments meant that war could literally come home without warning, thereby turning civilians, particularly women and children, into targeted combatants. Dealing with this eventuality required a new form of civic identity, and Grayzel details how the creation of the civilian as stoic combatant came into being during the First World War.

This is one of the more original aspects of the book: Grayzel makes it clear that the people's heralded stoicism in the face of bombing was not the product of the Blitz itself. For other than the scale of the attacks, there was nothing really new about the bombing of the Second World War or the population's reaction to it. Grayzel shows that the expectation and reality of stoicism in the face of bombing during the Blitz was culturally forged over the previous twenty years. She details reactions to First World War bombing, the rise of interwar civil defense and Air Raid Precautions, and British discussions of the examples of bombing elsewhere, particularly during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, as is well known, culturally expressed fears about the future prospect of bombing and aerially delivered gas in the interwar years far exceeded the actual experience of the Second World War.

Grayzel shows how the first civilian reactions to bombing in the First World War were confused and contested, ranging from outrage at their illegality and disbelief over their atrocity to calls for immediate retaliation in kind. And while discussions of the civilian reaction inevitably contained gender, social, and racial stereotypes (that Jews in the East End were more likely to panic, for instance), by the end of the war it was apparent that the population as a whole had adjusted to the situation with a grim determination to endure the new methods of warfare. The air raid had become domesticated. Pacifists and feminists used the air raid as a prime example of the dangers of modern war in their campaigns in the interwar years, only to be faced with arguments to the effect that not to prepare for air raids in the future would be damning the nation to certain attack and defeat. Eventually, the realization that all were at risk to bombing meant that safeguarding the state required actively preparing civilians for their role in future wars. Since the breaking of morale was understood to be the primary aim of bombing, strengthening the character and fitness of civilians and preparing them for the onslaught to come became a priority. Throughout the book, Grayzel shows that gender- and class-based assumptions about the capacity of the civilian population to respond in the necessarily stoic manner guided preparations throughout the interwar years. A particularly astute example is her discussion of the late-1930s search for a gas mask design for babies and the gendered assumptions that went into its technical development.

Ultimately, the potentialities and reality of air raids pushed forward both the state's involvement in technological developments and its concern for civilian welfare. The realization that war would be brought to civilians in the first instance as a means of attacking the state suggested that the state had an obligation to secure the domestic life of its citizens. As Grayzel writes, the bargain struck between welfare to alleviate civilian wants and an acceptance of state intervention, even in peacetime, “resonates” with the emergence of the “civil defense” state from the interwar years on (318). Grayzel underlines how the potential of aerial war was a key factor in the rise of the welfare state.

In many ways, this is an exemplary monograph: deeply researched, attentive to the production and reception of culture, and elegantly argued. Its main claim is convincing, and its de-emphasizing of the uniqueness of the reaction to the Blitz is important. However, the parameters of the book may be just a little too neat and narrowly defined. Surely the perception that the nation as a whole, rather than just its military combatants, was a legitimate target predates the air raid, and ending the account at the Blitz and the Beveridge Report, while defensible (and no doubt in part pragmatic—books have to end within reasonable lengths), does not take the argument to its logical conclusion. For surely the natural end point to this story is the civilian and state response to the development of nuclear (and especially thermonuclear) weapons that really did portend the kind of devastation of civilization envisaged by H. G. Wells and others in the interwar years. The idea of the nuclear air raid again shifted the bond between home and state, both cementing its key importance and at the same time exposing its contradictions. That later story is too often divorced from the preatomic era, yet Grayzel's book shows, at least implicitly, that it ought to be more rigorously connected. What this book does is excellent; however, connecting its narrative to the post–Second World War world would have made it even better.