Photo courtesy of the John Adam-Graf collectionīy mid 1918, Army regulations required that every soldier shipping out to France have a certificate that indicated he had successfully completed gas training. Here Doughboys become accustomed to their respirators during bayonet drill. British instructors arrived – Anti-gas lectures went from just one hour per week to five hours per week – Troops were compelled to wear gasmasks while participating in various activities such as firing weapons, marching, and playing sports – Recruits were made to don their masks and enter a “gas chamber” filled with chlorine gas, and then a tear gas filled chamber in which they were made to unmask – Plus, testing was done at the end of each training cycle. 02: As the war progressed, so too did the gas training. The lack of knowledge and training in regard to gas bred both ignorance and superstition among the poorly educated and unsophisticated recruits and veterans that made up the majority of the AEF. As a result, the majority of American Doughboys found themselves in a gas soaked environment with very little, or no defensive gas training and very little understanding of what that training actually meant.
In fact the first six divisions to arrive in France received no chemical warfare training at all while in America. Army’s woefully inadequate gas training program early in the war. The War Department’s lack of any kind of gas warfare doctrine was responsible for the U.S. When America entered the Great War, gas was such an unknown weapon on the battlefield that senior military commanders were unwilling to allocate any training time to gas defense, especially if it meant reducing the number of hours devoted to more traditional military skills, such as close order drill and marksmanship, which were deemed essential. Posters much like this one were prominently displayed in every training camp to ensure that America’s new soldiers were aware of the very grave danger that gas warfare posed. As such, the Army strived to make every recruit understand the value of looking after and keeping his gasmask in good order. 01: In the AEF, the importance of the gasmask was eventually considered to be second to that of only the soldier’s weapon. *Link to the other USMF, WW I related gasmask threads put together by Rusty Canteen:
Ww1 gas mask photo free#
PS, feel free to comment, corroborate, correct, contest, and continue this thread by posting pertinent information and by adding additional or better photographs. Any praise for this post should be directed towards them … World War I Nerd Trenchrat, Jagjetta, Rusty Canteen, and Retro, all of whom did not hesitate to supply me with advice, accurate information, high resolution period photos, and crisp clear photographs of many of the actual gasmasks and their carriers shown in this post. Regardless of its worth, this post would have been far less informative, and much less visually pleasing, if it were not for the assistance I received from forum members. Despite the fact that there are already some very informative threads* on the subject of gasmasks as used by the AEF during World War I (WW I) I decided to go ahead and add my two cents on that subject … okay, maybe it’s more like three cents.
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