The timing of this new book on the fear of bombing in Britain between the two world wars is somewhat unfortunate. A good deal has already been written about exactly this subject over the past decade, including the classic study by Susan Grayzel on the culture of bombing anxiety, the work of Amy Bell and Brett Holman on fear and its implications, the reflections of Robert Stradling on Spain and its lessons, and, most recently, Dietmar Süss's comparison of British and German social and cultural reactions to bombing. Though Michele Haapamaki has some new things to say, particularly about the political reaction to civilian defense in the 1930s, the overall argument of the book has few surprises.

The structure of the book moves from the reaction to the first air raiding on Britain in World War I, through the popular literary and professional writing on the bombing threat in the 1920s and 1930s, to a discussion of the complex pattern of negotiation between government, local officials, and the informed public about the appropriate nature of civil defense preparations during the late 1930s. The various themes contribute to Haapamaki's general contention that civil defense preparations in Britain in the 1930s anticipated the idea of the “people's war” by encouraging popular political and practical engagement with civilian defense and by developing the sense of a specifically British identity in coping with the coming threat. This is an important corrective to the idea that the “people's war” sprang up, fully grown, in the course of the 1940–41 wartime crisis. It also highlights the contrast with German civil defense preparations, which were strictly compulsory but at the same time technically superior and more widespread than those in in Britain.

The most original part of the book comes with the discussion of the deep shelter controversy in the 1930s. Building on the work of Joseph Meisel, Haapamaki shows that the popular argument for effective protection in deep shelters was not simply a stick used by the Communist Party of Great Britain to beat the government but also reflected a deeper tradition of radical dissent going back to the nineteenth century, in which government claims were subject to critical utilitarian review. The hero of this dissent is the Marxist scientist J. B. S. Haldane (whose sympathies certainly were communist). He championed the idea of deep shelters and was the reference point for one major campaign, mounted unsuccessfully by Finsbury Borough Council in London, to place all the area's population deep underground during air raids. Haapamaki observes that the opponents of deep shelters saw them as somehow un-British, while dispersed sheltering in people's own homes was more likely to match British civic values of voluntarism and individuality. The project for deep shelters was stillborn, and during the Blitz people chiefly stayed in their houses and apartments. The cost of this form of Britishness was 43,000 dead, many of them killed at home, in bed, or under the kitchen table.

Fear was not, as it turned out, a disabling emotion, though it was a very real one once the bombs began to drop. Haapamaki might have made more of the evident class contrasts in the attitude towards civil defense, the nature of the participating volunteers, and the opportunities for safety. “People's war” or not, British society in the 1930s was self-consciously a class society. While the wealthier could leave the city and go to their houses in the country (as so many of the left-wing intelligentsia did), the working-class communities straddling the ports and factories bombed by the German air force were given poor levels of protection, and in an estimated 50 percent of cases, no protection at all. These were people who in many cases could not or did not protest in the 1930s, who often had only the haziest notion of what bombing might involve, and whose identity was shaped more by local class communities than by a shared Britishness. It was among these communities that most of the 43,000 dead were to be found.

Haapamaki makes the shrewd point in her conclusion that although “fear” did not in the end lead to the exaggerated scenarios of mass panic, crime, and hunger described in the florid narratives of the interwar years, or even to the thousands of psychiatric casualties anticipated by the public authorities, bombing did leave thousands of hidden casualties, victims of the as yet unclassified effects of trauma. Nonetheless, dispersal of the population as a strategy fit for the British sense of home and possessions also had the effect of dispersing the shock, the minor injuries, and the psychiatric damage that persistent bomb attack clearly generated. Aerial raiding did not produce societal breakdown, any more than the bombing of Germany—with more than thirty times the quantity of bombs—could provoke German social collapse. Haapamaki's account underlines the current argument that the modern citizen in the 1940s could cope with total war much more effectively than the scaremongers had imagined once it was clear that this was his or her war, too.