Shortly after a deadly aerial attack on Great Britain in 1917, Ethel Bilbrough, a forty-seven-year-old woman living in Kent, recorded her reactions in her diary: ‘the cowardly wickedness of such raids is almost incredible; to think of defenceless innocent women and children, and old men and boys being ruthlessly murdered and mutilated by these devils in the air is unspeakably horrible. But as someone said the other day, “There are no civilians now, we are all soldiers.”’1 This somewhat startling assertion – that civilians had somehow ceased to exist and that instead all inhabitants had acquired the status of military participants – would have been unimaginable without the transformative qualities of the First World War. The extent to which air power, in particular, as well as a range of other innovations, could shape Britain’s so-called home front into a war zone remains a crucial and often underestimated aspect of this war.