An Army surplus store is a great place to find clothes, equipment, and other supplies that are not regularly available to the public. These stores are typically open to the military and their families as well as civilians who have an authorized ID. 

The items that are available at Army surplus stores can vary depending on the location, but they usually have a large selection of military clothing, footwear, and gear. You can navigate to this website  to find the best army surplus stores.

When you are shopping for military surplus items, it is important to know what to look for. The first thing you will want to do is to determine what type of military surplus store you would like to visit. There are three main types of stores: retail, outlet, and auction. 

Retail stores are the most common type of store and are where you will find the newest and most popular items. They tend to have a wider selection than outlet or auction stores, but their prices are usually higher. 

Outlet stores are smaller than retail stores and typically have a more limited selection. Auction houses are the least common type of store and are usually only found in larger cities. Auctions typically have the widest range of items available, but their prices can be very high. 

My special interest object is a 'general civil respirator' issued to the British people in the Second World War. These mass-produced objects have come to symbolize life in the UK, even though it has never been used in action: the much-feared poison gas bomb attacks never materialized. There are gas masks for adults, children, babies, horses … and even dogs. There are also complete gas mask hood systems for families.

Gas masks first became standard military equipment after the Germans pioneered chemical warfare on the Western Front of the First World War at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. The first gas masks for use in warfare were developed during the First World War when the German military pioneered the use of chlorine as a weapon – the original WMD.

The first gas masks were simple filters of damp cotton and were soon superseded by cloth bags soaked in chemicals. By the end of that conflict, the pattern for modern gas masks had been established, with a face mask, eye-pieces, a chemical filter, and a container.

In 1934, the British government asked its scientists at the Porton Down laboratory to design a civilian respirator that could be mass-produced at a unit cost of two shillings. The result was the General Civilian Respirator, familiar to the Second World War generation and to later generations from films, photographs, and stories of the period.