Of all the horrors of the Great War, the use of poison gas must surely have been one of the most terrible. Cruel, unpredictable, deadly, from the moment it was first used by the Germans at Ypres in April 1915 it added a new dimension of terror to the battlefield. And a simple change in the wind direction was all it took for the gas clouds to envelop those who had originally unleashed them... This unique DVD - surely the definitive film work on the subject - looks at the use of poison gas in both the First and Second World Wars. Narrated by military experts Major and Mrs Holt, it uses previously unreleased official training films, public information films and once top secret archive footage from both wars to reveal the full horror of gas warfare. Original films from the Great War explore the tactical use of gas on the battlefield and show the correct use of gas masks and decontamination techniques. By the time of the Second World War however, gas was expected to be used against civilians and this video includes fascinating films preparing the public for the horrors of gas attacks on cities, and restricted training films showing how decontamination squads would cope with the aftermath. Only the fear of retaliation in kind kept gas from being used against cities during the war, but of course it was used against civilians - in the shower rooms of the concentration camps. A once top secret film from America also reveals how the US military planned to gas no less than 25 cities, had a conventional invasion of Japan become necessary. Only the use of the atomic bomb stopped it - and the world traded one fearsome weapon of mass destruction for another...