AllMovie

This episode of WGBH Boston's globally-acclaimed American Experience series for PBS, entitled The Great War of 1918, uses archival footage and candid interviews with survivors of WWI to detail - in great horror - how the automatization of warfare virtually destroyed every romantic and poetic notion the United States held of "going off to fight." With the advent of poison gas, tanks, the machine gun, long-range explosives, and trench warfare, World War I blindly destroyed millions of American lives, and - almost a century later - remains the most tragic conflict that the United States has yet entered, its casualties towering high above WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. This fascinating and disturbing program gingerly explores that conflict and serves as a reminder and a warning, cautioning us against similar calamities that threaten to arise in the future.