German soldiers and dogs don gas masks in Reims, France during World War I in 1916. Only one year earlier, poison gas was deployed for the first time in war on a mass scale by the Germans in Ypres, Belgium. The battle marked the birth of weapons of mass destruction.
A Revolution In Killing: The Technological Innovations Of WWI -- Felix Bohr, Spiegel Online
A new era in warfare was born on the battlefields of Flanders in 1915. German troops launched a chlorine gas attack in the first ever large-scale use of chemical weapons. It was but one of the technical innovations seen during World War I, and not all of them were as deadly.
The man who would go down in history as the father of chemical warfare acted as his own guinea pig to test his invention. On April 2, 1915, Fritz Haber, the head of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry, rode through a yellow-green cloud of chlorine gas on grounds used for troop exercises.
The experiment was successful. The scientist, himself a war enthusiast, began coughing convulsively; he grew pale and had to be carried away on a stretcher.
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My Comment: Tanks and armored vehicles, airplanes, WMDs (chemical weapons) .... World War I certainly did spun an entirely new generation of weapons.
