Time-Life Completes Warfare Series

Time-Life’s 15-volume “Century of Warfare,” a video history of mankind’s most destructive century, is ready to watch after five years in the making.

The history is told in three five-volume sets. “The World War I Collection” covers 1900 to the 1930s, from preparations for “the war to end all wars” to its disastrous aftermath.

The second set, “The World War II Collection,” covers history’s most deadly conflict and the dawn of the atomic age.

The third set, “The Modern Warfare Collection,” covers the Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War and Desert Storm. The final volume in the set features the latest in battlefield technology and what awaits tomorrow’s wartime combatants.

Each five-volume set lists for $79.99, plus shipping and handling charges (call 1-800-846-3843 to order). Each cassette has a running time of 52 minutes for a total of approximately 13 hours.

These videos were edited from more than 750,000 hours of film, more than three-fourths of which has never been shown in public. Until recently, much of it was classified top secret.

Producers scoured archives around the world in their search for battlefield film. Some original nitrate-film stock had not been examined since it was put into cans during World War I, and it was still on its original wooden spools.

The Soviets had their film buried in vaults under the city of St. Petersburg, hidden by Bolsheviks to destroy the nation’s memory of the Czar and the Imperial Family. Only recently was it made available.

The World War I videos consist of “War to End All Wars: 1918 and the Aftermath,” “Aces High: Air Warfare 1914-1918,” “Battle Fleets and U Boats: Naval Warfare 1914-1918,” “Blood and Mud: Trench Warfare in the West” and “The World Goes to War.”

The World War II set contains “Air War 1939-1945,” “The War at Sea 1939-1945,” “Normandy to the Rhine: The Western Front 1944-1945,” “Jungle and Ocean: The Pacific Theater 1943-1945” and “The End in Europe: Eastern and Western Fronts 1945.”

The Modern Warfare set is made up of “War in the Middle East 1945-1989,” “Vietnam 1955-1989,” “Wars in Peace 1945-1988,” “The Iron Curtain: The Cold War 1946-1989” and “Gulf War and the Future.”