A Clear Case of Trading with the Enemy (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A Clear Case of Trading with the Enemy (2015)

greatwarproject.org

40 pointsZeljkoS11 comments

World War I was very strange by modern standards. It has to be understood in the context of previous centuries. Europe had a long history of wars, and several Great Powers pushing back and forth against each other. There were 18 or so wars in Europe between 1900-1917 alone, before WWI. Wikipedia has a list. Wars between the same players were accepted as normal, and businesses on both sides dealt with each other before, after, and sometimes during the war. In WWI, Vickers and Krupp had licensed each others patents for various weapons, and after the war, they settled up on royalties for wartime production. This was considered normal business practice at the time. War wasn't viewed as total; it was just something princes and governments did; politics with guns.

WWI started almost by mistake. It rapidly got out of hand. All the major countries now had machine guns, artillery, railroads, and steel mills. This was an industrial strength war. It started with calvary and ended with tanks. That was new. The level of destruction was much higher than in past wars. This was the first war where there was more than enough ammo, and enough machine guns and artillery to use it. France is still cleaning up unexploded ordnance from WWI.

It's important today to understand how Europe worked before WWI today, because that's Putin's view of the world - Great Powers engaged in ongoing power struggles and land grabs. Hence Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine. We're used to a comfortable superpower stalemate, which we've had since the atomic bomb in 1945. That may not last.

It sounds like an obsolete worldview when put like this, but it's worth bearing in mind also that "a comfortable superpower stalemate" is not really what it's ever looked like from the other side.

For the US, the decades of assorted coups, intrigue, proxy wars, military adventures, tinpot middle eastern dictators, oil crises, war on terror, drone strikes etc mostly happen somewhere off in another comfortably remote hemisphere, with US involvement small and limited to people who signed up for the job.

From the other side, all this stuff is happening near your country's borders and potentially affecting your conscripted kids. It's like the Cuban missile crisis ALL THE TIME. It's not "comfortable" at all.

As a side note, I have never heard of steel tires, but apparently in WW1 they were a big thing:

- Truck spring wheel: http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/smw/images/thumb/a/...

- Bicycle spring wheel: http://www.oldbike.eu/museum/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/WW1-...

Those are pretty awesome. Thanks for the links. I could certainly see how they would be hard on roads.

I think I can see some grooves on the first picture, but I don't see anything on the second (bike) picture. How did those grip onto anything at all?

Treads are usually for harsh environments: hard rain, ice, mud, to increase traction and avoid hydroplaning.

In regular environments (see: driving on paved road) they actively work against speed by reducing road contact due to tread gaps. That's why racing vehicles use smooth wheels:

http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2009/01/26/388620.1-lg.jp...

http://www.slowtwitch.com/articles/images/6/75576-largest_MI...

Plus most cars were still using slick (smooth) tires up until around the 1940s-1960s and (I don't believe) were fast enough to have a threat of hydroplaning.

ETA: Just remembered you were talking about the bike. Considering the background, it looks like it was used on dirt roads so if ever mud happened to be in the way, one could just carry the bike over. Dirt roads also don't usually require too much turning and are fairly sturdy, so there's little reason to believe skidding was a common problem.

Even if it were for sidewalk/road riding, you can easily get out of the way of puddles and slow down easier than cars.

They are pretty neat --but I have to wonder, how did that assembly deal with torsion when braking or in the rears when applying power?

Many of the machine tools used to make the Merlin engines in British fighters were made in Germany.

The British and Germans traded a lot prior to both wars, which is worry for the argument that the trade links between the US and China will prevent a future war.

War is business by other means.

18-20 July? Of which year?

This website seems to post articles about what happened 100 years earlier, and the URL says 2015/7/20, so I'd assume it's talking about July 1915.

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