I highly reccomend the author of that link’s book, The Great Influenza to anyone interested in the 1917-1918 flu pandemic. The stupidity of the Philadelphia comissioner of health is easily a match for any stupidy on the battlefield in Europe.
Thanks. That is a corner of history I had not encountered, although since it was utterly lost before it was ever used, I can see how I might have missed it.
I wonder if it was ever found. I know the CSS Hunley was eventually found and recovered. I think its in a museum now in fact (or its still in the process of being conserved/restored…don’t recall which).
-XT
Going back further, Bushnell’s Turtle was the first sub used operationally and it was another American invention. And William Gardner, of Toledo, OH, invented a cranked machine gun that the Royal Navy adopted nearly a decade before the Maxim. And though the company founded by Connecticut-born Benjamin Hotchkiss made machine guns for the Great War, they were designed by his French designers.
But Americans were not the only early machine gun designers. The Swedish Nordenfelt Gun was patented in 1873.
Here’s a link to the organization that’s currently supporting the restoration of the Hunley. Apparantly you can tour the site on the weekends, now.
Thanks for the link. :rolleyes:
Er… (looks up to post #38) Oh.
Umm…
Well…
Oops?
Soooooo. The people you’ve chosen as friends think we’re thieves who stole technology and then chastised us for not acting as policeman to world because Europeans were in the middle of yet another attempt at total domination. Uh Huh. How many countries in Africa, Europe, South America, Asia and the Mid-East did Europe conquer? You can’t spin a globe and point to something without seeing English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese Russian or Italian conquest. Who invented that exactly?
When the United States was attacked by Japan and Germany we committed the unpardonable sin of turning the defeated countries into economic world powers. And when Germany was divided by Russia (another European country), we spent millions of dollars, risked starting another war, and lost 31 pilots/crew to feed our former enemy. 75% of the pilots involved were Americans who crossed an ocean to help…
And if your friends think we’re supposed to rush over to every European war that happens by you might remind him that the United States was not a world power at the beginning of the war. My father trained with wooden guns and broomsticks because his unit didn’t have any real ones to spare. US troops suffered the greatest casualties in the D-Day invasion defending French soil from Germans. We then repeated the process in the Pacific Theater.
I hope your friend continues to enjoy his fine scotch and cigars.
The USA was a World Power as of the end of WWI, if not sooner. Note the Washington Naval Treaty (wiki):
*In the aftermath of World War I the British Empire had the world’s largest and most powerful navy, followed closely by the United States and more distantly by Japan. All three embarked upon large programs of new capital ships (battleships and battlecruisers). In 1920, the United States had declared an aim to produce a navy “second to none”, and had already laid down keels for five battleships and four battlecruisers. Japan was at the start of an 8:8 program (eight battleships and eight battlecruisers). In early 1921 the British finalized the design and ordered four very large battlecruisers (G3 battlecruiser) with plans for four matching battleships (N3 battleship) to follow. This burst of capital ship construction kindled fears of a new naval arms race, similar to the Anglo-German Dreadnought race leading up to World War I.
At the time, the United States’ economic power was considerably greater than its potential rivals. Its Gross Domestic Product was approximately three times larger than the United Kingdom (although here the terms United Kingdom and British Empire are not synonymous) and six times larger than Japan. While the United States had the economic wherewithal to outbuild the other maritime powers, rising isolationism meant that domestic political support for such an ambitious program was lacking. The Japanese and British Empires were linked by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance which included mutual defense.
*
The ratio was the famous “5:5:3” which gave the USA equal naval power with GB.
The USA thus had a powerful world class navy. However, the Navy and the Isolationists had convinced Congress that the USA did not need much of an army, as no one could attack us- due to said navy.
Wasn’t that debunked? The idea being that to run from your trench to the enemy lines, with all your kit, would leave you exhausted. Anyone in the opposing trenches should have been despatched by your artillery.
Where did you get this impression from? Arms had been a major US industry since before the Cvil War. In fact, many of the most important innovations in arms manufacture had occured in the US. With regards to WWI, in one example off the top of my head, many of the German U-Boats that eventually pulled the US into the war were built in the United States by the Electric Boat company in New London, CT. The Germans had to buy them from the U.S. because at the beginning of the war they had no capability to build submarines on their own.
tomndebb–given the slightly different wordings of our respective posts, I thought we were destined to miss each other. The Alligator was ‘workable’, but was never ‘employed effectively’. It sank in a violent storm, BTW-not as though it just went down due to poor design (althought that probably played a role as well).
Malacandra–thanks for the technical guidance.
If the USA hadn’t entered the war as a combatant, then (most likely), the allies and germany would have had to have an armistice. Both sides had been bled white, and germany was on the brink of famine (British blocade). Had the war (sans USA) gone on, into 1919, probably allied and german governments would have fallen, due to the spread of communist anti-war factions.
The Allies and Germany did end up with an Armistice, despite the USA’s entrance.
Not exactly. I think the preceding poster was suggesting it would have come to some sort of truce. Germany would probably have kept its eastern conquests if not the western ones. Hostorically, of course, they lost everything and then some.
This may be optimistic (for Germany) but isn’t particularly unrealistic. The western powers made some advances but were pretty well exhausted, too.
I think it is overly optimistic for Germany. It also assumes that the situation in the East would have remained the same. Absent Western powers intervening, what would have happened in Russia? The Soviet government never intended to leave the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to be a permanent solution. I have little doubt the Eastern front would have been reopened in this situation, and Germany was effectively bled dry, as well as facing, as mentioned, internal starvation and massive domestic discontent.
Yet they continued to use that tactic, though it didn’t work much better in 1918 than it had in 1914.
It didn’t work much better? It got a lot better with improvements in artillery (see, e.g. Vimy Ridge). What were the alternatives for the Allied forces in 1915-1917?