Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> How did the most industrialized wealthy democratic countries lose their lead in tanks? This volume is the first to combine the methods of history and science to resolve a controversy that has endured for a century. In both world wars Western European North American and Australasian states were democratic industrialized and rich. They shared a dominant Western culture. They tended to ally with each other. Materially their alliances overawed their enemies. Britain France and the United States (US) acquired the first largest and best tank forces of the First World War. They ended victorious. They remained dominant despite peacetime turmoil. In tanks the Western great powers remained innovative in the 1920s but were misguided by the 1930s. Worse they were overtaken by the very states they tried to contain. The Western great powers were practically the sole architects of peacetime international institutions laws norms and rules. Their international regime was meant to contain the losers of the First World War: Germany Austria Hungary the new states born of their empires (such as Czechoslovakia) and a revolution- ary communist Russian empire (eventually named as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; USSR). These states were late developers. However during the 1930s the USSR and Germany (eventually incorporating Austria and Czechoslovakia) developed the largest tank forces reverse-engineered Western tanks and innovated for themselves. They achieved quantitative and qualitative superiority despite less capital and smaller automotive industries. By then they were strong autocracies with a central- to eastern-European anti-Western orientation. (LL)