Sure, but you can’t eat it, you can’t kill your enemies or defend your homes with it, and having a big pile of it makes you a target. Hard to hide that once you start spending it.
Besides, in 1918 the walkie talkies alone are more valuable than anything you could buy. The current equivalent would be the SCR-68:
This was bulky, unreliable, complicated to operate, and had limited transmission power. It was portable only in the sense that it was built into an airplane.
Also, the Toughbooks… One modern laptop paired with one of the digital cameras would probably be worth more than 15 tons of gold in 1918. The radios would at least be understandable to technical experts of the time. The computer would be incomprehensible magic.
Sure, but you can’t eat it, you can’t kill your enemies or defend your homes with it, and having a big pile of it makes you a target. Hard to hide that once you start spending it.
Besides, in 1918 the walkie talkies alone are more valuable than anything you could buy. The current equivalent would be the SCR-68:
https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/western_el_scr68scr_6.html
This was bulky, unreliable, complicated to operate, and had limited transmission power. It was portable only in the sense that it was built into an airplane.
Also, the Toughbooks… One modern laptop paired with one of the digital cameras would probably be worth more than 15 tons of gold in 1918. The radios would at least be understandable to technical experts of the time. The computer would be incomprehensible magic.