IC: Well, those clunky gasoline-powered mechs that they had in the twenties... they cost $50,000 to buy. That's about $500,000 in today's dollars. Course, if you had the know-how and access to a decent junkyard, you could build your own for $2,000, most of which went into buying that gasoline-powered engine. Now, before you get all impressed, remember that these mechs were pieces of crap by our standards. They were slow, and all that we had to outfit them with back then was machine guns. Sure, they were pretty effective at mowing down infantry, but they were plum out of luck if a grenadier got anywhere near them.
Now, in WWII, the Krauts started arming their mechs with rockets. Oh, it was a dark day the first time we saw those on the battlefield. We cowered in fear every time those behemoths with the huge swastikas painted on the chest came lumbering onto the battlefield. That meant that some poor bastards were about to become hamburger if we didn't act right quick. Fortunately, those intimidating-looking swastikas also provided us with a good target to launch our mortars into...
Oh but I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah, so, me and a few of my crazy anarchist friends scraped up some money, built us some small mechs, and fought in the Abraham Lincoln Mech Brigade of the Spanish Civil War. You know, now that I think of it, those Kraut "volunteers" on the fascist side learned a lot of lessons from their great loss on the Andalusian plains...