First flu cases at Camp Funston

On the morning of 4 March 1918 Albert Gitchell, a cook at Camp Funston, a large training camp of the US Army in Kansas, reported to the doctor. He complained of a sore throat, fever and headache. According to accounts, by noon more than a hundred soldiers had come in with the same symptoms, and within a few days more than five hundred. Most sources give the date as 4 March, some as 11 March. Gitchell went down in history as the first recorded patient of the pandemic that was soon called the Spanish flu, though he was almost certainly not the first person infected.

Camp Funston was built in the summer of 1917 on the grounds of Fort Riley, a few months after the United States entered the war. It was one of sixteen camps where infantry divisions were trained from men called up under the conscription act. According to the American historian John M. Barry, it held on average more than 56,000 soldiers, crowded into cold barracks and tents. Barry also suggests where the disease may have come from. From the end of January, in Haskell County, a few hundred kilometres to the west, a local doctor, Loring Miner, had been treating a strangely violent influenza that killed the young and strong. He considered it so dangerous that he warned the federal health service. Draftees from Haskell went for training to Funston, and their families visited them at the camp.

The disease spread fast. According to Barry, within three weeks more than 1,100 soldiers had been admitted to hospital, and thousands of others were treated in infirmaries scattered around the camp. Several dozen died. On 18 March the flu appeared in two camps in Georgia, and by the end of April epidemics had swept 24 of the army’s 36 main camps. The spring wave, however, was relatively mild and few people worried about it. Influenza did not even have to be reported to the health authorities.

Meanwhile soldiers were constantly leaving the camps. In March 1918 about 84,000 Americans sailed for France, and in April about 118,000. Crowded troopships, on which the sick could not be isolated, carried them mainly to Brest and Saint-Nazaire, where the first American units had already landed in June 1917. In April the flu was already spreading among soldiers on the Western Front, and in May it reached Spain.

Where the virus really arose is still unknown. Barry’s Kansas thesis is popular but not the only one. The British virologist John Oxford pointed to the camp at Étaples in France, where as early as 1916–1917 soldiers were laid low by “purulent bronchitis”. The Canadian historian Mark Humphries considers it possible that the disease was brought by labourers from China, who were transported across Canada to France. He also notes that, according to data from the American army medical service, a wave of respiratory infections had passed through the army as early as December 1917. The only certainty is that the disease was first noticed in the American army. In the spring no one yet suspected that in the autumn it would return in a far more dangerous form and become the worst pandemic of the twentieth century.