Spanish flu

The Spanish flu was a pandemic of influenza caused by an H1N1 virus that swept the whole world in 1918–1919. It came in the last year of the war and was spread by armies and troop transports, and according to the American CDC it killed more people than the soldiers and civilians who died in the entire war. It was the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century.

Three waves

The first wave was noticed in the spring of 1918 in the American army. On 4 March at Camp Funston in Kansas the cook Albert Gitchell fell ill, and within three weeks more than 1,100 soldiers had been admitted to hospital. Troopships carried the disease to France; in April it was spreading on the Western Front, and in May it reached Spain. Where the virus arose is unknown: besides Kansas, the camp at Étaples in France and workers from China have been suggested. The spring wave was mild.

The second wave broke out at the end of August 1918 almost simultaneously in three ports: Boston, Brest in France and Freetown in West Africa. This time patients often developed haemorrhagic pneumonia and died within days. According to the American researchers Jeffery Taubenberger and David Morens, more than 2.5 per cent of the sick died, compared with less than 0.1 per cent in other influenza pandemics. Young adults aged 20–40, usually the most resistant, died in particular. In the United States October was the worst month. A third wave came in the winter and spring of 1919 and died down in the summer, though in places the epidemic returned as late as 1920.

At the front

The flu weakened armies in the decisive months of the war. According to the German historian Eckard Michels, during the Second Battle of the Marne it put nearly 400,000 German soldiers out of the ranks. It ravaged American divisions in the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, spread aboard troopships crossing the Atlantic, as in the Otranto convoy, and among the Americans at Arkhangelsk, where nearly a hundred soldiers died in the first weeks. It reached the victors in Damascus and Lettow-Vorbeck’s column in East Africa.

The name

The disease had little to do with Spain. On 22 May 1918 the Madrid press wrote about a mysterious illness among soldiers, and soon King Alfonso XIII fell ill. In the belligerent countries censorship was in force and newspapers avoided news that might hurt morale. Neutral Spain wrote about the epidemic openly, so it seemed to have suffered the most. In Poland the name “hiszpanka” took hold.

Deaths

According to the CDC about 500 million people fell ill, a third of the world’s population. Nobody counted the dead. The figure most often accepted is 25–50 million deaths; the CDC gives at least 50 million, and the extreme estimates range from 17 to 100 million. On Samoa, where a ship from New Zealand brought the flu in November 1918, about a fifth of the inhabitants died.

On the Polish lands the epidemic raged just as Poland regained independence; in Kraków the schools were closed, and the historian Łukasz Mieszkowski estimates that 68,000 to 130,000 people died in the autumn and winter of 1918–1919. Among the victims were the painter Egon Schiele and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Deaths from the pandemic are not usually counted among the losses of the war.