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Effects of Flu on World War I
Influenza and pneumonia killed more American soldiers and sailors during the war than did enemy weapons. In the fall of 1918, U.S. Army and Navy medical officers in camps across the country presided over the worst epidemic in American history, but the story was not new. In the fourth dreadful year of the war, as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) assumed fighting strength and prepared their first great offensive against the Germans, the flu struck. By the War Department's most conservative count, influenza sickened 26% of the Army - more than one million men - and killed almost 30,000 before they even got to France. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Army lost a staggering 8,743,102 days to influenza among enlisted men in 1918. The Navy recorded 5,027 deaths and more than 106,000 hospital admissions for influenza and pneumonia out of 600,000 men, but given the large number of mild cases that were never recorded, the sickness rate [was placed] closer to 40%. The Army and Navy medical services may have tamed typhoid and typhus, but more American soldiers, sailors, and Marines would succumb to influenza and pneumonia than would die on the industrialized battlefields of the Great War. |
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/ and
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862337/
Transcribed by Lynn Diemer-Mathews and uploaded November 20, 2024.
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