By now, there was a raging influenza epidemic, ravaging both Central Powers and Allied armies,
and we’ll see more of that, but today I’d like to look at another type of illness, one
not often talked about during the war, but one that affected soldiers in the millions-
venereal disease.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week on the Western Front came the Battle of Hamel.
It was a small battle, but remarkable for being the first combined use of air power,
tanks, infantry, and machine guns in one integrated battle plan.
The Bulgarian and Ottoman citizenry were starving, and German High Command decided to ditch their
Foreign Minister for daring to suggest that the war could not be won militarily.
They certainly did not agree, and had already finalized their plans for the next phase of
their Western Front Offensives.
They actually considered postponing it, though, because of the spread of flu among the German
troops, but it will go ahead as planned.
But illness was complicating things.
I know we haven’t spoke about it really, even though it’s been growing and growing
for the past couple months, but by now the Spanish Flu had reached epidemic proportions.
It was affecting both armies, but chronic malnutrition supposedly made it worse on the
Germans side.
Thousands of men were becoming too sick for duty.
According the G.J. Meyer in “A World Undone” as many as 2,000 PER German division, and
just over the rest of 1918, 186,000 German soldiers would die of the flu.
There was one battlefront where epidemic disease had been rampant the whole time, and which
we haven’t heard much from in a while, the Macedonian Front.
Now, I mentioned last month that Adolphe Guillaumat had been called home from that front to be
military governor of Paris and had been replaced as Commander by Franchet “Desperate Frankie”
D’Espérey.
There was a nice irony here- the idea of the Army of the Orient, to attack through the
Balkans out of Salonika, had actually been Desperate Frankie’s idea in the first place
back in 1914, when he had suggested it to French President Raymond Poincaré.
However, by the time he’d actually gotten a proposal together, the Allies were occupied
with the Dardanelles and then Gallipoli in that region.
But still, the multi-national army at Salonika began building under Maurice Sarrail in late
1915, and was 300,000 men by the summer of 1916.
There was some fighting that summer, as we saw, and then the stalemate resumed, and by
1917 there were 500,000 Allied troops there.
But by then, Salonika was something of a joke to the European command.
German generals called it their largest internment camp, and Clemenceau called the troops “the
gardeners of Salonika”.
Thing is, it was anything but pleasant there.
Men by the hundreds of thousands had gotten malaria, which was endemic, and the city itself
was no picnic.
It had been part of the Ottoman Empire until just a few years ago, and thousands upon thousands
of refugees from the Balkan Wars were living on top of each other in hellish slums.
Well, anyhow, Guillaumat had replaced Sarrail, and he had spent the early part of this year
making preparations for a limited attack against the Bulgarians, which seemed promising, especially
with the Germans pulling out troops from the region to use in the Western Front Offensives.
But now Desperate Frankie was finally in charge of what had been his idea nearly four years
ago.
And now in addition to the Allied forces already there, he had a quarter of a million Greek
troops, and he was now demanding from Paris permission for a major offensive.
They hadn’t said anything definite yet, but with Americans arriving by the hundreds
of thousands in France, none of his troops were really going to be needed over there,
so he keeps on asking.
There might soon be action for the gardeners.
I want to get back to diseases, though, but ones that were not region specific.
Now, there’s this idea that many young men left for war and died on the fields as virgins.
This is largely a myth.
If they were virgins when they left home, they most probably weren’t by the time they
met their fate.
If you didn’t have the luck to meet a local the ‘normal way’, there were plenty of
other options.
On all of the fronts and on all sides, brothels were not only tolerated, they were systematically
organized and in some cases even regulated by the armies to keep them as clean and as
healthy as possible.
There is the inevitable fact that young fighting men, facing potential death, will do whatever
they can to get some comfort and solace in the arms of another, but the customs of the
different nations’ armies made for different ways of dealing with that.
The French, for example, have been issuing condoms to the troops to fight disease and
prevent unwanted pregnancies as a standard part of equipment since the end of the 19th
century.
The Germans, the Russians, the Austrians, The Italians… all of those have been handing
out condoms.
Nations that do not do so for reasons of supposed morality are the nations of the Commonwealth
and the United States, and this had pretty serious consequences.
Here are some numbers that might surprise you: during the war 416,891 soldiers of the
British Empire’s Army were admitted to hospital for treatment of venereal disease.
Yep, over 400,000.
Compare that to just 74,711 cases of the more spoken of condition trench foot.
Canadian soldiers, who were better paid than their English counterparts, for example, and
thus can afford more visits to brothels- and who also can’t go home to their sweethearts
on leave because they’re overseas- had it worse.
In 1915 they have a VD infection rate of 22%.
Consider also the amount of cases of VD that were not treated.
Some diseases like Chlamydia or Syphilis present little or no symptoms initially.
There’s also the embarrassment and shame that stops many from seeking treatment.
And although many other armies are handing out condoms, that’s not a foolproof solution
either.
First of all you have to actually use the condoms, and even if you do; in the 1910s
condoms are less than perfect.
So the soldiers bring the diseases back home with predictable results, and you get epidemics
of venereal disease among civilians all over the world.
And it’s not like civilians don’t have enough to worry about as it is.
Even in countries that were technically no longer part of the war, like Russia, there
was still war going on all over, much of it fought by civilians, and all of it affecting
daily life.
On the 6th, the Allies declared Vladivostok, way to the east, a protectorate.
Woodrow Wilson suggests the Japanese send 12,000 troops to aid the Czechoslovak Legion,
that’s been making its way across Russia eastward, and Japan accepts.
The Legion was fighting and beating the Bolsheviks all week in Siberia, occupied Irkutsk the
8th, and under General Horvath proclaimed a new Siberian government at Grodekovo, NW
of Vladivostok the 10th.
They capture Kazan the 12th and now control the Siberian railway east of Penza.
Also, the Bolsheviks declared martial law in Moscow this week after the German ambassador
there was assassinated.
Gotta say a bit about that here.
On July 6th, two members of the Left SR Party entered the embassy and killed Ambassador
Count Wilhelm von Mirbach.
He had taken part in the Brest-Litovsk negotiations earlier this year and became Ambassador in
April.
Over the following days after the assassination, troops loyal to the Left SRs seize the Moscow
post and the telegraph, but the Bolsheviks soon re established control.
These events are the final split between the two once-allies, and were a big step toward
the establishment of a one-party system in Russia.
The Left SRs and the Bolsheviks certainly described it differently on July 8th: The
Left SRs, “The executioner of the laboring Russian people... has been assassinated by
the avenging hand of a revolutionary... just on the day and the hour when the death sentence
of the laboring masses was finally being signed... and all the wealth of the laboring people
were being surrendered to the German landowners and capitalists...”
The Bolsheviks: “The insane rising of the so-called Left SRs has been suppressed.”
They go on and on, and there’s a link in the description to read the whole thing but
that first sentence pretty much sums up their attitude.
Historians still question the purpose of his assassination, though.
Was it part of an attempt to take power?
Was it to coincide with Right SR uprising in Yaroslav, as historian E.H. Carr implies?
Though we talked a lot about the big split between the Left and Right SRs over the winter.
Was it to provoke the Germans into cancelling the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and attacking Russia,
and then removing the Soviets from power by war?
Well, whatever it was, the Bolsheviks saw it as a betrayal, and soon will have removed
all SRs from any positions of power in Russia.
And as the Bolsheviks re-establish control, and as the French and Italians launch a minor,
but successful series of attacks in Southern Albania, the week comes to an end; a week
of flu, malaria, and venereal disease in the summer sunshine.
But you know, soldiers weren’t just affected by naturally occurring diseases, they were
creating “diseases” themselves.
I read in Martin Gilbert’s “The First World War” that on July 12th the Allies
premiered a new method of gas warfare.
They used a train and the train’s cars were loaded with gas cylinders.
This was brought up by light rail to the war zone and then the cars manually pushed up
to close to the front.
Then they detonated 5,000 gas cylinders at once, and a huge grey cloud formed and rolled
across to the Germans, widening as it went.
It worked well, causing hundreds of casualties.
Someone in one of the gas companies- anonymously- wrote this about their work that day:
“Science of the ages; the highest arts of man,
Degraded and prostituted, that Might should take the van,
Whilst Empire, Justice, Freedom slumbered.
Then chemist, student, artisan answered Duty’s call;
Our arms, our arts, our poison fumes Gained liberty for all.”
Thanks to Spartacus Olsson for his VD research.
If you want to learn more about one of the Serbian generals that fought at the Salonika
front, you can click right here for our episode about Stepa Stepanovic.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Filip Radulovic.
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