"It stalked into camp,
when the day was damp and chilly and cold.
It crept by the guards,
and murdered my pards
with a hand that was clammy and bony and bold.
And its breath was icy and mouldy and dank
And it killed so speedy,
and gloatingly greedy
That it took away men
from each company rank."
Private Joshua Lee,
34th Infantry Division,
1919.
[Opening theme]
When we left off,
the 1918 flu was aboard
troop transports headed for the battlefields of France.
And though this first wave of the virus was comparatively mild,
its time in the trenches would reforge it into hardened killer of men
and helped tip the balance of the war.
In early April,
it erupted among the American troops at their disembarkation ground in Brest.
By April 10th,
the first cases began showing up in the French army,
which generally trained and served alongside American units.
It was hard to notice at first.
High fever, headaches, and weakness could come
from many diseases that swirled around the trenches
such as insect-borne trench fever or typhus.
But it soon became clear that this was different.
The troops called it
three-day fever,
knock-me-down fever,
or La Grippe.
It rarely killed,
but men who got it were out of action for days and lead-footed for weeks.
The overcrowded camps and trenches of the Western Front were ideal tinder for an epidemic.
Men lived within inches of each other,
their immune systems compromised from exhaustion and disease.
And unlike a city where the virus might run out of victims, here,
fresh bodies were rotated onto the line every few days.
It spread to the British in early May,
and by then,
there was no hope of containment.
It swept through them like a bad spirit.
English hospitals saw over 36,000 admissions for flu
in a single month.
Only then,
when it began undermining the troops' ability to fight,
did military doctors raise the alarm.
The outbreak had sprung up during a critical phase of the war.
The Germans had launched a massive Spring Offensive,
and Allied generals needed every man possible on the line.
But as spring turned to summer,
the frontline hospitals of the Allies swelled to over capacity.
Men on the front lines would get ready to rotate to the rear,
only to find that the unit ordered to relieve them had instead gone into quarantine.
Medical tents had run out of space, and some hospitals
took to laying patients outside on canvas tarps.
In late May, a group of French recruits came down with it.
69% of them had to be hospitalized and 5% died.
By the end of the summer,
10% of the British army had fallen ill.
Back in Washington, D.C.
Welch and his epidemiologists
finally took notice.
The flu,
previously ignored,
became a matter of national security.
They set about turning the
Rockefeller Institute into an information gathering
and communication center for the disease.
Welch wanted anything he could get his hands on,
reports,
lung samples,
information on treatment,
so he dispatched doctors to centers of infection
to swab throats and collect samples.
But all of it remained a closely guarded secret.
No one wanted the Central Powers to know that
the Allies were being weakened by disease.
Upon entering the war,
both the U.S. and Britain had
clamped down on the press with
unprecedented censorship measures.
When American officers denied or minimized reports of the flu,
newspapers at home accepted it without question.
The British, for their part,
tried to strangle any mention of the spreading plague.
But with the virus now infecting the civilian population,
news of an epidemic
started to leak.
In May,
the virus arrived in Madrid,
and since Spain was neutral,
it wasn't subject to wartime censorship.
There, the flu made front page news, especially once it infected the king.
It whipped through Spanish cities,
passing from person to person so fast
that local wits named it after a hit opera song,
The Naples Soldier.
It was as catchy as the song, the joke went,
if more deadly.
International newspapers picked up the story on the
Madrid outbreak and,
erroneously, assumed
the disease had originated there.
And from those articles, the killer gained another name:
the Spanish Flu.
But it wasn't just the Allies covering up the flu's impact.
On the other side of No Man's Land,
the German commander,
General Ludendorff,
was also wrestling with the disease.
Ludendorff had gained
day-to-day command of the German military in 1916,
along with a huge amount of political power,
and he'd used it to embark on a bold plan
to save the Kaiser and Germany.
And to be honest,
it hadn't gone so well.
First, he'd planned to crush the Allied supply lines with
unrestricted submarine warfare.
Instead,
it had helped drag America into the conflict.
Now,
84,000 Americans
were arriving on the Western Front each month.
But that would be a surmountable problem if he could
knock Russia out of the war and
free up the troops fighting on the Eastern Front.
Luckily for him,
a revolution had broken out against the Czar,
and to fuel the chaos,
he helped transport a famous Bolshevik revolutionary,
one Vladimir Lenin,
back to Russia.
The plan worked...
kinda.
Ludendorff had hoped
the strict peace terms he'd forced on Russia
would scare other Allies into opening negotiations.
But instead,
the harsh treaty only had convinced them that peace was not possible until they
achieved total victory,
and forced an equally punishing treaty on Germany.
But at least Ludendorff now had his 50 divisions from the Eastern Front,
and he'd used them for one more,
all or nothing shot at winning the war.
He'd retrained the freed up veterans as
assault specialists,
stormtroopers,
and launched his
massive Spring Offensive in hopes of securing victory
before the Americans arrived in force.
As the offensive began, Ludendorff's army had better
trained troops, superior tactics,
higher morale,
and for a brief time, numerical superiority.
And at the beginning,
it all went so well.
German troops had captured more territory
than they had since 1914, and driven a wedge
between the British and the French.
But the Allies had held on to the strategic port roads
and railroad junctions.
All the ground that Ludendorff
captured was worthless, shell shocked dirt.
And they'd taken a lot of casualties,
so the next phase of the operation was critical.
But as he began to organize for a final push,
his generals requested a delay.
The German army, you see...
had the flu.
They'd caught it in June,
probably from a British
prisoner of war,
and by July it was sweeping the ranks.
German troops, their systems already weak from food
rationing, appeared especially susceptible to infection.
Half a million soldiers were sick.
In some units, a quarter of the men were too ill to fight.
Ludendorff delayed the attack five days.
After that,
the commanders would just have to deal with the reduced unit strength.
Meanwhile, the Allies, who had caught the flu earlier
in the spring and summer, were recovering.
Despite sickness, exhaustion, and casualty depletion, on
July 15, the German marshalled for their one last attack.
A rolling bombardment pounded the French and
American lines as they advanced.
Stormtroopers rushed
behind with fast-moving infiltration tactics.
Gas shells turned the battlefield into a chemical hell.
But the French, British, and Americans held,
and counterattacked.
And they would keep counterattacking
for 100 days,
pushing the Germans back step by step.
Ludendorff had failed.
Within weeks,
he was shut in his office, suffering a nervous breakdown,
and by October,
he was fleeing across the
Swedish border in sunglasses and a fake beard.
Now, it would be wrong to say the flu
defeated Ludendorff's Spring Offensive,
because there were other factors.
It was an overambitious operation with a nebulous goal.
He kept changing the objectives,
units outran their supply lines,
and he lost too many men.
But, German accounts do suggest the flu bled the army's
manpower and resolve at a critical moment.
And just as it had tipped the balance,
it was gone.
In August,
British hospitalizations fell to the point that
they had declared the epidemic over.
But it wasn't over.
For as the balance of the war was shifting,
so were the virus' genes.
Even today,
no one's sure what happened.
Perhaps the original, deadly virus had temporarily
mutated into a mild strain,
only to have its lethality re-emerge.
Or it may have infected someone,
even an animal,
that had a different version of the flu,
and the two viruses combined.
It's even possible that, as it passed through
millions of soldiers,
this avian virus was
gradually adapting itself to human hosts.
Most frightening of all,
the war itself may have given it a nudge,
because the soldiers the flu infected
had been exposed to a chemical agent
known to cause genetic mutation:
mustard gas.
The soldiers' throat and lung cells laced with chemical weapons
may have helped increase the rate of genetic shift,
and raised the likelihood that a new strain would develop.
However it happened, the virus that emerged from the trenches
was both highly contagious and severely lethal.
It could kill within 24 hours of presenting symptoms,
drowning a patient in their own fluids.
And while common flu strains
primarily kill the very old and very young,
the 1918 flu
struck people down in the prime of life.
The mild first wave was over,
and the second lethal wave was about to begin.
In fact, it was already making itself known on the troop ships
delivering soldiers to nations across the globe.
The Naples Soldier
was on the march.
[Ending theme]