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 19, 2024.
