Fever of War by Carol R Byerly

Author:Carol R Byerly [Byerly, Carol R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I, United States, 20th Century, Medical
ISBN: 9780814799246
Google: haCUuvaj-58C
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2005-04-05T22:16:45+00:00

The Third Wave

Despite the November 1918 armistice, the war and the flu were not over for everyone. Many Americans had to stay in Europe because troop ships had been returned to commerce and were not available to take people home quickly. Pershing had also formed another army. The AEF’s Third Army joined the Allied Army of Occupation and moved into the Rhineland to ensure the terms of the Armistice and keep pressure on the Germans during the treaty negotiations. As the training camps at home hastily emptied, many of the two million soldiers languished in France until the spring and summer of 1919.

Soldiers and medical officers alike fell prey to a third wave of influenza which swept the world: another wave of death and failure. The third wave was not unexpected. Medical scientists were familiar with cycles of flu outbreaks, and Jay Grissinger, Third Army chief surgeon, was prepared: he had requested 5,000 hospital beds for the 240,000-man army. When the commanding general approved only 2,100 beds, Grissinger went over his head to the army chief of staff and got his 5,000. “The soundness of our calculation,” he later wrote, “was abundantly proven during the early months of 1919 when an outbreak of respiratory disease was encountered.”108 But even if expected, the third wave of influenza seemed especially cruel because it killed people who had survived the war. As one officer remarked, “Perhaps nothing touched the hearts of the American people more than did the deaths of those who had survived strenuous training, an ocean voyage fraught with peril, enemy shells, and disease, only to succumb to illness after all warfare was over.”109 Medical officer William Dyer had to watch a patient, Private Ben Eggleston, die of pneumonia aboard the Aquitania on 27 February 1919, just two days before the ship landed in New York.110

During the first three months of 1919, the Third Army hospitalized more than 31,000 men. While only 13,000 of these had respiratory illnesses, 90 percent of the deaths were from the flu and pneumonia. In the Forty-second Division, 30 percent of one regiment fell ill with the flu, and Frederick Pottle’s evacuation hospital had seventeen deaths during the first week of January.111 The epidemic prompted a spate of medical bulletins, inspections, and a special investigation of respiratory disease in the Army of Occupation, none of which shed new light on the problem.112 Medicine was as ineffectual as during the first and second waves, but AEF medical services seemed, if anything, a little more frantic. A Third Army bulletin issued during the epidemic warned medical officers and line commanders that “sick casualties only differ from battle casualties in that they are largely preventable,” and “sickness is not a dispensation of Providence, but usually a breach of discipline and sanitary offense.” The bulletin ended ominously: “Epidemics do not occur in well regulated companies,” suggesting that any outbreaks signified incompetence or laxity on the part of the medical and line officers in charge.113

Bed rest, alcohol baths, and aspirin could not prevent Clair F.

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