Second Saturdays at Pioneer Park: Museums, Gardens, and Homestyle Charm

World-wide, 45,000 Americans troops died from the Spanish flu and 53,400 died in combat in World War 1. Stateside, another 675,000 Americans died, more than the U.S. casualties of all the wars of the 20th century combined. Many medical historians say it's likely the virus launched itself onto the world from Haskell County, Kansas, and the United States Army helped move it along to become a worldwide killer. In January and February 1918, local physician Loring Miner found people in sparsely populated Haskell County were coming down with a particularly violent strain of flu. Strong, healthy people died. Miner was so concerned that in March 1918 he let the U.S. Public Health Service know what he had seen and warned of a new type of flu. In the past, the disease probably would never had spread beyond Haskell County, however in 1918 America was at war. Young men from Haskell County were training nearby at Camp Funston, what is now Fort Riley, Kansas. They reported to the camp for duty and went back and forth from home when on leave. On March 4, the first influenza cases were identified at Camp Funston. Within three weeks, 1,100 of the 56,222 troops at the camp were sick. And because the Army was constantly transporting men to camps all across the country and to Europe, the virus quickly spread. Within a month, infected soldiers had carried the flu with them to all of Europe. During the spring of 1918 more than 130,000 of the 1.2 million soldiers just in the United States were hospitalized with flu. With the arrival of summer, the virus disappeared again, but in the fall of 1918 it had mutated and came roaring back. At Camp Devens in Massachusetts the influenza virus appeared in September. By the end of the month, 14,000 troops at the camp were sick and 757 had died. Before the Army decided to quarantine the camp, troops had been sent to Camp Upton on Long Island. Camp Upton was where the National Guard's 42nd Division had assembled and where the 77th Division--composed of draftees from New York City--had trained. The disease appeared at Camp Upton Sept. 13. Temporary hospitals were established when the Army post’s hospital became overwhelmed with patients. In Europe, doctors of the American Expeditionary Force hospitalized 340,000 soldiers for influenza and 227,000 soldiers due to battle wounds. In October 1918, as the American Army was locked in battle with the Germans in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, 1,451 Americans died from the flu. More 3rd Infantry Division Soldiers were evacuated from the front with influenza than from combat wounds. The flu continued to spread and kill for nearly three agonizing years, on a scale that had not been seen since the bubonic plague wiped out at least one-third of Europe’s population in the late Middle Ages. Some 675,000 Americans died, more than the U.S. casualties of all the wars of the 20th century combined. Soon after the Spanish flu ended and for decades after, the pandemic largely vanished from the public imagination. “Part of the problem was that dying from flu was considered unmanly. To die in a firefight -- that reflected well on your family. But to die in a hospital bed, turning blue, puking, beset by diarrhea — that was difficult for loved ones to accept. There was a mass decision to forget.”,” said Catharine Arnold, the author of “Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts From the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History.” The first major account of the flu, “Epidemic and Peace” — later reissued as “America’s Forgotten Pandemic” — was published in 1976 by Alfred Crosby. 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, Braisted put the sickness rate closer to 40%. The Red Cross recruiting trained nurses for the Army Nurse Corps and organized ambulance companies. The Army Medical Department had 30,500 medical officers, 21,500 nurses—including 350 African American physicians but no black nurses until December 1918.