This month in history October 1918

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Why October 1918 Was America's Deadliest Month Ever
It wasn't because of World War I.

1918 Influenza Epidemic

While war engulfed the globe in the early autumn of 1918, Roy Grist watched as the bodies of fellow soldiers piled up inside a makeshift morgue. As the U.S. Army doctor wandered through the double rows of dead doughboys, he struggled to comprehend how young men, so full of life only days earlier, had been cut down in their primes. It would have been understandable if they had been felled by German guns on the Western Front, but these soldiers had died from a mysterious disease at an army camp northwest of Boston. “It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle,” Grist wrote of the devastation he witnessed at Camp Devens.

In the weeks to come, the situation only grew worse, much worse. October 1918 would become the deadliest month in American history as a contagion the likes of which had not been seen since the days of the Black Death raged across the country and around the world.

The first officially recorded case of what has been called the “mother of all pandemics” occurred in early March 1918, at a U.S. Army training camp in Kansas. After mess cook Albert Gitchell complained of flu-like symptoms in the morning, another 107 soldiers followed by lunchtime. Five weeks later, more than 1,000 soldiers had been infected and 47 were dead. The deadly influenza tore through the overcrowded army training camps populated by one million new recruits, and the doughboys sent to Europe in the spring of 1918 carried with them infinitesimal microbes that proved as lethal as their guns.

After subsiding over the summer, a second, even more powerful wave of influenza swept across the United States after two sailors in Boston contracted the illness. The flu quickly reached nearby military installations such as Camp Devens before spreading to civilian populations across the country.

Working 16 hours a day, Grist saw patients who arrived with coughs, sore throats and high fevers “very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen.” Within hours, mahogany spots dotted soldiers’ cheeks before their faces turned such a dark shade of blue or purple from a lack of oxygen in their blood that Grist reported it became “hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.” Patients bled from their noses and ears, gasped for air as fluid filled their lungs and eventually suffocated from their own mucus and blood.

The flu's cause was a mystery.
The outbreak confounded Grist and his fellow doctors. “There is no doubt in my mind that there is a new mixed infection here, but what I don’t know,” he wrote. This influenza strain was more virulent than any seen before or since, and instead of striking the very old and the very young, it cut down otherwise healthy, young adults such as the soldiers preparing for war.

Some saw an enemy hand at work. Rumors spread that the Kaiser’s U-boats had released poison clouds in American ports and that German pharmaceutical company Bayer had tainted its aspirin tablets. Preachers such as Billy Sunday blamed sin for the seemingly biblical plague. They were as good an explanation as any at a time when scientists knew much less about viruses, which were too small to be seen by the microscopes of the day. The U.S. Navy Bureau of Sanitation reported bacteria caused the illness and advised that “fresh air and sunshine kill the germ in a few minutes.”

In some cases, more concerned about the spread of panic than the flu itself, public health authorities downplayed the risks. “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed,” proclaimed U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue. Not wanting to run afoul of censorship laws that called for up to 20 years in prison for printing anything the government deemed detrimental to the war effort, newspapers under-reported the rapid spread of the pandemic.

While news of the influenza was suppressed in the United States, France and Great Britain, that was not the case in Spain, which remained neutral in World War I. Wire service reports of a flu outbreak in Madrid in the spring of 1918 led to the pandemic being called the “Spanish flu,” even though it originated