Fighting War, Fighting Flu: The British Battle with Pandemic Influenza during and after the First World War

• In Event: Disease and the Transition from War to Peace in Europe, 1918-1923

Abstract

As the First World War was coming to its end a new environmental crisis was just beginning. The onset of pandemic influenza, which first struck in March 1918 at Fort Riley in Kansas, would have far greater lethality than the war itself. While the history of influenza in the aftermath of the Great War is well established, this paper examines the history of influenza during the last months of the Great War (flu mortality peaked in October 1918--one month before the war’s end) in order to examine the role of disease and war in the making of the interwar environment. While pandemic influenza was a global environmental crisis from 1918-1920, this paper focuses on the effects of pandemic influenza on the late-wartime experience in Britain. By considering how environmental forces (in this case a disease) shaped the last months of the war both on the fields of battle and on the British home front, this allows us to consider the proximate impacts of a global health crisis, as well as the interconnections of the histories of war and the environment. This paper will also examine how British efforts to combat the influenza pandemic played a major role in shaping interwar British public health efforts by examining how the pandemic forced concerns about high-impact infectious disease back into the center of British public health concerns.

Author

• James Harris, Ohio State University