Spanish Flu Pandemic

Albert Mitchell, a company cook at Ft. Riley’s Camp Funston, didn’t feel well during the night. Little did he know his flu-like symptoms were about to send the world into chaos.

Not that the world wasn’t already in turmoil. When Gavril Princip shot Archduke Ferdinand, in the summer of 1914, a mindless series of events resulted in a “war to end all wars.” The United States kept out of the fray for awhile but, by April of 1917, American troops were fighting in Europe. By November of that year they were dying on French soil. In the spring of 1918, many thousands more were preparing to leave.

On the morning of March 11, Albert Mitchell couldn’t take it anymore. He was just too sick to make breakfast for the men in his company.

At the infirmary, Mitchell said he had a bad cold. The doctor told him he needed bed rest. Up to that point, everything seemed typical. But then a really strange thing happened. By lunchtime, 107 soldiers were sick, just like Mitchell. By week’s end, 522 men were ill. Some of them developed severe pneumonia. Many of them would die. Camp Funston had so many sick people that emergency “tent hospitals” had to be set up.

As American soldiers congregated in close quarters elsewhere around the country, preparing to go “Over There,” many more troops were exposed to the illness. An airborne disease, it spread rapidly on military training grounds like those at Camp Hancock, Georgia.

When American soldiers left the U.S. on transatlantic ships, the flu-like illness had a direct path to Europe. By May of 1918, it had infected approximately 8 million people in Spain. Not involved in World War I, Spanish authorities grappled with the effects of the devastating pandemic even as the Spanish press reported the unbelievable story. Officials there were convinced strong winds had blown influenza into Spain from the battlefields in France.

Ever since its outbreak in Spain, Albert Mitchell’s illness has been known as “Spanish Influenza,” or “Spanish Flu.” But its first wave (when Mitchell and others fell ill in America) was nothing compared to what would happen later (when U.S. soldiers returned home).