CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SHIP OF DEATH
THE FIRST DEATH from Spanish flu on the USS Leviathan was at 6:08 p.m. on 2 October, when Private Howard Colbert, 11th Battalion, 55th Infantry, was declared dead of lobar pneumonia.1 ‘He was a sailor who did duty in the Hospital Corps. He told the chaplain that he did not want to die because of the great need of his help at home.’2 On the same morning, galvanized into action by this fatality, the army officers ordered healthy soldiers to go down into the holds and clean out the troop compartments and bring out the sick. In an act of mutiny, the troops refused to obey. ‘No threat could be made which filled the men with greater fear than the pestilence loose below.’3 But someone had to clean up before the Leviathan became a floating charnel house. Despite tradition, which dictated that the army and navy were separate entities, the ‘bluejackets’ or sailors were ordered below decks to clean up, a task which, to their eternal credit, they performed.4 Without doubt, their actions halted the progress of the disease. There were no further mutinies among the men: horrified by the impact of Spanish flu, they belatedly recognized that anarchy would make conditions even worse.
From 2 October, not a day passed without a death. Three men died after Private Colbert, then seven, and then ten on succeeding days. The Leviathan’s war diary revealed a new horror: ‘Total deaths to date, 21. Small force of embalmers impossible to keep up with rate of dying … Total dead to date, 45. Impossible to embalm bodies fast enough. Signs of decomposing in some of them.’5 There was nowhere to store the dead: the morgue was already being used to nurse the living.
Initially, the deaths were carefully recorded in the Leviathan’s log, with details of the victim’s rank and cause of death: ‘12.45 PM. Thompson, Earl, Pvt 4252473, company unknown, died on board … 3.35 PM Pvt O Reeder died on board of lobar pneumonia…’6 But by the time the Leviathan was a week out of New York, the deaths were so numerous that the officer no longer bothered to add ‘died on board’. There were so many deaths that he was simply recording a name and a time. Two names at 2.00 a.m.; another two at 2.02 a.m.; two more at 2.15 a.m.7
Identification of the sick and the dead proved impossible. The sick were too ill to say who they were and although they had all been issued with dog-tags on a chain around their necks, the tags had not yet been engraved with the owner’s name, rank and number. This meant that the names of those who died and those who survived on the Leviathan would never be accurately recorded.8
Burials at sea soon became expediencies. Traditionally, burial at sea was a time-honoured ritual, carried out with great solemnity and dignity. But this was soon forgotten in the ongoing horror of the Leviathan’s Spanish flu epidemic. The urgent concern was to get the diseased and decomposing bodies off the ship as soon as possible. One sailor recalled watching similar proceedings on the President Grant from the deck of his own ship, the Wilhelmina. Time after time, after a few muttered prayers, the ship’s colours were dipped and the plank tipped the shrouded corpses into the sea. ‘I was near to tears, and there was tightening around my throat. It was death, death in one of its worst forms, to be consigned nameless to the sea.’9
On 7 October, thirty-one more soldiers died, and the Leviathan finally entered the port of Brest. The ship’s log recorded the grim death toll: ‘Upon our arrival in Brest we had on board 96 dead soldiers and three sailors.’10 The healthy and all but the sickest disembarked at once, and 969 patients were removed and taken to army hospitals. The army nurses, who had saved countless lives by putting their own at risk, wept as they walked ashore and ‘bade the sailors an affectionate goodbye’.11 As the historian of the Leviathan concluded, ‘surely they have earned a place in Heaven’.12
Of those who died on board the Leviathan, fifty-eight were buried in France, thirty-three were repatriated to the United States and seven were buried at sea in the war zone. The ship departed from Brest after three days, and on the following morning at sunrise, ‘after an imposing prayer by the chaplain, the flag was half-masted, taps were sounded, three volleys fired and the coffins containing the bodies of the dead soldiers were lowered gently into the sea’. The ship was speeding at 21 knots, as the crew feared the imminent arrival of enemy submarines.13
After ‘seven days of mostly fair weather and without trouble from submarines’,14 the Leviathan returned to New York. The ship’s log concluded, with evident relief: ‘we docked in New York on the morning of 16 October. It was a nerve-racking voyage and we were all greatly relieved that the trip was over.’15
There are no clear records of the numbers who died on the Leviathan’s ninth voyage to France. While the ship’s Deck Log lists seventy deaths, the Leviathan’s War Diary gives the figure as seventy-six. The History of the USS Leviathan, written by crew members after the war, states that seventy-six soldiers and three sailors died during the crossing, but in another place it states that the numbers were between ninety-six and three. This confusion may arise from the fact that the chroniclers of the Leviathan were writing about the round trip from France to the United States and back again; or the deaths could simply have been mis-recorded as a consequence of the ‘inferno’ epidemic that raged through the ship.16
Whatever the true figure, the dying did not stop when the Leviathan put into port at Brest. Around 280 sick soldiers were still on board on 8 October, and 14 of them died that day. Dozens of soldiers who had escaped dying at sea went ashore to die on land. Those who could walk were expected to make the four-mile journey to the army camp at Pontanezan on foot, during a violent storm.17 When they arrived at the camp, the barracks was not ready to receive them, and the camp hospital was full. Lieutenant Commander W. Chambers of the United States Navy Medical Corps was already horribly familiar with this situation. In the previous month, 1,700 cases of Spanish flu had arrived in Brest; the death rate of flu and pneumonia cases coming off the troopships was already 10 per cent higher than among those ashore. Chambers ordered the local military hospital to create more space in their wards, and the YMCA transformed their hut, initially designed as a club for the doughboys, into a seventy-five-bed hospital.18 Aid stations along the route were staffed with orderlies, and the YMCA and Knights of Columbus ambulances followed the marching column, collecting the men as they fell. Six hundred men, too sick to walk, were picked up on the night of 7 October. Three hundred and seventy were convalescent, 150 were still sick with flu and 80 had pneumonia. Four who collapsed during the march were dead. Over the following days, hundreds of the men who came over on the Leviathan died.19 Out of the 57th Infantry alone, 123 died at Kerhuon Hospital, 40 at Base Hospital Number 23 and several at Naval Hospital Number 5 and the hospital at Landernau. Nearly 200 of the flu victims of the 57th were buried at Lambezellec, overlooking the ocean.20
The tragedy of the Leviathan illustrated the way in which a troopship could become a liability to the Allies. The vessel, and ships like her, were no more than floating incubators for a virus, which erupted once it hit dry land. The most extreme example was the RMS Olympic, which arrived at Southampton, England, on the night of 21 September after a six-day voyage. The Olympic, a sister ship of the doomed Titanic, carried 5,600 men, of whom 450 had shown symptoms of flu while at sea, though only one died. By 4:00 p.m. on 29 September the flu cases among the passengers had risen. A third of the entire number of troops travelling on the Olympic – 1,947 people – had been admitted to hospital and 140 had died.21
Private Wallace survived his dose of Spanish flu and sailed into Liverpool on the Briton, staggering ashore to join his regiment, the 319th Engineers.22 As the men gathered in a desultory fashion, unsure of quite what to do, the sergeant standing next to Private Wallace swayed under the weight of his pack, keeled over and fell to the ground. A group of officers hurried across and one exclaimed in shock: ‘He’s dead!’23
Private Wallace and the 319th took a train to the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash. From there they were to march to the American camp. An army truck picked up the baggage of the sick detail, which Private
Wallace had joined. It was raining heavily and the water was pouring down his neck. From time to time, men collapsed. Eventually, Captain Edward B. Pollister of the 319th found the sick detail and procured a truck to carry his men to the camp.24 After a wet, draughty night by a tent flap, wracked with pain from the secondary ear infection caused by the flu virus, Private Wallace asked a supply sergeant for a new cap and puttees, and was told to go to hell.25 Realizing that he had survived Spanish flu on the Briton only to face dying in Liverpool, Private Wallace promptly went AWOL. Heading for the cookhouse, he was taken in by a sympathetic Italian-American cook, who fed him and looked after him until he recovered.26 Returning to camp, Private Wallace faced no disciplinary action; he had not even been missed in the chaos of the epidemic. Going AWOL had saved his life, but Private Wallace was left with the distinctive stamp of the Spanish Lady, which it took a long time to eradicate: his hair had turned white, and then fallen out.27
Back in Washington, the generals began to realize that the losses experienced by the American Expeditionary Force crossing to France were unacceptable. Spanish flu was already enough of a problem in France without the Allies importing it from America. It was understood that one factor was overcrowding, and by the time the Armistice was declared on 11 November, troopship capacity has been reduced by 30 per cent.28 The generals also conceded that it was madness to send troops across the North Atlantic in the autumn with little more than one blanket and no overcoat. A greater effort was made to inspect the health of troops before they sailed, and some were issued with throat sprays and face masks. Troops on the Olympic and the Henderson spent their entire voyage to France wearing masks, although the effectiveness of these was debatable.29 It was also recommended that only units that had already experienced the influenza epidemic be sent overseas, on the grounds that these units had developed some degree of immunity. But ultimately, few of these precautions made an impact: despite all attempts to contain her, the Spanish Lady remained a terrifying and implacable enemy.
The Leviathan was not the worst example of influenza on a troopship. In the same period, 97 soldiers out of 5,000 perished on the President Grant. When General March declared, in a speech, that every soldier who had died on his way to France had still played his part in the war, the statement brought little comfort to their families.30
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT’
AT 3.30 ON the morning of 1 October 1918, Driver W. E. Hill was hoisting a cage full of black miners to the surface at the East Rand Proprietary Mine in Witwatersrand Basin, South Africa. Suddenly, as Hill sat before his controls, he became ‘powerless to act’, with ‘a multitude of lights exploding before his eyes’.1 As Hill sat paralysed, the cage went on being raised until it hit the top of the headgear and plummeted back to earth from a height of 100 feet. It smashed onto the collar of the shaft, killing twenty of its occupants and injuring eight.
The cause of this tragedy was not exhaustion or intoxication. Hill had suffered a sudden and devastating onset of Spanish flu. Mercifully, the official inquiry into the accident did not find Hill to have been ‘criminally neglectful, but in view of the shock to his nervous system and owing also to the lack of knowledge of the possible after-effects of Spanish influenza on a person who has contracted the malady’,2 it felt he should not resume his job for at least a month, and then only if the mine’s medical inspector certified him fit to do so.
Hill’s dreadful experience came after the Prevention of Accidents on Mines Committee had recommended that workers operating lifting equipment should report any unusual symptoms at once. The advice had been issued too late for the twenty miners who died in the accident, but it did at least indicate that Spanish flu was being taken seriously in one region of South Africa.
The first reference to Spanish flu in South Africa appeared on 9 September 1918, when a mild form of the disease manifested itself in Durban.3 It appeared in the gold mines of the Rand around about 18 September, but was not considered serious. But by 27 September, 14,000 mineworkers had been reported as suffering from influenza, predominantly black workers although the report included 100 white men. It had already been noted that the black workers were particularly vulnerable to pneumonia.4
Initially, Spanish flu had caused little alarm among the South African medical profession. Influenza was regarded as a routine scourge, seldom fatal unless patients were already compromised by extreme youth, extreme age or pre-existing conditions. Dr E. Oliver Ashe, a distinguished Kimberley doctor, felt more than capable of dealing with an outbreak:
Having worked through epidemics in London (Whitechapel), Sheffield, and Maidstone nearly 30 years ago, I thought I knew what epidemic influenza meant, and when rumors of an impending outbreak began, I merely looked forward to a few weeks of extra hard work, with a rather heavy death-rate amongst the old, the feeble, and the alcoholic, though the majority of the cases would be mild.5
At first the influenza made little impact. Deaths were rare and recovery swift. The news agency Reuters declared that the outbreak was ‘not seriously regarded’ and would only ‘produce temporary inconvenience without serious loss; in view of the fact that such a very large number of people have been affected, the fact that there has been only one death must be considered to be reassuring’.6
As a consequence, the Union was totally unprepared for the epidemic of Spanish flu unleashed in September 1918. The medical profession and public health officials had remained ignorant of the epidemic in other parts of the world, as influenza was not a notifiable disease. There had been no official warnings that ships coming to the Union might be carrying the disease, and there had been little news of the epidemic in Europe because of the war. Those press reports and medical journals that did refer to Spanish flu suggested that it was highly infectious but low in mortality. The region had no idea of the impending catastrophe.
Cape Town had already experienced the first, comparatively mild, wave of Spanish flu in July 1918, providing the population with some immunity. But the lethal strain of influenza that hit Cape Town in September 1918 was in a different league.
On 13 September, a troopship named the Jaroslav arrived in Cape Town from Sierra Leone, bringing with her some 1,300 South African Native Labour Corps (SANLC) troops home from Europe to be demobilized, including forty-three cases of influenza.7 Thirteen men were still ill when the ship docked in Cape Town, one of whom died that night. As a result, those suffering from influenza were sent to No. 7 Military Hospital, Woodstock, and the remainder quarantined at Rosebank Camp.8 When none of these men developed symptoms, they were permitted to leave for home on 16 and 17 September. The very next day, influenza broke out among the staff at Rosebank, the transport unit that had carried the troops there, and among the hospital staff. On 19 September, more cases appeared among men from a second troopship, the Veronej, which had also called at Freetown, Sierra Leone.9 The troops were quarantined, as before, and only those who were flu-free were permitted to travel home. But, despite all these precautions, Spanish flu and pneumonia deaths were exceeding 160 a day in Cape Town by 6 October.10
When the connection between the outbreak and the arrival of the Jaroslav and the Veronej in Cape Town became public knowledge, the newspapers were the first to claim that the troopships had brought the disease, with the Cape Times claiming that the Department of Health’s officials were ‘gravely lacking in a sense of their duty to the public’,11 and De Burger accusing the Department of gross negligence.12
Cape Town offered perfect conditions for a deadly epidemic. It had a population of over 270,000, including thousands of servicemen in addition to white, black and Cape Coloured citizens (the Cape Coloureds, as they describe themselves, are an indigenous ethnic group with mixed African and European heritage). Influenza flourished in the filthy tenements and slums of District Six and the Malay Quarter. Spanish flu was still not a notifiable disease, meaning there were no official reports, but by 1 October the Cape Argus was claiming that ‘it may almost
be said that every other household is affected’.13 But few were prepared to consider Spanish flu as a serious threat to life, even when John Smith, a twenty-year-old Cape Coloured brush maker from District Six, died on 30 September.14
‘It was regarded as quite a joke’, recalled a woman then at the University of Cape Town. ‘She’s gone down with Spanish flu. What’s the fuss about?’ her friends asked when she contracted it.15 At the Opera House, a cough in the audience provided the actor on stage with an excellent opportunity to ad-lib, ‘Ha, Spanish flu, I presume?’ The remark brought the house down.16
But within days, that joke wasn’t funny any more. A wave of deaths among the Coloured community, and reports of victims lying dead and dying in the streets of District Six and the Malay Quarter, changed the public mood. As doctors and nurses struggled to care for their patients, pharmacists enjoyed a boom period, staying open all hours to supply the crowds with the quinine, aspirin and patent medicines now advertised in the newspapers. On Sunday 6 October, one doctor’s secretary wrote in her diary: ‘Nothing but phones and doorbells going all day. Influenza Epidemic [sic] in full swing. Felt pretty beastly myself.’17 A city doctor observed, ‘It is not safe for me to put my nose out of doors – I am mobbed wherever I go.’18
Cape Town became a ghost town as shops, banks and businesses stayed shut for lack of a workforce; schools closed and the law courts were suspended; there were no deliveries of groceries, or fresh bread.
‘It is doubtful if the Tivoli theater was ever so empty on a Saturday night,’ remarked one audience member on 5 October, ‘which shows how big a hold this new form of influenza has taken upon the social life of Cape Town.’19
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