Invisible Shipkillers, Winning the Great War

Review by Bill Doughty

Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States into a war many Americans strongly opposed. Exactly one hundred years ago, in 1917, the United States Navy converted ocean liners to serve as troop transports, often rushing to move Soldiers and Marines to England and France. Invisible dangers threatened the ships: U-boats, saboteurs, lack of training, icebergs and a virus that would devastate the ranks of the military.

Those are some of the themes in this remarkable, well-paced book by Peter Hernon: "The Great Rescue: American Heroes, An Iconic Ship, and the Race to Save Europe in WWI" (HarperCollins 2017). Events and people intersect aboard USS Leviathan, a converted German liner.

Hernon follows some now-forgotten characters such as Corporal Freddie Stowers, Army Nurse Corps officer Emma Elizabeth Weaver, several Navy ship captains, and American journalist Irvin Cobb. One character, Congressman Royal Johnson of South Dakota, voted against entering the war out of loyalty to his constituents, but then he enlisted and distinguished himself in combat.

Sailor Humphrey Bogart

Other more well-known names with ties to USS Leviathan get some limelight too, including Navy Seaman Humphrey Bogart (who had a sketchy service record as a teenager); then-Col. Douglas MacArthur (who was flamboyant, vain but brilliant); General John Pershing (who had a tender love relationship with a French artist) and then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who showed diplomatic skills during a trip to Europe).

FDR

FDR suffered a life-threatening bout of influenza aboard Leviathan in a return to the States from France.

"The Leviathan was waiting for him out in the harbor, a gray monster with black coal smoke trailing from her tall stacks. By the time Roosevelt boarded her, he could barely stand. He'd been showing signs of illness for days. A week earlier, he'd run a 102-degree fever during a hair-raising all-night drive to Paris without headlights over crowded roads. He ignored the symptoms and refused to rest, pushing himself without letup. According to Roosevelt biographer Kenneth Davis, 'For weeks on end he had been driving his body beyond its capacity for self-renewal, using up every reserve of its strength in reckless disregard of the protests it made.' He was knotted up in pain when he was piped aboard the Leviathan and met Captain Bryan."

One hundred years ago, a killer version of the flu swept through the world and hit the U.S. Navy. "The illness spread fast, and within the tight confines of a ship at sea it could explode like a bomb."

Desperate to bring reinforcements to Europe, the Leviathan knowingly brought aboard hundreds of already-sick troops aboard. Hernon's characters see the "sickness of war" either at sea or in the trenches, where Soldiers and Marines experienced hand-to-hand combat, grenade and machine gun attacks and chemical weapon horrors. And there were other challenges:

"Johnson had to get used to the chronic lack of sleep, especially at night, when staying awake was a matter of life and death for anyone on duty. This was true even in the rear shelters, which regularly came under shell fire. The trenches and dugouts were infested with rats, the big black variety the soldiers had to club to death, and no matter how much the men tried to stay clean and keep their hair cut short, the lice, or 'cooties,' were always with them, burrowing deep into their uniforms and blankets until they were scratching or picking nits nearly every waking moment. In the morning, tormented soldiers angrily ripped off their shirts, looking for the vermin that abounded in the collars and sleeves."

Scenes aboard USS Leviathan

Hernon makes us care about the people he profiles, including African American Cpl. Freddie Stowers, who along with his regiment, overcame racial barriers and showed valor on the battlefield despite entrenched Germans at Verdun.

"The Germans had had four years to add a devilish array of defenses to the already challenging landscape of hills, ravines, and woods – seemingly countless numbers of machine gun pillboxes, a network of trenches, and barbed wire in lines four and five deep and concealed over the years with lush vines and brush. Artillery was positioned to provide flanking fire on infantry trying to move between the Meuse and the Argonne.This masterpiece of interlocking, mutually supportive firepower was designed to defend a critical railroad in the rear, the Sedan-Mezieres line, the only escape route to Germany. If it were broken, the German army would be trapped, unable to be resupplied or reinforced. The war would end."

The war did end, thanks to American presence and power. Hernon uses the battlefield and the sea as a stage for his characters, with USS Leviathan as a centerpiece, all to show an intimate history of World War I, thought to be a war to end all wars but which ended in a treaty described by MacArthur as "drastic ... more like a treaty of perpetual war than of perpetual peace."

USS Leviathan's work was not over after the treaty was signed. The ship joined other converted liners, commercial ships and war ships as part of a "massive logistical undertaking" to bring two million troops home from Europe.




We featured USS Leviathan in a Navy Reads post honoring the Statue of Liberty: According to the Naval Historical Center, "Leviathan (was) an appropriate name considering that she was then the largest ship in the U.S. Navy, and in the World. The Navy would not operate a bigger ship until 1945, when the slightly longer and heavier aircraft carrier Midway entered service."

[for Paris] Enlightening 'Mother of Exiles'

by Bill Doughty
(Navy photos courtesy Navy.mil and Naval History and Heritage Command)

The Statue of Liberty stands as a symbol of enlightenment. France bequeathed the sculpture to the United States in the late 1800s. Lady Liberty has inspired U.S. Sailors and Marines, veterans, and people "yearning to breathe free" for more than a century.

131108-N-XQ474-108 NEW YORK CITY (Nov. 8, 2013) A Sailor and Marine man the rails of the amphibious transport dock ship USS New York (LPD 21) as it transits past the statue of liberty. New York departed Naval Station Norfolk to conduct training operations and participate in Veterans Week New York City to honor the service of our nation's veterans. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Andrew Schneider/Released)

According to the National Park Service, "In 1865, a French political intellectual and anti-slavery activist named Edouard de Laboulaye proposed that a statue representing liberty be built for the United States. This monument would honor the United States' centennial of independence and the friendship with France. French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi supported Laboulaye's idea and in 1870 began designing the statue of 'Liberty Enlightening the World.'"

The statue had to be shipped in pieces and reconstructed. It arrived aboard the French Navy ship, Isère. For more than a century U.S. Navy ships have paid tribute, sailing past in New York Harbor.

The Statue of Liberty is framed between the smokestacks of USS Boston in 1889, a protected cruiser and one of the first ships constructed from steel, part of the "modern Navy" of the late 1800s.

USS Leviathan sails with escorts past the Statue of Liberty in 1917. The former German passenger liner Vaterland was seized by the United States during World War I and renamed USS Leviathan in September 1917, serving as a troop transport to Europe, where troops fought with the people of France and England. According to the Naval Historical Center, "Leviathan (was) an appropriate name considering that she was then the largest ship in the U.S. Navy, and in the World. The Navy would not operate a bigger ship until 1945, when the slightly longer and heavier aircraft carrier Midway entered service."

Jerome Agel writes in "Words that Make America Great" (Random House, 1999), "America was the objective of the largest migration of people ever seen on the planet. This extraordinary flow shaped us as a nation. The newcomers came for different reasons ... But most of them considered America a haven, a refuge, a country of the second chance."

Agel reprints the sonnet "The New Colossus," written in 1886, noting that the last five lines of the poem are part of the 150-foot-high pedestal that supports the sculpture.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVB-42) Passes the Statue of Liberty while en route to Bayonne New Jersey from the New York Navy Yard 16 November 1945.

SSN 696 emblem designed in 1977. USS New York City (SSN-696) was commissioned March 3, 1979 and served till April 30, 1997.

131213-N-KG934-298 NEW YORK (Dec. 13, 2013) The U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, pilots fly in the world-renowned Delta Formation past the New York City skyline. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Terrence Siren/Released)

121001-G-TG089-038 NEW YORK - The guided-missile destroyer Pre-Commissioning Unit (PCU) Michael Murphy (DDG 112) makes its way through New York Harbor in preparation for its commissioning Oct. 6, 2012. The new destroyer honors the late Lt. (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, a New York native, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in combat as leader of a four-man reconnaissance team in Afghanistan. Murphy was the first person to be awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Afghanistan, and the first member of the U.S. Navy to receive the award since the Vietnam War. #murph (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Erik Swanson/Released)

The Lies of Totalitarianism

Review by Bill Doughty–

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

So writes Hannah Arendt, gifted thinker and historian in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976). Her work is vital to anyone interested in understanding the Holocaust or the rise of Fascism.

Leo Hymas speaks about his personal experiences to a group of Soldiers about World War II and the Holocaust at French Theater on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA., April 29, 2014 to educate the JBLM community of the history and significance of the Holocaust. (Photo by Sgt. Jasmine Higgins/Released)

Totalitarian leaders use fear, existential threats, and targeting of "the other" – people perceived to have no rights. Most of all, dictators or would-be dictators tell lies.

Hitler and Stalin

Profiling the Nazis under Adolf Hitler and Bolsheviks under Josef Stalin, Arendt examines the characteristics, effects and results of dictatorship. She also helps answer how and why people were willing to believe their supreme leaders' lies.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp.

Regarding the belief in unbelievable lies and falsehoods, Arendt writes, "Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity." People had to believe lies and dehumanize in order justify murdering millions of other people during the Holocaust.

Arendt explains how narcissistic autocrats are drawn to rituals and symbols. Marches, military parades and self-adulating shows of idolatry reinforce the propaganda.

She compares Nazi and Bolshevik mass propaganda. Both heavily depended on conspiracy theories, either age-old themes (such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" forgery and anti-semitism) or invented fears (countless sinister imperialist or internal conspiracies).

"The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time."

Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated April 15, 1945.

"Repetition ... is important" in propaganda and mind control. Arendt, of course, writes in a time before the internet, social media and smart phones. In 2020, distorted truths and outright lies can be repeated and shared in ways unthinkable in the 1940s and 50s.

The Leader establishes a "spell of infallibility" and thrives in chaos. "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop," Arendt writes. Followers must have contempt for the nonbelievers and outsiders. 

"The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense."

Arendt in 1924

"Totalitarianism in power," Arendt writes, "uses the state as its outward façade, to represent the country in the nontotalitarian world." Ignoring or appeasing dictators may not work. They often will find ways to manipulate the system to remain in power.

Imperialism and Role of Racism

"Origins" is presented in three parts: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. Part II, Imperialism, is the longest section and examines the "brutality and megalomania" of the ideology that brought about the World Wars. In words that resonate today in light of Putin's revanchism toward Crimea and Ukraine, we read: "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe [i.e. Nazi Germany] but is exclusively located in Russia."

Imperialism, Arendt shows, was supported by the right and the left, often encouraged by the workers who saw economic benefits. "In Germany, the liberals (and not the Conservative Party) were the actual promoters of that famous naval policy which contributed so heavily to the outbreak of the first World War." The Socialist Party also "repeatedly voted" to obligate funds to build the German navy after 1906.

The British trawler Rudyard Kipling, launched in 1920, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1939.

She calls author Rudyard Kipling "the author of imperialist legend" for the British Empire, establishing a "foundation legend" based on the sea, quoting him from "The First Sailor" (Humorous Tales, 1871). Arendt writes:

"The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental reality of the people of the British Isles. Surrounded by the sea, they need and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. 'You'll win the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four gifts – one for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that carries you ... For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carrying the world on their backs – on land, or on the sea, or in the air – your sons will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy – damned heavy – in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to windward of every enemy – that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the seas on their lawful occasions.'"

This passage sums up, as Arendt recognizes, the so-called "white man's burden" – as well as, it could be argued, "manifest destiny" exceptionalism and white supremacist racism.

Early European colonists in Africa captured slaves, often pitting tribes against each other.

Africa was exploited by colonialists and imperialists in the centuries leading up to the 19th century. Seafaring nations, especially Britain, established "maritime and trade stations" to promote commercial exchange. Commerce included African slaves. Arendt presents an eye-opening discussion about South Africa's Boers, who were descended from Dutch settlers, and how they acted out of fear, exterminated tribes and then accepted another banality of evil: apartheid.

What fuels imperialism? "Racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics," Arendt contends, Russians who consider themselves Slavs, Germans who think they are superior Aryans.

Diversity in a nation is shown as a bulwark and strength. "Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization."

Power Lessons for 2020

From its 600 pages, packed with history and philosophy, it would be impossible to summarize all of Arendt's points in this blog. But her points seem as fresh and relevant in 2020 as they did 70 years ago, even as she admits, "No matter how much we may be unable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future."

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Through Arendt we discover lessons from history that can can apply to current events: Corruption in the Soviet Union but supposedly not in Communist China, the Dreyfus Affair, "Secret Judah" and "Secret Rome," and the roles of some Catholics (Pius XII and "The Deputy") and Protestants (Martin Niemöller) in dealing with the Nazis.

Arendt gives an extended interpretation of mid-17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his treatise on social contracts in a civil society, "Leviathan." She writes, "Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage." A "never-ending accumulation of power necessary for a never-ending accumulation of capital ... foreshadowed the rise of imperialism."

"Origin" lays out how imperialism grew out of colonialism. Arendt explains Soviet goals and seems to predict Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, from a perspective more than half a century ago. "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe but is exclusively Russian," She writes. "No one justifies expansion any longer by 'the white man's burden ...; instead we hear of 'commitments' to client states, of the responsibilities of power, and of solidarity with revolutionary national liberation movements.'"

A hopeful sign comes in a chapter called "A Classless Society": "Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced."

Laced throughout this indispensable history of totalitarianism is an unspoken warning, though. Beware the lies, especially the big lies. Demand clear, consistent, trusted messaging and honesty from leaders. Most of all, recognize the insanity.

U.S. Navy Sailors assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) tour the Haifa Holocaust Museum as part of a community relations event during a scheduled port visit to Haifa, Israel, June 22, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

Navy and 'Great Influenza' Changed the World

Review by Bill Doughty

One hundred years ago another wave of an influenza epidemic crashed on America's shores.

(Illustration from Penn Medicine News)

"By February 7, 1920, Influenza had returned with enough ferocity that the Red Cross declared, 'Owing to the rapid spread of influenza, the safety of the country demands, as a patriotic duty, that all available nurses or anyone with experience in nursing ... (offer) their services," according to John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" (Viking/Penguin, 2014).

Courage in the Face of Fear

Fortunately, the epidemic did not hit with the same deadly force throughout 1920 that it had in the previous two years. 

The epidemic of 1918 erupted with such speed and scope that it created worldwide fear and terror. This influenza seemed to target young, otherwise healthy, adults as well as people with vulnerable immune systems.

"In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, 'There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken,' ... the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death."

The misnamed "Spanish Flu" of 1918 (Barry makes a strong case that it originated in Kansas) took more American lives in the first year (675,000) than all the U.S. service members who died fighting in WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. In one week in October, 4,597 Philadelphians died of the disease.

Paul Lewis

On the front lines of the war against the killer influenza epidemic – in laboratories and medical facilities – U.S. Navy and other military and civilian researchers searched for the pathogen as well as a vaccine and a cure.

This book is dedicated, in part, to one of those Navy warriors, and opens with a scene about him: "The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander ..." Lewis had previously helped prove that a virus caused polio, "a discovery still considered a landmark achievement in the history of virology."

Lewis saw the early signs of disease in sailors in Philadelphia, where the virus was killing five percent of Sailors who showed any symptoms of influenza. 

In Boston, another Navy medical warrior, Lieutenant Commander Milton Rosenau at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, mobilized to fight the epidemic.

(Photo from Bureau of Medicine and Surgery)

"Rosenau too was a scientist who had chosen to leave a Harvard professorship for the navy when the United States entered the war, and his textbook on public health was called 'The Bible' by both army and navy military doctors."

Other military doctors and researchers who raced against the disease included William Henry Welch, Simon Flexner, Victor Vaughn and William Gorgas. Oswald Avery went from Army private to captain; he would eventually make "the most profound discovery of all" in his search for the cause of the disease.

The enemy in 1918 was not only the epidemic of disease, but also a pandemic of fear. "Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear." Truth matters.

Emergency hospital in Funston, Kansas.

A Maritime Component

Author-historian Barry profiles each of these courageous warriors as well as dozens of other people who faced the crisis. He reveals the strong maritime component to its global spread.

(Photo from Naval History and Heritage Command)

The pandemic of 1918-1920 was fueled by WWI fervor and war mobilization – in crowded barracks and aboard ships, including international steamers and U.S. Navy vessels. Dozens of shipyards were hit and had to close. Naval hospitals were overwhelmed. Navy brig prisoners volunteered as test subjects for Lt. Cmdr. Lewis and other scientists.

Sailors unintentionally brought deadly influenza to Great Lakes Naval Training Center and Newport Naval Base in Rhode Island; to New Orleans and Puget Sound; back-and-forth to Europe; as well as across the Pacific aboard USS Logan to Guam. Adm. Albert Gleaves and his captains dealt with effects of the pandemic, including aboard USS Leviathan.

Navy collier USS Brutus carried a relief expedition to Juneau, Alaska. "They found terrible things. Terrible things," Barry writes. "In Nome, 176 of 300 Eskimos had died. But it would get worse." Other Red Cross relief teams to the Aleutian Islands found devastation caused first by the disease, then by starvation and finally by starving dogs.

Nineteen U.S. Navy nurses died on active duty during the war, more than half from influenza. One of the survivors was the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, Chief Nurse Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, recipient of the Navy Cross and namesake of the first USS Higbee, commissioned in 1945. The keel was laid for the future USS Lenah H Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123) in November 2017.



Changing the World

The epidemic of 1918-1920 occurred at a time when women increased demands for the right to vote, a right won 100 years ago. Women had supported the war effort in Europe, and they served on the front lines in the fight against the epidemic.

The nation and world changed in other ways too in those first decades of the 20th century. 

President Woodrow Wilson's physician, Navy Rear Adm. Cary Grayson (who had served as presidential physician to Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) accompanied Wilson to the peace conference in Paris in 1919. Both Wilson and Grayson, as well as Wilson's wife and others, contracted influenza while in Paris.

President Wilson and Rear Adm. Grayson

Barry contends that the disease caused physical weakness and some mental lapses in the commander-in-chief and may have led to his stroke four months later. But the devastating effects of Wilson's bout with influenza also may have led to his concessions to the allied enemies of Germany in order to save his League of Nations.

"Historians with virtual unanimity agree that the harshness toward Germany of the Paris peace treaty helped create the economic hardship, nationalistic reaction, and political chaos that fostered the rise of Adolf Hitler," Barry writes. Feelings of persecution and resentment in Nazi Germany led to another world war.

Other ways the epidemic changed the world but for the better: Science, as represented by medical centers and researchers, triumphed over superstition. Corrupt local authoritarian governments in Philadelphia (the Vare political machine) and New York (Tammany Hall) were exposed and impeached in the court of public opinion. Truth and ethics were shown to be supremely important in the face of fear and terror.

"The media and public officials helped create that terror – not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure.Terror rises in the dark of the mind, in the unknown beast tracking us in the jungle. The fear of the dark is an almost physical manifestation of that. Horror movies build upon the fear of the unknown, the uncertain threat that we cannot see and do not know and can find no safe haven from. But in every horror movie, once the monster appears, terror condenses into the concrete and diminishes. Fear remains. But the edge of panic created by the unknown dissipates. The power of the imagination dissipates."

Cmdr. Richard Shope

Meanwhile, researcher Paul Lewis had remained perpetually restless both during and after the epidemic. The microscope was his periscope searching for an enemy lurking in his laboratory – "the mysteries he embraced. He settled into them like a man casting off into an impenetrable ocean fog, a fog that made one feel both alone in and part of the world.

"Among the warriors against fear was Paul Lewis's protege and assistant, Richard Shope. 

Shope investigated swine flu in the 1920s and by 1931 published his papers showing his discoveries. He included Lewis's name as an author on one of his papers.

Shope's research was successful. "He had found the cause of influenza, at least in swine," Barry writes. "We now know that the virus he found in swine descended directly from the 1918 virus, the virus that made all the world a killing zone."

In 1928, in England, Alexander Fleming serendipitously discovered penicillin while researching influenza. Oswald Avery's work on influenza led directly to the discovery of DNA, further changing the world.

Applied Science: Coronaviruses

Barry provides more than a history of the epidemic. He also explains coronaviruses, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and the science of the influenza virus at the cellular level, including the difference between a slower mutating DNA virus and a faster mutating RNA virus.

"Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all the RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest," Barry writes.

"[O]ne cannot leave this subject without speaking to other questions: the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic, what we can learn from the one of 1918-1919, and how we can apply those lessons to the emergence of a new pathogen, whether that pathogen is a weapon of terror or a new natural menace – such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, the disease which spread from animals to man in the spring of 2003 and threatened to become a major pandemic.The answer to the first question – the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic – is not very reassuring. Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen. It almost certainly will happen."

Barry offers a special discussion of the coronavirus SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – that appeared in China in 2003 and spread quickly across borders bringing with it susceptibility to ARDS. The Navy forward deployed to the western Pacific was concerned about the possibility of SARS outbreaks in 2004. The Navy maintains a preventive medicine SARS webpage as part of Ready Navy. 

The Navy (Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center), DoD and Centers for Disease Control are leaning forward to provide information and prevention tips regarding the newly emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that reportedly originated in Wuhan, China.

Today, unlike 100-plus years ago, scientists throughout the world are able to communicate and collaborate within seconds. They can, if allowed, share information and assistance across borders. An informed public can make rational decisions and not succumb to fear. Medical scientists have more tools and information to fight against pandemics.

Read this book to see the fate of Paul Lewis after the war. 

Right up there with McCullough's sweeping history books, Barry's "The Great Influenza" is a masterpiece. This is a great Navy read.

Camp Lemonnier’s medical team gives influenza vaccinations to service members, Oct. 28-30, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 Marquis Whitehead)