Fateful Alliance: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the First World War. In the British Context (2006)
Brown, Robert J. (Author)
Syracuse University
Bennett, David
Edition Details: Advisor: Bennett, David
Physical Details: 627 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation investigates the relationship between two of the 20th century's greatest demographic disasters: the First World War and the 1918 'Spanish influenza pandemic, in the British context. Rather than exist in isolation, as has previously been assumed, the war and the H1N1 virus fused symbiotically into a dangerous partnership whose combined ravages made 1918 the costliest year of the war. Utilizing a range of official and unofficial British sources, I attempt to illuminate the considerable extent to which wartime-generated overcrowding, undernourishment, demographic movement, mental and physical strain, and medical shortages created the ideal environment for the disease to flourish and attain pandemic proportions, while impeding the best attempts of military, governmental and medical authorities to combat it. As wartime conditions fuelled the pandemic, the burgeoning disease magnified wartime suffering and rendered it increasingly difficult to maintain an effective war effort. Sky-rocketing rates of sick-related absenteeism in munitions factories and mines, and among vital public services, had a menacing effect on the domestic war effort. In the various operational theaters abroad, especially the all-important western front, the pandemic's rapid depletion of Britain's fighting ranks (and those of her enemies) played a role in determining the character and outcome of the decisive actions waged there in the war's final phase. High pandemic wastage in overcrowded and ill-ventilated Royal Navy vessels disrupted troop transport, anti-submarine, supply, and coastal defense activities. The Navy's wide-ranging wartime movements were crucial in the global dissemination of the virus in 1918. The intensification of pandemic mortality in early November 1918 contributed to the Allied and German decisions to terminate the war with an armistice. Military demobilization and the continuation of active service conditions in the post-Armistice period helped prolong the pandemic into early 1919. The death of over 260,000 British civilians and servicemen, mainly 20-35 year-olds, within less than a year was an unprecedented epidemiological event, and contributed to the postwar myth of a "Lost Generation." These official figures do not reflect the larger numbers of sick individuals who never reported their condition, and consequently, must be upwardly revised.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/02 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3251814.
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