Disease, War and The Lost Generation I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1918 Part 2 of 2 - YouTube

The simplest thing I can say about the Spanish flu is this :

it killed more people in a shorter period of time than any other disease in human history.

Welcome to Between 2 Wars, a summary of the interwar years, from the uncertainty and hedonism of the 1920s,

to Humanity's descent into the darkness of the Second World War.

I'm Indy Neidell.

As the nations that fought the Great War lay down their arms,

there's something else going on that further colors a world that was

unquestionably a world of absolute disaster.

In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish Flu reaches its highest level of infection and mortality;

The flu has quickly spread all over the world since the spring.

Okay, infection comes in waves, the first wave in spring was already bad,

but this second wave is absolutely devastating.

September and October are the worst months of the Spanish flu,

the numbers are staggering; On every single day of

September and October, 1918,

more than 300,000 people are killed by the disease.

It's so widespread that there is no one that isn't affected in some way, those who themselves are spared

still have to deal with close friends and family dying.

Everyone all over the world is impacted, literally the ENTIRE world population.

It's hard to even imagine what that does to a world already so broken,

and the second wave is followed immediately by two more waves lasting into the spring of 1919.

Then a final wave of infection strikes in autumn of 1919 which leaves people dying into the first months of 1920.

In the end, we don't have exact figures on how many people died from the Spanish flu,

but we know it killed at least 40 million and maybe as many as a hundred million people,

worldwide, in 18 months, starting in March 1918.

That's up to 1 in 20 of the world population.

There was nowhere on the planet that was safe :

It reached the frozen wastes of the Arctic and the remote Pacific Islands.

As a comparison, the population of Spain in 2018 is around 46 million people.

Imagine if every single person in Spain, man woman and child, died in under two years

and you get an idea of how many lives were lost to the flu.

Now, in terms of mortality by percentage, it was not the most deadly disease we've ever seen.

The Black Death for example, which ravaged Europe in 1347 and 1351,

though it originated in Central Asia in the 1330s,

killed an estimated 23 million of Europe's roughly 72 million inhabitants in that period,

which is roughly a third of the population.

But we hadn't seen anything like that for centuries by 1918,

sure there was there was malaria, which overall killed more people through the years,

and smallpox which killed hundreds of millions of people between 1900 and 1950.

But the rate of people dying, over just that 2-year period,

coming on the heels of the First World War, made it really seemed that

one way or another the world was coming to an end.

Aside from just the death toll, which was 3 to 5% of the global population, the flu infected some 500 million people,

about a quarter of the world was infected and it killed up to 20% of those infected,

whereas a normal flu has a mortality rate of just 0.1%.

Unlike most flu outbreaks, that primarily kill the very young the elderly or the sickly,

a huge proportion of those killed by the Spanish flu were healthy young adults.

One explanation for this, is that death is caused by a cytokine storm provoked by the flu.

Now, this is an overreaction of the immune system to a pathogen :

cytokines tell our immune systems to fight the invader and

an exaggerated response to an especially virulent pathogen, in say the lungs, can lead to respiratory failure.

A cytokine storm is the result of a healthy and vigorous immune system

so the stronger immune systems of young adults, when confronted with the flu,

ravaged their own bodies while those with much weaker immune systems saw far fewer deaths.

Also, a study published in the scientific journal PNAS in 2014,

shows that children born in the years just after 1889, were never exposed to the kind of flu that struck in 1918,

which left them uniquely vulnerable while older people had been which gave them immunity.

Those researchers did find some interesting things when they looked back at the dominant flu strains going back to 1830,

there was an 1889 world outbreak called the Russian flu, the H3N8 virus,

which left that generation of children unexposed to an H1 type virus like the 1918 flu.

Those letters and numbers by the way refer to flus proteins.

Starting in 1900, there were seasonal outbreaks of H1 type flus

that the study claims provided partial immunity to children born after 1900

and all this could explain why adults aged 18 to 29 were basically the hardest hit.

The Spanish flu, despite his name did, not originate in Spain.

During 1918, when the flu spread among the armies fighting the war,

wartime censors minimized the spread of news about it to maintain morale.

Spain was neutral though, so the newspapers there were free to report on the epidemic and the media,

in the warring nations, was free to write about its effects in Spain

which created the false impression that it originated there, thus giving rise to its name.

Now if you're wondering exactly where it did originate, well there are several theories.

Many say that the first confirmed outbreak was at Fort Riley Kansas,

and that it was American troops that were first infected and who brought the flu to Europe with them.

A British virology investigation in 1999 places Étaples in France, near the battlefront,

as the center of the epidemic and postulated that a precursor virus among birds

migrated to pigs kept in the region and from there to humans.

Dr. Claude Hannoun, the leading Spanish flu expert for the Pasteur Institute,

hypothesized that the virus came from China before mutating in the US and spreading to Europe and the rest of the world.

While he thought it was possible the disease originated in Kansas, he did not think it likely.

Also, just a few years ago, historian Mark Humphries found archival evidence

of a respiratory illness that struck northern China in late 1917

and may have been spread to Europe by the nearly 100,000 men of the Chinese labor corps during the war.

A 2016 report, from the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association though, found no evidence that the virus

was imported to Europe from East Asia, and actually found some evidence that it was already in circulation

among the European armies before the 1918 pandemic broke out.

Whatever the case it was catastrophic, and the close quarters and massive troop movements,

as well as the new access to modern transportation systems, quickly spread it everywhere in two strains :

one before August 1918 and one after that, it was far more serious and deadly.

There are those who argue that the flu is one thing that tipped the balance in the war in favor of the Allies,

and it's true, that there is data, that the Central Powers were hard-hit before the Allies were

and that mortality in Germany and Austria was higher than in Britain and France.

I can't say much about that though, even as a WWI historian myself.

On November 30th 1919, health officials will declare the Spanish flu pandemic over,

though deaths will continue into the spring of 1920.

By the end 1919, the flu has killed more people in 18 months than the World War did in four years.

A world that had just been devastated by four years of total war, a world that was just beginning to rebuild itself

had to do so against a background of millions upon millions of people dying of disease.

The impact of the war, the flu and all the sorrow that followed, would be far ranging.

You'll think of this : most of the people fighting and dying in WWI were men born between 1889 and 1900,

most of the people that died from the Spanish flu were born in the same timeframe.

An entire generation has just lost up to a hundred million people right when they come of age,

that's around 18% of all the young adults in the world wiped out in less than five years.

Also the proportion of males lost is significantly higher because of being soldiers.

So think of it like this, right :

you start high school in a class of 33 students.

By the time you're all supposed to graduate,

6 of your classmates have died from the flu or been killed in the war,

now not only that, in the next classroom, the same numbers apply, and in the next, and in the next,

so, in a school of say, five high school classes, one entire classroom has been killed.

And also in every other school in every other country in the entire world.

Shortly after the war, the novelist and patron of the arts Gertrude Stein will name this generation the Lost Generation,

and they were already generally considered decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by WWI.

Her protege, the author and journalist, Ernest Hemingway himself born in 1899, popularizes the term

and will write several books seminal in describing the hopes and pains of his generation.

His debut novel, The Sun Also Rises published in 1926, is based on his own experiences and those of close friends.

Hemingway explained that he's trying to show that although they are a lost generation,

the suffering and loss has also made them resilient and strong.

Hemingway turns out to be right because in the next 20 years, this very generation

will redefine the world and give birth to modern times as we know them.

The suffering will lead many of them to work for the improvement of the world,

the change in demographics will also contribute to women gaining more rights as they assume

traditionally male activities and roles in society.

The new outlook will also give birth to completely new forms of modern art, design and music.

But many of that generation will also descend into desperation, fear and hatred,

turning to extreme ideologies like Nazism, Fascism and Communism to find answers

leading to more death, suffering and ultimately to an even more destructive World War.

Joseph Goebbels, Mao Zedong, Hô Chi Minh, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tōjō and Adolf Hitler,

were all part of the Lost Generation.

But for now that's all in the future and as you shall see, in our first episode about 1919,

there is still hope and improvement as wartime innovation starts entering civilian life.

If you missed our first prologue, it's right here.

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WW2 week by week begins 1st September 2018, see you next time !

To your health !