[The following takes place aboard American troop transport ships that were ravaged with influenza on the way to reinforce Allied armies in Europe during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.]
The Leviathan and, over the course of the next several weeks, other troopships would ferry approximately one hundred thousand troops to Europe. Their crossings became much like that of the train that carried three thousand one hundred soldiers from Camp Grant to Camp Hancock. They became death ships.
[…]
Access to the decks and open air was limited. The sweat and smells of hundreds of men – each room generally held up to four hundred – in close quarters quickly became a stench. Sound echoed off the steel bunks, the steel floors, the steel walls, the steel ceiling. Living almost like caged animals, they grew increasingly claustrophobic and tense. But at least they were safe, they thought.
For the plan to keep men quarantined in isolated groups had a flaw. They had to eat. They went to mess one group at a time, but they breathed the same air, their hands went from mouth to the same tables and doors that other soldiers had touched only minutes before.
Despite the removal before departure of men showing influenza symptoms, within forty-eight hours after leaving port, soldiers and sailors struck down with influenza overwhelmed the sick bay, stacked one on top of the other in bunks, clogging every possible location, coughing, bleeding, delirious, displacing the healthy from one great room after another. Nurses themselves became sick. Then the horrors began.
Colonel Gibson, commander of the Fifty-seventh Vermont, wrote of his regiment’s experience on the Leviathan: “The ship was packed… [C]onditions were such that the influenza could breed and multiply with extraordinary swiftness… The number of sick increased rapidly, Washington was apprised of the situation, but the call for men for the Allied armies was so great that we must go on at any cost… Doctors and nurses were stricken. Every available doctor and nurse was utilized to the limit of endurance. The conditions during the night cannot be visualized by anyone who had not actually seen them… [G]roans and cries of the terrified added to the confusion of the applicants clamoring for treatment and altogether a true inferno reigned supreme.”
It was the same on other ships. Pools of blood from hemorrhaging patients lay on the floor and the healthy tracked the blood through the ship, making decks wet and slippery. Finally, with no room in sick bay, no room in the areas taken over for makeshift sick bays, corpsmen and nurses began laying men out on deck for days at a time. Robert Wallace aboard the Briton remembered lying on deck when a storm came, remembered the ship rolling, the ocean itself sweeping up the scuppers and over him and the others, drenching them, their clothes, their blankets, leaving them coughing and sputtering. And each morning orderlies carried away bodies.
At first the deaths of men were separated by a few hours: the log of the Leviathan noted, “12:45 P.M. Thompson, Earl, Pvt 4252473, company unknown died on board… 3:35 P.M. Pvt O Reeder died on board of lobar pneumonia…” But a week after leaving New York, the officer of the day was no longer bothering to note in the log “died on board,” no longer bothering to identify the military organization o which the dead belonged, no longer bothering to note a cause of death; he was writing only a name and a time, two names at 2:00 A.M., another at 2:02 A.M., two more at 2:15 A.M., like that all through the night, every notation in the log now a simple recitation of mortality, into the morning a death at 7:56 A.M., at 8:10 A.M., another at 8:10 A.M., at 8:25 A.M.
The burials at sea began. They quickly became sanitary exercises more than burials, bodies lying next to one another on deck, a few words and a name spoken, then one at a time a corpse slipped overboard into the sea. One soldier aboard the Wilhelmina watched across the waves as bodies dropped into the sea from another ship in his convoy, the Grant: “I confess I was near to tears, and that there was tightening around my throat. It was death, death in one of its worst forms, to be consigned nameless to the sea.”
Source:
Barry, John M. “The Tolling of the Bell.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 304-6. Print.
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