Covid-19: What we can learn from wartime efforts

By Adrienne Bernhard       30th April 2020
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200430-covid-19-what-we-can-learn-from-wartime-efforts

Language more normally suited to wartime is commonly invoked around the Covid-19 pandemic, but can we learn anything from past conflicts in our battle against coronavirus?

In January 1941, Winston Churchill gave a sombre address to the House of Commons, the UK’s parliament. “Our Empire and indeed the whole English-speaking world are passing through a dark and deadly valley,” he remarked in one of World War Two’s bleakest periods. “But I should be failing in my duty if, on the other wise, I were not to convey the true impression, that a great nation is getting into its war stride.”

Comparisons between World War Two and the current coronavirus pandemic are prolific. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been compared to a wartime president, has peppered his daily briefings with combative language, describing the apex of the disease’s curve as “the next battle at the top of the mountain”, and proclaiming “ventilators are to this war what bombs were to World War Two”.

European leaders, meanwhile, talk of an inevitable “D-Day” when the outbreak will overwhelm the hospital system, and allude to war with an invisible enemy. Healthcare workers are on the frontlines, scientists are the new generals, economists draw up battle plans, politicians call for mobilisation. Just a few weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth II urged Britons to adopt the same discipline and resolve that the people had showed during WWII. “It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made in 1940, helped by my sister,” the monarch recalled during a rare televised address.

The coronavirus pandemic, though different from the war in many crucial respects, seems to demand some of the same measures used during that global emergency. From boosted production to rapid redeployment of resources, increased governmental oversight and stimulus plans to potential rationing, 2020’s battle against a virus might force great nations to once again adopt their war strides.

Are there lessons we can learn from the collective anxiety, the contingency measures, the calls for national cohesion and the dramatic changes to society that defined WWII? Is there is a fallacy in the modern conception of the immediate “united front” – a fallacy that will continue to play out against the backdrop of the pandemic? What does shared sacrifice look like, and how will it shape our future this time around?


The spirit of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill is often invoked by those urging the adoption of measures against coronavirus (Credit: Getty Images)


The extent to which wartime psychology is relevant to our understanding of the coronavirus pandemic is, like the trajectory of the disease itself, unclear and rapidly evolving. When politicians (or journalists) reach for convenient parallels between the pandemic and those wartime battles, they may make dangerous assumptions. Comparisons that rely on militarisation, organised violence or the threat of civilian control aren’t useful, and can even be harmful, especially as new information becomes available and data changes by the hour.

“If we mount a war on coronavirus, that doesn’t solve fundamental problems in the healthcare system or in global trade, for example,” says Mark R Wilson, professor of history at the University of North Carolina. “We constrain our imagination by thinking about a short-run war mobilisation.” Insidious global problems such as equipment shortages, health care disparities, lack of emergency protocols, confusion between federal and local policies, poverty and societal inequity can’t be neatly addressed by a rapid offensive against Covid-19, even if that battle is metaphoric. “There is no automatic formula for what happens during and after a crisis,” Wilson adds. “But right now, people can and should still take an interest in the past.”


Neurosurgeons, cardiologists, medical students– all have been pulled into emergency rooms and intensive care wards


During World War Two, a dire need to radically accelerate the output of items such as ships, tanks and bombers led to a mobilised wartime economy. The United States and Great Britain, in particular, converted existing factories that once made civilian products into those that could produce military equipment. Car manufacturers built army trucks instead; clock companies and plumbing industrialists designed ammunition cartridges; silk stockings were repurposed for parachutes.

Over the past month we’ve once again seen this phenomenon of conversion, as companies across the globe repurpose production lines in an effort to turn the tide of the outbreak. In just 72 hours, luxury brand Louis Vuitton began manufacturing hand sanitiser with alcohol normally used in its perfume distillery, which it then distributed to hospitals across France. General Motors, the US auto manufacturer that mass-produced tanks in World War Two, has pivoted once again, this time producing thousands of ventilators, while clothing retailers in the UK have turned from fashion to manufacturing in-demand surgical N-95 masks.

The war also spurred massive social changes, such as the development of universal health care in countries including the UK (Credit: Getty Images)


Airlines across the globe have begun chartered flights to repatriate stranded nationals abroad and transport health care workers and medical supplies to deeply impacted regions. Hospital ships such as the USNS Comfort, designed to treat casualties of war, now offer a relief valve for hospitals overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients.

This redeployment calculus applies not just to goods and services but to human capital as well. Neurosurgeons, cardiologists, medical student – all have been pulled into emergency rooms and intensive care wards. Receptionists who normally deal with billing are suddenly tasked with screening coronavirus patients, making up for an acute shortage of personnel. Restaurant workers prepare and deliver meals in bulk to exhausted emergency care nurses, parents have become full-time teachers to their children, hotel managers are being trained in hospital protocol as they open their doors to health care workers.

During World War Two, the measures used to ramp up production took months to implement; today, it would appear that we had not months, but weeks. And our current efforts seem patchwork at best. World War Two’s unprecedented mobilisation effort, by contrast – its dramatic output, profit control and federal regulation – might serve as a blueprint during the next phase of the coronavirus outbreak. As they did during the war, officials could opt to fund brand new factories and equip them with machinery and tools (in this case, ventilators or personal protective gear).


The short-term financial cost of these measures would be enormous, but the payoff could be too


By establishing dedicated Covid-19 facilities rather than converting existing ones, governments would expand capacity and absorb risk. Over the next several months, these factories could implement production lines to speed the creation of antibody tests and a vaccine. And authorities could further regulate the crisis standard of care – allocating treatment to certain patients – and ration medical equipment or even food.

The short-term financial cost of these measures would be enormous, but the payoff could be too. Indeed, rapid government intervention in the months following the coronavirus outbreak has already shown signs of success. In China, for example, thousands of workers built a field hospital on government orders; modular construction and rapid mobilisation meant that thousands more Covid-19 patients could be treated in a matter of days.

Federally mandated social distancing has also worked to compress the timeline – a kind of individual sacrifice reminiscent of wartime strain on the home front. World War Two’s iconic message of “equality of sacrifice,” emphasised by labour leaders and union officials and propagated through steep progressive taxes and government regulations, would be hard to sustain in today’s political and financial landscape. But in recent weeks, people have shown a desire to comply, even to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.

During World War Two, factories which had once made cars were quickly reorganised to make weapons such as these British bombers (Credit: Getty Images)

“People are turning to war as a metaphor because of the mobilising aspects of war,” says Mary L Dudziak, a law professor at Emory University who has published widely on the concept of wartime in US history. “But a pandemic is not a ‘war’. A country responds to war by killing other people: death is the means of war. In a pandemic, the means of responding is not killing other people but instead trying to preserve life.”

The desire to comply, to make personal sacrifices, these are no longer for the purpose of destruction, but for a greater good that is truly good: mutual assistance across nations and the safeguarding of human life

“Moments of crisis can provide opportunities for reform,” says Wilson. World War Two brought national healthcare reforms, gave rise to international organisations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, and in the US led to the introduction of the GI Bill, which detailed important benefits for soldiers returning from war.


There will be no “return to normalcy” after the coronavirus pandemic


Of course, not all reforms at the time were sweeping in scope. While the UK’s universal health care system, the National Health Service (NHS), emerged out of World War Two, the US ended up with a far less robust system; many were left uninsured. The coronavirus crisis might bring about similar reforms; for example, targeted compensation packages for health care workers or grocery store staff. Or it might engender an entirely restructured economy, resulting in universal health care or increased job security. At the very least, we can expect to see a new generation of political leaders and thinkers to come out of it.

Consider the scientific experts now on the front lines. Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime, medical experts like Anthony Fauci are at the microphone to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs. Healthcare professionals are perhaps the new wartime generals.

After World War Two, much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. The figures are difficult to grasp – nearly 60 million dead. Indeed, 1945 has often been referred to as Year Zero: a new way to mark time before and after the war’s destruction. People the world over confronted a landscape that had been changed forever, marked by deprivation but also by hope. Government expenditures helped bring about the business recovery that had eluded President Roosevelt’s New Deal .

While the industrial conversion hasn't been as dramatic as turning tractor factories into tank plants, it has been widespread and rapid (Credit: Getty Images)


Throughout the US and Europe, wartime mobilisation and ingenuity secured employment and a fairer distribution of income, while creating entirely new technologies, industries and associated human skills. Old ideological constraints collapsed, but new ideas about capital, entrepreneurship, and social bonds emerged. These extraordinarily ambitious efforts – civilian and federal, at home and abroad – meant that nations could ultimately recover.

To misquote a post-war US presidential candidate, there will be no “return to normalcy” after the coronavirus pandemic. From the comfort of our homes, we may sit and leaf through the pages of history, imagining various after-lesson actions – but we know for certain only that nothing can be certain.

Yet, this crisis has arguably spurred mobilisation on an international scale not seen since the war 80 years ago. The pandemic demands quick crash efforts with high stakes, has united people across the world, and promises to accelerate seismic global changes which could last for years to come.

Then, as now, we might take some courage in the Queen’s wartime vow: “We will be with our friends again. We will be with our families again. We will meet again.”

The worldwide race to make solar power more efficient

By Padraig BeltonTechnology of Business reporterShare this with Facebook

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Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionBlue skies in the UK in April were a bonanza for solar power

One of the few parts of the UK economy to have a good April was solar power,

The Met Office says it has probably been the sunniest April on record and the solar power industry reported its highest ever production of electricity (9.68GW) in the UK at 12:30 on Monday 20 April.

With 16 solar panels on his roof Brian McCallion, from Northern Ireland, has been one of those benefitting from the good weather.

"We have had them for about five years, and we save about £1,000 per year," says Mr McCallion, who lives in Strabane, just by the border.

"If they were more efficient we could save more," he says, "and maybe invest in batteries to store it."

Image copyrightBRIAN MCCALLION

Image captionSolar panels even make sense in cloudy Northern Ireland

That efficiency might be coming. There is a worldwide race, from San Francisco to Shenzhen, to make a more efficient solar cell.

Today's average commercial solar panel converts 17-19% of the light energy hitting it to electricity. This is up from 12% just 10 years ago. But what if we could boost this to 30%?

More efficient solar cells mean we could get much more than today's 2.4% of global electricity supply from the sun.

Solar is already the world's fastest growing energy technology. Ten years ago, there were only 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity globally - one gigawatt being roughly the output of a single large power station. For context, New York City, with 8.4 million people uses about 12 gigawatt-hours of electricity a day.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionThis solar farm covers 200ha (500 acres) in southern France

By the end of last year, the world's installed solar power had jumped to about 600 gigawatts.

Even with the disruption caused by Covid-19, we will probably add 105 gigawatts of solar capacity worldwide this year, forecasts London-based research company, IHS Markit.

Most solar cells are made from wafer-thin slices of silicon crystals, 70% of which are made in China and Taiwan.

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But wafer-based crystalline silicon is bumping pretty close to its theoretical maximum efficiency.

The Shockley-Queisser limit marks the maximum efficiency for a solar cell made from just one material, and for silicon this is about 32%.

However, combining six different materials into what is called a multi-junction cell can push efficiency as high as 47%.

Another way to break through this limit, is to use lenses to magnify the sunlight falling on the solar cell, an approach called concentrated solar.

But this is an expensive way to produce electricity, and is mainly useful on satellites.

"Not anything you would see on anybody's roof in the next decade," laughs Dr Nancy Haegel, director of materials science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES

Image captionThe technology of the current generation of solar panels is close to its theoretical maximum efficiency

The fastest improving solar technology is called perovskites - named after Count Lev Alekseevich von Perovski, a 19th Century Russian mineralogist.

These have a particular crystal structure that is good for solar absorption. Thin films, around 300 nanometres (much thinner than a human hair) can be made inexpensively from solutions - allowing them to be easily applied as a coating to buildings, cars or even clothing.

Perovskites also work better than silicon at lower lighting intensities, on cloudy days or for indoors.

You can print them using an inkjet printer, says Dr Konrad Wojciechowski, scientific director at Saule Technologies, based in Oxford and Warsaw. "Paint on a substrate, and you have a photovoltaic device," he says.

With such a cheap, flexible, and efficient material, you could apply it to street furniture to power free smartphone charging, public wifi, and air quality sensors, he explains.

He's been working with the Swedish construction firm Skanska to apply perovskite layers in building panels.

Image copyrightINSOLIGHT

Image captionSaule Technologies is using perovskites in solar panels

According to Max Hoerantner, co-founder of Swift Solar, a San Francisco start-up, there are only about 10 start-up firms in the world working on perovskite technology.

Oxford PV, a university spin-off, says it reached 28% efficiency with a commercial perovskite-based solar cell in late 2018, and will have an annual 250-megawatt production line running this year.

Both Oxford PV and Swift Solar make tandem solar cells - these are silicon panels which also have a thin perovskite film layer.

Since they're made from two materials, they get to break through the Shockley-Queisser limit.

The silicon absorbs the red band of the visible light spectrum, and the perovskite the blue bit, giving the tandem bigger efficiency than either material alone.

One challenge is when "you work with a material that's only been around since 2012, it's very hard to show it will last for 25 years," says Dr Hoerantner.

Image copyrightINSOLIGHT

Image captionInsolight panels use lenses to concentrate light

Insolight, a Swiss startup, has taken a different tack - embedding a grid of hexagonal lenses in a solar panel's protective glass, thus concentrating light 200 times.

To follow the sun's motion, the cell array shifts horizontally by a few millimetres throughout the day. It is a bid to make concentrated solar cheap.

"The architecture of these conventional concentrated photovoltaics is very costly. What we've done is miniaturise the sun tracking mechanism and integrate it within the module," says Insolight's chief business officer David Schuppisser.

"We've done it in a cheaper way [that] you can deploy anywhere you can deploy a conventional solar panel," he says.

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's solar energy institute measured Insolight's current model as having an efficiency of 29%. It is now working on a module that is hoped to reach 32% efficiency.

Current silicon technology is not quite dead, though, and there are approaches to make tiny, quick wins in efficiency. One is to add an extra layer to a cell's back to reflect unabsorbed light back through it a second time. This improves efficiency by 1-2%.

Another is to add an outside layer, which lessens losses that occur where silicon touches the metal contacts. It's only a "small tweak", says Xiaojing Sun, a solar analyst Wood Mackenzie research - adding 0.5-1% in efficiency - but she says these changes mean manufacturers only need to make small alterations to their production lines.

From such small gains - to the use of concentrated solar and perovskites - solar tech is in a race to raise efficiency and push down costs.

"Spanning this magical number 30%, this is where the solar cell industry could really make a very big difference," says Swift Solar's Max Hoerantner.

THIRD WORLD USA
Four Amish children killed in horse-drawn buggy accident
FLASH FROM THE PAST TODAY

GETTY IMAGES

An Amish horse-drawn buggy (file photo)

Officials in Kentucky say four children were killed and one is missing after their horse-drawn buggy was washed away while trying to cross a stream.

The Amish family of six were crossing a low water bridge when their horse was swept away by the current, police say.

The incident occurred in the Salt Lick Community of Bath County around 17:00 local time (22:00BST) on Wednesday.

As of Thursday, the National Guard and state police are still searching for the missing child.

The ages of the four children, who were siblings, has not yet been released.

Emergency workers staged themselves beside a flooded creek and searched through the night, according to WKYT-News, which reports that they were hampered by muddy conditions.

Missi Mosley and her boyfriend rushed to the scene after hearing a call for rescue on a police scanner, she said.

"It was devastating," Ms Mosley told WKYT.

"The waters are so swift, and the rain was pouring down. It was just a sombre feeling."

WHEN BABE RUTH AND THE GREAT INFLUENZA GRIPPED BOSTON
As Babe Ruth was emerging as baseball’s great slugger in 1918, he fell sick with the flu

Baseball star Babe Ruth in his last year with the Boston Red Sox in 1919, one year after he survived the flu. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

BY RANDY ROBERTS AND JOHNNY SMITH

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | April 30, 2020


Even before Babe Ruth reached the Red Sox spring training camp in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and took his first tentative steps toward revolutionizing the game of baseball, the influenza virus destined to convulse the world lurked nearby.

Many epidemiologists believe that what became known as the “Spanish Flu” in all likelihood took shape in early 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas. Loring Miner, a successful country doctor and health official, first noticed the odd strain of influenza. He had never encountered one like it. The “grippe” tore into residents of the county—the characteristic chills, blinding headache, high fever, hacking cough, and debilitating body aches came on fast, and for some rugged, healthy residents of the county just as rapidly killed them.

Americans were on the move in early 1918, and the flu Miner identified moved with them. In early March, it showed up in the shamefully overcrowded barracks and tents of Camp Funston, Kansas, one of the Army’s hastily and poorly constructed cantonments to train soldiers for action in the war in Europe. At Funston more than several thousand doughboys sickened, dragging themselves to the camp hospital or infirmaries. Thirty-eight died. Those who recovered, and many others who were not sick enough to seek medical treatment, soon boarded trains for other camps further east. Many traveled to Camp Devens, near Boston, and from there to the Western Front. Others spent time at such posts as Camp Pike, on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. Everywhere they traveled it was like the contagion was packed in their kit.

Around the same time, in the second week of March, professional baseball players, eager to escape northern winters, began to trickle toward the warmer climes of the South. Babe Ruth, carrying his left-handed golf clubs, and his Red Sox teammates boarded trains bound for their quarters in Hot Springs. Babe moved about the train like a Newfoundland puppy, greeting other ballplayers, making plans for golf and other “relaxations,” jabbering about anything that jumped into his head, and shaking hands with other passengers, especially with the soldiers who got on at every stop. Boston Globe beat reporter Edward Martin noticed Ruth’s bonhomie, commenting how the moon-faced athlete “was the life of the party and fraternized with a lot of the soldier boys from Camp Devens.” Always generous, Babe “passed around his cigars and did not overlook any of the lads in khaki.”

Martin informed his readers no golf matches were set on the train, “but it is understood that there will be other games played.” For Ruth, those games—gambling at the casinos and racetrack, drinking in the saloons, enjoying nights at the brothels—were the sine qua non of spring training. But he did not ignore the ballpark, where he discovered an added pleasure, one not on his usual list. The war had decimated the Red Sox roster. Almost a squad of veterans was missing in action, casualties of the draft. Their absence left the team dangerously short on hitters. Ruth, who at the time was one of the best pitchers in the league, swung a bat as hard as he heaved a fastball, and he relished the chance to strut his stuff.

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The top officials of the Boston Red Sox, Ed Barrow, left, and Harry Frazee, seated center, talk with Babe Ruth, center top, and Stuffy McInnis about the upcoming baseball season in 1918. (Mark Rucker / Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images)

For manager Edward Grant Barrow, an old school “small ball” man, Babe’s stuff was purely a circus act. Instead of choking up on the bat and laying down bunts or chopping singles the way Ty Cobb did, Ruth gripped the bat low near the knob, and swung with a ferocious long-arcing, uppercut action. He often missed the ball by a foot or more, but when he connected, when he “banged that old apple” with the sweet spot on the barrel of the bat, it was a sight to see. The ball seemed to explode off his bat, climb high in the air, and sail over the heads of the outfielders.


He hit balls where none had ever been hit before. In one game, he belted a home run over the fence and into the middle of an alligator farm. “The intrusion kicked up no end of commotion among the ‘Gators,” reported Martin. Another time, he took a few swings and then “calmly announced” that he was going to knock one over the fence. Then he did it.

On yet one more occasion, in a game scheduled for Camp Pike, he entertained “the khaki boys.” Although lightning, thunder, and rain forced the cancellation of the contest, Babe’s batting practice performance was one for the ages. While the soldiers cheered, he drove five balls over the right field fence. The next day, a Boston American headline announced Ruth’s unprecedented power display: “BABE RUTH PUTS FIVE OVER FENCE, HERETOFORE UNKNOWN TO BASEBALL FAN.”

Babe Ruth warms up before a 1918 game. ( The Stanley Weston Archive via Getty Images)

During the exhibition season in Hot Springs, Babe Ruth the slugger, the Boston “Colossuses” was born. On the field it seemed like such an innocent time. But for some odd reason, an unusual number of Red Sox players began to suffer from sore throats and fevers. In Hot Springs, reporters noticed it. One called it “the reign of grippe.” Another wrote, “A perfect epidemic has run through the entire city, and almost everyone complains.”

A reign of grippe? A perfect epidemic? Or just the flu—sick for a few days then back to work. No one on the team seemed too concerned. Yet out in Haskell County, Loring Miner had recently contacted the U.S. Public Health Service to report some strange influenza patterns. This seemed to be a new kind of flu. And it killed.


***

It all happened so fast. On May 19, 1918, the first warm day of the year, Ruth took his wife, Helen, to Revere Beach for an afternoon outing. Located just north of the city, it was the nation’s first public beach, a working-class “people’s beach” that featured amusement rides, a boardwalk, and an elaborate pier, as well as swimming facilities. Babe spent the day in the sun, eating a picnic basket full of sandwiches and drinking warm beer, swimming on a full stomach, and enjoying his own celebrity by playing a game of baseball in the sand with some locals. He couldn’t have been happier.

Later that night, Ruth complained of a terrible fever. His temperature climbed to 104 degrees, his body ached, he shivered with chills, and his throat throbbed. He had all the symptoms of the flu, a condition that he shared with millions of other Americans in the spring of 1918. This first wave of influenza coursed through U.S. training camps and followed soldiers aboard transport ships set for France. By May, hundreds of thousands of troops—countless infected—sailed across the Atlantic each month, carrying the virus into the packed trenches on the Western Front. There the virus mutated and then a more lethal strain returned home later that summer. Wartime censorship, however, prevented American reporters from writing many stories about the emerging epidemic. Although some people died, most struck with the virus that spring struggled through the aches and sweats of the fever and recovered.

Ruth might have been among the lucky ones, but the Red Sox physician made matters worse. The day after his trip to the beach, Babe was scheduled to pitch. He showed up at Fenway looking like a ghost, feeling miserable, obviously ill, and in no condition to take the field, but determined to throw nonetheless. Team doctor Oliver Barney “took a look at the big fellow, decided that the trouble was something more than a mere sore throat, and recommended four or five days of complete rest in bed.” Barrow agreed and immediately crossed Ruth’s name off the lineup card, sending him home with the doctor, who liberally swabbed his throat with a caustic compound of silver nitrate, probably a 10 percent solution, to ill effect. Among the dangers of using silver nitrate to treat tonsillitis, the standard American Journal of Clinical Medicine noted in 1914: “Caution: Great care must be exercised that no excess silver-nitrate solution oozing from the swab drops into the throat, lest serious results follow; for as we know, cases are on record in which edema [swelling] of the glottis, severe spasms of the larynx and other spastic affections of the throat, even suffocation, resulted from such accidents.”

The treatment hit Ruth like a line drive to the throat. He choked and gagged, writhed in pain, and finally collapsed. He was rushed to the eye and ear ward of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a physician packed his inflamed throat in ice. Soon rumors shot through Boston that “the Colossus . . . worth more than his weight in gold” was on his deathbed.

Two days later, the news from Massachusetts General significantly improved. “Babe’s great vitality and admirable physical condition have started to throw off the aggravated attack of tonsillitis [sic],” noted the Boston Herald and Journal. “The prophecy now is that the big lad will be out of the hospital in four or five days” and would be ready by the end of the month to travel west with his teammates.

Ruth’s brief spell of illness came at a time when he was emerging as baseball’s first slugger, cracking 11 home runs, more than five entire American League teams would hit that year. In the context of America’s deadly attacks on the Western Front, Ruth’s awesome power, his violent, full-bodied swings, resonated with the country’s glorification of unrestrained force. Whenever “The Colossus” stepped to the plate, carrying his mighty “war club” like a cudgel, he struck “the fear of the Lord” into opposing pitchers.

By the end of June, when Ruth was back on the field, journalists had begun to compare American fighting forces in France with Babe’s performances on the home front. “The story of Babe Ruth’s mighty hitting, his Homeric smashes, kindles a glow in the hearts of all those who know baseball,” commented a Boston Herald and Journal columnist. “In Italy, in Normandy, in Alsace, and in a hundred camps along the firing line, men meet and ask for the latest news of the gifted hitter of home runs. The story of each succeeding circuit clout is received with acclaim. It lightens and breaks the dangerous tension of a soldier’s duty and it’s not stretching a point to say that in his own inimitable way the Colossus is contributing a worth-while gift to the morale of Uncle Sam’s fighting men both in the new and the old world. He is the hero of all present-day baseball.”

Increasingly, Ruth’s power at the plate became a metaphor for America’s power in the war. As his reputation ascended, his German heritage vanished into the mist of the past. Reporters molded Ruth into an emblem for all that was good in America. This ballplayer who “only lightly brushed by the social veneer we call civilization” was transformed, as Harry Hooper dimly said, “into something pretty close to a god.”

***

On August 27, during the team’s final homestand at Fenway Park, as the Red Sox moved closer toward playing in the World Series, the epidemic’s second wave arrived at Commonwealth Pier in Boston. That day, two sailors reported to the receiving ship’s sick bay with chills, fever, sore throat, and coughing—the usual symptoms of influenza. The next day, eight more staggered into the infirmary; the following day, 58; and by the end of the week, there was an average of 150 a day. The receiving ship—a massive floating barracks where the sailors slept and ate as they waited to depart—was “grossly overcrowded,” a petri dish for multiplying victims of the disease.

Soon the outbreak overwhelmed the limited medical facilities, and short of beds, physicians transferred patients to Chelsea Naval Hospital, just north of Charlestown. But the sailors were not suffering from the ordinary flu. Struggling to breathe, the patients coughed violently and displayed a bluish complexion with purple blisters.


In less than a week, the killer had made its way into the neighborhoods of Boston. On September 3, the first civilian struck by the flu had entered Boston City Hospital. That same day, 4,000 men, including 1,000 sailors from Commonwealth Pier, marched the streets of Boston in a “Win the War for Freedom” parade. The sailors’ contact with civilians and shipyard workers spread the disease throughout the city.

Two days later, when the Red Sox and Cubs began playing the World Series in Chicago, John S. Hitchcock, head of the communicable disease section of the Massachusetts State Department of Health, warned Boston officials about the developing crisis: “Unless precautions are taken the disease in all probability will spread to the civilian population of the city.”

Hitchcock’s urgent warning proved prophetic. Boston, a major port where soldiers and sailors came and went, would soon become the epicenter of a pandemic that killed more than 675,000 of the nation’s 105 million inhabitants.

When the World Series resumed at Fenway Park on September 9, an increasing number of civilian cases appeared in Boston. Undoubtedly, crowded public events—three World Series games, parades, rallies, and a draft registration drive—fueled the plague. The contagion afflicted passengers riding ferries, trollies, and subway cars. And it infected the patrons of dance halls, theaters, saloons and Fenway Park.


Yet before the Series began no one publicly campaigned to call off the games or forewarned Red Sox fans about the dangers of sitting in the bleachers, rubbing elbows and shaking hands. In fact, reading the Boston papers during the week of the World Series one could hardly tell that a mutant virus had already contaminated the city. In the first week of September, most front-page stories broke the latest reports from the Western Front and Fenway Park. Boston reporters gave the impression that the influenza outbreak remained a problem contained among sailors at Commonwealth Pier.

Belatedly, on September 11, 1918, the last day of the Series, William Woodward, the city’s health commissioner, issued a warning: people should avoid “crowded cars, elevators, or buildings”—that would have included Fenway Park, though he did not urge people to stay home entirely. Perhaps, Red Sox fans took the warning seriously, or maybe some resented the fact that the players nearly went on strike over diminished playoff bonuses before Game Five. Nonetheless, over the course of two days, a precipitous decline in attendance at Fenway Park reveals that something prevented the Red Sox faithful from showing up.

A baseball player wearing a mask during the 1918 pandemic. (George Rinhart / Corbis via Getty Images)

In a stadium that could hold about 35,000 spectators, empty patches of seats checkered the stands. For Game Five, 24,694 fans showed up. The following afternoon for Game Six, the same day Woodward issued his warning, merely 15,238 saw the Red Sox win the championship.

After the World Series ended, no Red Sox victory parades were held and no wild celebrations erupted. Consumed with the war while the pandemic spread, baseball mattered little amidst more than 3,000 cases of influenza.

Over the next few weeks, the situation worsened. On September 25, the Boston Health Department reported that nearly 700 citizens had already died from influenza and pneumonia. Besieged physicians and nurses could barely keep pace with hospitals overflowing with desperate patients. The next day, after Woodward advised Mayor Andrew Peters, the city closed all movie houses, theaters, concert halls and dance halls. Soon, the closure order extended to schools and all “public gathering places,” forcing high schools and colleges to cancel football games.

The streets emptied as hysteria paralyzed the city. Rumors fed widespread panic. One story circulating around town claimed that a German sub had penetrated Boston Harbor and emitted a deathly gray gas that drifted ashore and poisoned people with germs.

No cure for influenza existed—no medication, no vaccination, no antibiotics, no miracle drug. As the death toll rose, patrolmen stacked decomposing corpses wrapped in white sheets on the sidewalks, waiting for the meat wagons to scoop them up. The stench of putrefying bodies poisoned the air. The Boston newspapers published daily tallies of the deceased.

Under government orders to find “essential work” after the World Series ended, Ruth signed with Charles Schwab’s Bethlehem Steel plant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. But he hardly worked there. Ruth expected to play baseball and get paid for it. Years later, a Bethlehem worker complained that Babe and the other ballplayers avoided real work. They just played ball, as everyone suspected. “Babe Ruth used to show up at the plant an hour before practice. He’d be wearing fancy trousers, silk shirts and patent-leather shoes. He’d just walk around talking to people about baseball. There wasn’t anything essential about what he was doing.”

Ruth played sporadically for the Lebanon team. The little surviving evidence of his time there doesn’t indicate how many games exactly he played, but he was back home in Baltimore in early October. His extended disappearance from the team was likely caused by a bout of influenza, as reported by the Baltimore Sun at the time. In Ruth’s old neighborhood, “Pig Town,” a gritty waterfront of stockyards and slaughterhouses, the grippe tore through the crowded miserable hovels. The outbreak was so severe that Baltimore’s city hospitals could no longer accept new patients.

In Boston, during the third week of October, as the death toll waned, city officials announced that the worst had passed and removed the closure order on October 20. By that time, more than 3,500 Bostonians had died from the flu. After being confined to their homes for three weeks, massive crowds flocked to theaters and dance halls. Patrons packed cafés and saloons, celebrating the end of the closure order with suds and spirits.

Ruth spent much of the winter at his farm cottage in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he regained his strength. He built up his body that winter chopping pine trees, splitting wood, and shouldering logs. Forever restless, when he got bored, he threw parties or invited children from an orphanage for a day of games. His wife had hoped that a quiet life in the country, 20 miles away from Boston, might bring them closer together. She disliked the crowds and the spotlight that her husband drew whenever they went out in the city. Perhaps, she thought, Sudbury would be different. Perhaps, she’d have him all to herself. “Someday people are going to find I’ve kidnapped my own husband and run away someplace where we can lead a simple life, away from grandstands and managers and photographers,” she said.

But Babe did not share Helen’s fantasy. He loved the attention and the company of fawning women. He was always on the go, searching for his next adventure.

Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith are the authors of War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War.

High Waters in the Great Lakes Reveal Two Centuries-Old Shipwrecks

In the month of April alone, the remnants of two historic vessels washed up on Lake Michigan’s shores 

The wreckage of a mid-19th century ship washed ashore north of Ludington, Michigan, on April 24. (Mason County Historical Society)

By Alex Fox
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
APRIL 30, 2020

The depths of the Great Lakes are littered with the sodden remains of an estimated 6,000 sunken ships. Many of these wrecks—preserved by the cold, fresh water of the so-called inland seas—are nearly pristine, frozen in their final death throes for centuries.

This month, waves and high water levels unearthed two historic shipwrecks on the shores of Lake Michigan, reports Lynn Moore for MLive. Experts from the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association (MSRA) identified the first, discovered near the city of Manistique on April 20, as an early 20th-century schooner named after part-owner Rokus Kanters, a marine contractor and the former mayor of Holland, Michigan. The second, which washed up near Ludington on April 24, has yet to be identified but is thought to date back to the mid-19th century, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum.


The high water levels divulging these ancient wrecks have plagued the Great Lakes region over the past several years, eroding its beaches and threatening lakefront properties.

“We’re seeing some of the highest water levels in recorded history on the Great Lakes, and that’s the result of very wet weather experienced over the last several years,” Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the Detroit district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told the Washington Post’s Kim Frauhammer in 2019.

Climate change is the simple explanation for the region’s unprecedented weather and rising water levels, but in lakes, the situation is more complicated than in seas. Instead of an inexorable march upward, the Great Lakes are expected to seesaw between extremes, according to the Post. That means both flooded basements and shipping lanes too shallow for cargo ships loom in the lakes’ future.

The unidentified ship bears the hallmarks of vessels built between the 1850s and 1880s, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum. (Mason County Historical Society)
MSRA experts identified R. Kanters—the more recent of the two shipwrecks—by tracking down photographs, old newspapers and historic records following a video call with the local man who happened upon the wreck, reports Emily Bingham in a separate story for MLive. Records indicate that the 112-foot-long, double-masted schooner sank on September 7, 1903, after getting stuck in shallow water south of Manistique during a storm.


Just three days after its reappearance, the wreck had already started to sink back into the shores of Lake Michigan, reports Brent Ashcroft for local broadcast station WZZM 13.

The older, unidentified ship bears the hallmarks of vessels built between the 1850s and 1880s, according to the Port of Ludington Maritime Museum. Its hull fragment measures roughly 32 feet long and 8 feet wide, according to local broadcast station WWMT3.

The area where the 19th-century ship was discovered is notoriously hazardous for ships: More than 300 vessels have grounded along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan over the past 170 years, the museum notes in a Facebook post. Collaborative research with the MSRA has yielded the names of five vessels that may be responsible for the chunk of hull: The J.B. Skinner, built in 1841; the George F. Foster, built in 1852; the J.O. Moss, built in 1863; the Eclipse, built in 1852; and the Orphan Boy, built in 1862.

The two newly discovered wrecks may soon be added to a recently launched interactive map of the shipwrecks found in Michigan’s state waters. And for those looking to learn more about the thousands of ships lost in the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum on the shores of Lake Superior offers a wealth of information and artifacts. The museum is located at Whitefish Point, a treacherous area known for possessing a trove of some 200 shipwrecks.


Speaking with Smithsonian magazine’s Arcynta Ali Childs in 2011, Sean Ley, the museum’s development officer, explained, “The reason there are so many wrecks along there is because there are no natural harbors for ships to hide when they have these huge storms. Whitefish Bay is kind of a natural bay, and with its point sticking out, it does provide a great deal of protection for ships that are lost.”


Alex Fox is a freelance science journalist based in Washington, D.C. He has written for Science, Nature, Science News, the San Jose Mercury News, and Mongabay. You can find him at Alexfoxscience.com.