Wilson’s closest adviser, Cary T. Grayson, happened to be a medical doctor. Barry suggests that Grayson is the one who convinced the president to confront his army chief of staff about the disease felling the ranks. In early October 1918, Wilson met with Gen. Peyton March at the White House. The president said, “General March, I have had representations sent to me by men whose ability and patriotism are unquestioned that I should stop the shipment of men to France until the epidemic of influenza is under control.”
The general responded, “Every such soldier who has died [of influenza] just as surely played his part as his comrade who died in France.”
That may not have been the soundest military practice. For every soldier who showed up in France debilitated by the flu, others had to care for him. Sending more troops when many of those troops were sick only reduced the power and readiness of American forces in Europe. The epidemic “rendered hundreds of thousands of military personnel non-effective,” Carol R. Byerly wrote in the journal “Public Health Reports.” “During the American Expeditionary Forces' campaign at Meuse-Argonne, the epidemic diverted urgently needed resources from combat support to transporting and caring for the sick and the dead.”
Wilson let General March have his way.
Some 16,000 American troops died of disease in Europe, on top of the 30,000 who succumbed in stateside training camps.
Snip
It’s not that there wasn’t a federal public health service. It just did very little for the public. Wilson had signed an executive order in 1917, putting the health service under military control. Resources that might have mitigated the suffering on the home front in 1918 went to the army. Perhaps the most important resource, nurses, were in short supply when the influenza epidemic began to spread. Barry writes that hospitals had been stripped of their most essential workers and that “many private hospitals around the country [were] so short staffed that they closed, and remained closed until the war ended.” Snip
One might argue that Wilson had a war to win and couldn’t afford to get distracted by anything so pedestrian as the flu. But other wartime leaders recognized the threat diseases pose. On July 4, 1775, George Washington, newly made commander of the Continental Army, instituted a regime of social distancing to keep smallpox from spreading among his soldiers. There was a quarantined smallpox hospital near a pond near Cambridge, Mass. Washington made the pond off limits. “No person is to be allowed to go to fresh-water pond a fishing or on any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.” It was one of the first orders Washington issued, and he never lost sight of the threat epidemics posed to soldiers and civilians alike. The man who would become the first president urged his fellow Founders to have “the utmost vigilance against this most dangerous enemy.”
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Smallpox had an effect on the failure to conquer Canada during the Revolutionary War
