In 1918 less than 40 miles north of Chicago, an insidious illness killed twice the number of naval personnel in two months than combat did during the entire First World War. The so-called Spanish influenza swept through Great Lakes Naval Training Station “like the Black Plague,” recalled Martin Birkham, a YMCA volunteer at the training station. The hard choices made at Great Lakes should haunt us today.
The Great Lakes Naval Revue, which included budding comedian Benjamin Kubelsky (later known as Jack Benny), played the midwest theatrical circuit to popular acclaim. The undefeated football team, whose lineup included George Halas, won the Rose Bowl. Barnstorming across the country, John Philip Sousa and his Great Lakes Band Battalion raised tens of millions of dollars for war bonds and war charities, a very handsome return on the $40,000 appropriated for band instruments.
Reservists who contracted the flu simply went home to recover. After receiving mandatory nose sprays, hundreds of sailors left on weekend passes for the north shore. Stover, who went on leave after helping sick mates, believed the iodine nose spray protected him from infection. “The sailors who have been about Waukegan during the past few days have been sneezing and coughing and buying ‘dope’ for their noses and throats,” commented the Waukegan Daily Sun.
Though Lt. Mink warned that people in cities should remain at home and avoid crowded indoor facilities other than the workplace, the scope of the epidemic’s lethality was not readily apparent to those communities that had not yet witnessed its effects. “I do not feel much alarmed about the Spanish Influenza,” Evanston banker Rufus Dawes wrote to his brother. “It will take its toll on the old and the weak.” Privately, the commander of Great Lakes Hospital authorized leaves for convalescent cases who were “depressed to the point of loss of interest in all things,” a state in part attributed to the “contact of great numbers of desperately sick and dying mates.”
Between September 12 and October 11, 1918, Great Lakes Naval Training Station recorded 9,623 cases of influenza, with 924 deaths. Great Lakes presented half-truths about the epidemic in large part to protect the war effort, which demanded full participation by healthy young men. Guided by a tragically incomplete understanding of how influenza was transmitted, Moffett and his staff chose not to reveal that Great Lakes Naval Training Station had been the site of heroic failure and lonely death.
