The Invisible Enemy: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic
1918 · event
In the final year of the Great War, a virus killed more people than the war itself, at least fifty million. Whole villages lost a generation in a winter. A century later, their names survive mostly in family stories. Remember them.
It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than the Great War had in four years, and unlike most flu, it took the young and strong. Whole families vanished within days; in some villages there was no one left well enough to dig graves.
It was called "Spanish" only because neutral Spain had no wartime censorship and reported it honestly. A century later, scientists recovered the virus from a body preserved in Alaskan permafrost, so that the next pandemic would not find us as unprepared.