The Spanish Flu
By 
Given our current health crisis, the National Interest asked me to write a couple of pieces on the impact of the Spanish Flu on World War I. The first concentrates on the United States:
In its first years, World War I had promised (or threatened) to overturn the ancient relationship between war and disease, the reality that sickness killed more soldiers than enemy action. On the one hand, advances in medical technology and sanitation worked to dramatically reduce the toll of disease, especially on the Western Front. On the other, the lethality of automatic weapons and heavy, long-range artillery meant that an increasing proportion of soldiers would die at the hands of the enemy, rather than as a result of viral infections and bacteria.
While the second takes a look at what was happening in Europe:
As the spring of 1918 opened, the end of the largest war that humanity had yet undertaken appeared to be in sight. The collapse of the Russian Empire resulted in a brutal sort of “peace” in the East, allowing the transfer of German soldiers to the Western Front. The senior commanders of the Reichswehr knew that they needed to win the war rapidly, as famine was taking hold in the homeland and ever more Americans were arriving in France. Either the Germans would strike a decisive blow in the West, or the Allies would overwhelm them. Either way, an end to the carnage was foreseeable.