I remember the name. Jim Lovett.
In 1963 we moved from Stapleton (down by the St. George ferry) on Staten Island to Westerleigh, into a house in Temperance Park, 42 Boulevard (not The Boulevard), and the attic of our new house was filled with artifacts from a WW1 veteran who obviously returned from Over There (in Europe) with mementos from his time in the trenches of The War To End All Wars. Ha! That war only set up the doubly or tripley destructive war a generation later that was the scourge of my parents' generation, who as children had already endured the hunger and jobless angst of the Great Depression, a worldwide pandemic due to the economic crash, largely as a result of the draconian terms the Versailles Treaty of 1919 imposed on Germany, with its impossible reparations requirement and its humiliating war guilt clause. Well, the German people weren't going to stand for it (or obviously, never could afford it, ever) and the world got Hitler as a direct result. Talk about winning the war and losing the peace, that's what the Allies did.
In the attic along with a bunch of 78 rpm records and old clothes, I scored several WW1 battle books with titles like "Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears," a DI hat, a pair of leather military puttees, a doughboy military tunic and a wicked German sawtooth 14-inch bayonet in a scabbard. I was 11 at the time and I kept that sword-like bayonet in my possession until my middle child, who like me was always interested in military matters and was always a serious, somber boy, was 13 when I gave it to him. He was also largely a rules-bound child and a bit of a momma's boy and a year later during the sneak divorce my wife launched at me after first spiriting the boys away during Spring Break under false pretenses to her Dad's house 500 miles away, that bayonet became courtroom discussion point number one in the endless litigation into how reckless a parent I supposedly was (I was awarded full joint legal custody with plain vanilla visitation after two years of expensive legal wrangling once the judge caught on to her act). I don't know where that war trophy bayonet is, perhaps Johnny will give it to his child when he's of a suitable age like 12. Interestingly, even by 1963, the WW1 hardbound war books, all published in the twenties or thirties, were literally unreadable as the cheap-pulp pages turned an orangish brown hue from the acidic content in the paper and crumbled away whenever you turned a page. Legislation later mandated a better standard of paper to be used in books (sometimes you'll see in older books a front piece certification that the paper is manufactured in accordance to that requirement for longevity) to ensure long-life. The tunic, puttees and DI hat were all victims of the divorce as well, as once I left the house so that Sharon would return with the children so they could return to school ("if you don't leave the house immediately I won't return with the children and they'll flunk out of school and it will be your fault"--yes, the deliberate use of the children as pawns in the divorce was started right away by my covert-narcissistic, in my opinion, former wife), all of my possessions or our joint property like rugs or crystal that I didn't actually take with me in my one small pick-up truck load going to my rental apartment became hers two years later with a wave of the hand by the judge at the equitable distribution trial. That casual sleight of hand probably cost me $100,000 in the joint property that she never accounted for nor shared nor split "equitably."
But I digress. The holiday season plus February are always hard for me, from Thanksgiving through my last child's birthday in late February, since I have had no contact with any of my children since 2007, no doubt much to the pleasure of their mother who I have discovered has a heart made of stone.
So Jim Lovett was an American hero undoubtedly, and I can't fathom why the sellers of that house on 42 Boulevard would leave all that historical stuff behind. It sparked an interest in me in WW1, a pointless, enervating war that sapped the power and worldwide hegemony of the European continent and led directly to the super destructive Second World War, which ruined and impoverished Europe until Western Europe was restored to affluence by the US through the Marshall Plan.
But everything I read about World War I was either about the tangled politics, entangling treaties and alliances, and arms races that led to the impossible-to-stop initiation of it, or the four years of battlefield bloodletting that finally ended with the Allies triumphant in 1918 after the might of the US was added to the Allied side in 1917, with 20 million people dead, mostly soldiers. (60 million people died in WW2, soldiers and civilians alike.)
It was four years of mud, blood and morass, with gains usually measured in a few hundred yards at the cost of thousands of lives. The machine gun stymied the battlefield until the British invented tanks, cumbersome clanking slow monsters that they were back then. The last German offensives in France in early 1918 with new tactics and troops transferred from the Eastern front once Germany knocked Russia out of the war in 1917 (and gave the world the Soviet Union a few years later) failed to breach the Allied line of trenches and the Americans started arriving in force and the tide irrevocably turned, thanks to the infusion of the doughboys. Or so the histories say.
In all my readings, there were scarcely any mentions of a worldwide pandemic at the time except perhaps a sentence or two to mention that the Americans returned home to a homefront wracked by the Spanish Flu which swept the world in 1918-19 and killed 640,000 Americans and 60 million people worldwide. So it was a pestilence that somehow came from Spain, blew through the world for two years and disappeared. Or so it seemed. But meanwhile in England, France, Germany and to lesser extents Austria, Russia, Italy. the Ottoman Empire and other countries, a generation of young men was lost on the battlefields to the horrors of war. Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory and One of Ours detailed the horror and devastation the war wrought.
But: Now with a worldwide pandemic, COVID-19, laying waste to the US and cutting a deadly path through all the nations of the world in tis time of peace, there is a new way to look at the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, and its impact, mostly or wholly neglected, upon WW1. The Spanish Flu didn't originate in Spain, it originated in the US, in the farmlands, and spread rapidly in the US army centers in 1918 when rural boys were thrown together with city boys in troop depots (and hence came to the attention of medical experts). Its existence was censored by wartime restrictions on public information and was brought to Europe, and thence to the world, in crowded US transport ships and then into the crowded front lines (it spread to the enemy through the capturing of prisoners) and back to the home fronts when soldiers went on leave. It was all subject to wartime censorship on both sides, and got the moniker Spanish Flu because the new, deadly condition first achieved worldwide notoriety in neutral Spain when it arrived there from neighboring France and there was no censorship.
General Ludendorff, who masterminded the German end-the-war push in 1918, claimed his last offensive, aimed at encircling Paris, failed because he had too many troops in the hospital with the virus! I have never read about this theory before (it was reported on a recent covid-19 report that detailed the 1918-19 outbreak). It's incredible that there has been no popular analysis before on the effect a scourge that killed 60 million people worldwide had on a simultaneous World War that killed "only" 20 million people.
No wonder the world was so unprepared for the coronavirus last year that came out of China and in particular has so devastated the US. The last pandemic a century ago was largely hidden to history by the attention paid the the World War. I'll bet Jim Lovett knew a thing or two about the 1918-19 scourge though.
