The most effective general in the history of Russia is
probably General January. The horrible
cold, the snow and the ice have defeated invaders such as Napoleon and Hitler
when the peasant armies could not. No
matter the size of your army, the quality of its guns, or even the size of its
artillery, General January has always been the ultimate victor.
Less well-known, however, is that there is an equally
formidable military protagonist in North America: General Yellow Jack.
Ships coming into harbor carrying yellow fever would anchor
off-shore and would hoist a yellow flag or "jack" to warn off other
ships. This self-imposed quarantine had
devastating consequences for the isolated crews--sometimes the entire crew
would perish.
Yellow Fever is a viral disease that killed one out of five
people stricken with the mysterious illness.
Victims complained of intense headaches, fevers, chills, and frequent
vomiting. The patient’s
skin turned yellow as the liver slowly ceased to function. Dark bruises appeared on the victim’s
skin and the more severely afflicted began to cough up what looked like coffee
grounds—in reality coagulated blood as the
victim began to drown in his own blood.
Every year, successive yellow fever epidemics would sweep
across the US and some cities suffered almost annually, devastating the
population. Between 1693 and 1901,
ninety-five epidemics swept the country.
Poor Philadelphia was hit eleven times, with one epidemic killing
one out of ten people in the city.
Unfortunately, how the disease spread, what caused it, and
even any means to effectively treat it were completely unknown. The most popular theory was that the disease
was caused by an "imbalance of humors" and the result of "bad
air". A common prevention was to
open more windows and let in more good air (and a few more mosquitoes). It is the blackest ironic humor to consider
that this disease (like malaria and several others) probably came to the new
world in the water barrels of slave ships.
The Amazon rainforest was not a mystery
well into the twentieth century because travel to it was difficult--it was
because travel in the mosquito-infested wetlands would kill you with the
diseases that the Europeans had brought there.
The disease has, indeed, been a powerful force in military
history. In 1793, a slave revolt broke
out against the Grand Blancs who were quite literally working their slaves to
death in their sugar camps. The riot was
brutally violent, with horrible atrocities committed on both sides. Napoleon, then the emperor of France, sent a
large army to put down the rebellion.
Napoleon's army arrived in Haiti just in time to meet
General Yellow Jack in a full-blown epidemic.
Of the 25,000 troops sent there, only 3,000 survived. Among the dead was Napoleon's son-in-law,
General LeClerc. Shortly after this,
diplomats from the United States showed up, wanting to buy the port city of New
Orleans. Napoleon, still reeling with
the loss of his army in Haiti, had just heard that a fresh yellow fever
epidemic had broken out in New Orleans.
Disgusted with the entirety of the pestilent New World, he decided to
sell to the American ambassadors all of Louisiana
for roughly the price the diplomats were willing to pay for just New
Orleans. General Yellow Jack had just doubled
the size of the United States.
Back in Haiti, the French abandoned the island. Because of General Yellow Jack, Haiti had the
only successful slave revolt in history
to result in an independent state.
Almost 50 years later, the United States was at war with
Mexico. General Winfield Scott was to
lead an Army to Mexico City, capture the capital, thus ending the war. To do this, he had to capture the port city
of Veracruz. The city was almost
impregnable due to heavy fortifications on an island in the harbor. The fort's guns pointed toward the city,
while the city's guns faced the harbor.
Enemy ships sailing between the guns would be destroyed long before they
could reach the docks in order to unload.
General Scott landed his troops south of the city, marched
them north and inland, and then used his artillery to shell Veracruz from the
inland. After a full day of barrage, the
town was ablaze, the hospital destroyed, and more civilians than soldiers had
been killed. European diplomats left the
town under a flag of truce, to plead with General Scott to stop the
bombardment, but Scott refused.
The next day, the shelling continued for hours, until the
town finally surrendered. By this time,
over 6,700 rounds had been fired into the city. These artillery rounds were far, far from
being smart bombs: they had killed over 1500 people, over a third of whom were
civilians.
General Scott had a reason to commit what was, at best, an
act of total warfare, and, at worst, a war crime. No one knew why, but the city experienced
annual yellow fever epidemics starting in spring--roughly in the middle of
April. Scott had landed in late March,
and knew that if he could get off the beach
and move his army farther inland fast enough, he could save the army by moving
across the "fever line" on a map.
What Scott did not know, was that that line on the map
indicated where the terrain became too high and dry for mosquitoes.
Within months, Scott's army took Mexico City, Mexico
surrendered, and it sold half its territory to the US for a pittance. While Mexico shrunk by half, the United
States--with the aid of General Yellow Jack--grew by a third. The cost of this conquest was high: 1,192 men were killed in action, but 11,155 more
soldiers died of disease.
General Yellow Jack--in cooperation with his colleague,
General Malaria--easily defeated the French attempt to dig the first Panama
Canal. After successfully completing the
Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps attempted to build a 75 mile-long canal across
the swamps and mountains of Central America.
In 1884, 500 young French engineers began supervising what was thought
to be a project of three years. None
of the engineers lived long enough to collect their first month's paycheck.
When the Panama project was inspected by the crew of a
British warship, the entire crew died of yellow fever.
The European work force, which eventually numbered over
20,000, battled insects as much as they did the mud and dirt. The legs of tables, chairs, and beds were
placed into pots of water to prevent the insects from crawling up the
furniture. The disease-carrying
mosquitoes didn’t really need these improvised
breeding grounds as the Europeans also left the windows open wide for the
ventilation they believed would prevent disease.
After the mosquitoes had killed a third of the work force,
the French (predictably) surrendered and sold the construction rights to the
United States. Armed with the knowledge
we had acquired from fighting in Cuba, the US finally knew what caused
the disease. After a tremendous effort
where the U.S. Army declared war on General Yellow Jack, the canal was
completed in 1914.
Some of the battles were still close. A yellow fever epidemic in 1904 killed so
many of the workers that their coffins stacked up faster in the railroad depots along
the canal than the trains could haul them away.
Many people believe that General Yellow Jack has been
retired, no: he and his fellow
veterans--General Malaria and Field Marshall Plague--are just waiting in the
reserves for an opportunity to do fresh battle.
While they wait, they have welcomed new recruits: Lieutenant Ebola and Captain Lassa have
joined the ranks. We win battles,
eventually they win the wars.
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Normally, I would never force comments to be moderated. However, in the last month, Russian hackers have added hundreds of bogus comments, most of which either talk about Ukraine or try to sell some crappy product. As soon as they stop, I'll turn this nonsense off.