MAN: People didn't want to believe

that they could be healthy in the morning

and dead by nightfall.

They didn't want to believe that.

NARRATOR: It was the worst epidemic this country has ever known.

It killed more Americans

than all the wars this century, combined.

MAN: It was a phantom.

We didn't know where it was.

MAN: In a gradual, remorseless way

it kept moving closer and closer.

MAN: You never knew from day to day

who was going to be next on the death list.

WOMAN: There were so many people dying that you ran out of things

that you'd never considered running out of before-- caskets.

NARRATOR: Before it was over, it almost broke America apart.

WOMAN: I remember my mother putting a white sheet,

a white piece of cloth over his face

and they closed the casket.

NARRATOR: In 1918, the United States was a vigorous young nation

leading the world into the modern age.

All our fears and anxieties were directed toward Europe,

where the war raged.

At home, we were safe.

William Maxwell was growing up in Lincoln, Illinois.

MAN: In 1918, Lincoln was a town of 12,000 people.

It was perhaps 50 years old,

just time enough for the trees to mature

so that the branches met over the sidewalks.

Yards were large.

The children played in clusters in the summer evenings.

On Sunday morning, the church bells were pretty to hear,

but my father had had enough of churchgoing

so we went fishing on Sunday,

out in the country with a picnic.

It was a life not very much impinged on

by the outside world.

(birds chirping)

NARRATOR: In Macon, Georgia, Cathryn Guyler was five years old.

WOMAN: My father was a playmate, actually,

and when he'd take me out in his car

he would stop at a grocery store that he knew

and take me in

and the owner of the store, in his white uniform,

would say to his men...

(claps hands)

"Go out and shake the candy tree, boys."

I think I must have known that candy didn't grow on that tree,

but I wouldn't have given up the notion

because he was enjoying it, and I was enjoying it,

and everybody was enjoying it, you see.

NARRATOR: For a young newspaper woman in Denver, Katherine Anne Porter,

life was like a romantic novel.

PORTER (dramatized): I had a job on the Rocky Mountain News.

The city editor put me to covering theaters.

I met a boy, an army lieutenant.

We were much in love.

NARRATOR: The soldier was the darling of America.

Patriotism ran unrestrained

in a country newly entered in the Great War.

WOMAN: We would march up the streets

singing, "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.

"I spy Kaiser at the door.

"and we'll get a lemon pie and we'll squash him in his eye

and there won't be any Kaiser anymore."

GUYLER: It was a good world,

but it was an age of innocence;

we really didn't know what was ahead.

NARRATOR: Some say it began in the spring of 1918,

when soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, burned tons of manure.

A gale kicked up.

A choking dust storm swept out over the land--

a stinging, stinking yellow haze.

The sun went dead black in Kansas.

Two days later, on March 11, 1918,

an army private reported to the camp hospital before breakfast.

He had a fever, sore throat, headache -- nothing serious.

One minute later, another soldier showed up.

By noon, the hospital had over a hundred cases.

In a week, 500.

That spring, 48 soldiers, all in the prime of life,

died at Fort Riley.

The cause of death was listed as pneumonia.

The sickness then seemed to disappear,

leaving as quickly as it had come.

For over a century, the booming science of medicine

had gone from one triumph to another.

Researchers had developed vaccines for many diseases:

smallpox, anthrax, rabies, diphtheria, meningitis.

WOMAN: With the great advances in microbiology,

we were eliminating mysteries, okay?

The mystery of what causes this disease,

the mystery of what causes this disease.

The optimism of being able to visualize something --

all we have to do is just look under the microscope

and we'll see the organism and then take an action

and see that something die off or be controlled.

That leads to the thought of invincibility.

NARRATOR: It seemed that the masters of medicine

could control life and death.

There was nothing that Americans couldn't do.

We could even win the war that no one could win.

That summer and fall,

over one-and-a-half million Americans crossed the Atlantic for war,

but some of those doughboys came from Kansas

and they'd brought something with them--

a tiny, silent companion.

Almost immediately, the Kansas sickness resurfaced in Europe.

American soldiers got sick...

English soldiers, French, German.

As it spread, the microbe mutated,

day by day becoming more and more deadly.

By the time the silent traveler came back to America,

it had become a relentless killer.

On a rainy day in September, Dr. Victor Vaughan,

acting surgeon general of the army, received urgent orders.

Proceed to a base near Boston called Camp Devens.

Devens was about to change Dr. Vaughan's world forever.

VAUGHAN (dramatized): I saw hundreds of young, stalwart men in uniform

coming into the wards of the hospital.

Every bed was full, yet others crowded in.

The faces wore a bluish cast.

A cough brought up the blood-stained sputum.

NARRATOR: On the day that Vaughan arrived, 63 men died at Camp Devens.

An autopsy revealed lungs that were swollen, filled with fluid,

and strangely blue.

Doctors were stunned.

What in the name of God was happening to these lungs?

When the strange new disease was finally identified,

it turned out to be a very old and familiar one:

influenza -- the flu.

But it was unlike any flu that anyone had ever seen.

MAN: One of the factors that made this so particularly frightening

was that everybody had a preconception

of what the flu was,

it's a miserable cold, and after a few days

you're up and around.

This was a flu that put people into bed

as if they'd been hit with a two-by-four

that turned into pneumonia,

that turned people blue and black and killed them.

It was a flu out of some sort of a horror story.

They never had dreamed that influenza

could ever do anything like this to people before.