By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 killed more people than World War I, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50 million deaths around the globe.

When it arrived in the United States in early 1918, it wasn’t recognized as the vicious killer it grew to be.

Doctors reported scattered outbreaks in military installations where recruits were reporting for training before going to France. Waco’s own Camp MacArthur saw its share of related fatalities.

A smattering of obituaries from the Waco Daily Times Herald in January 1918 was but a harbinger of what was to come:

* Peter Mauseth, 24, a private in Company F, 337th Infantry, died New Year’s Day 1918 in the base hospital at Camp MacArthur of pneumonia. “He was taken off the train ill,” the notice said.

* Percival Risher of Wisconsin, 19, a private in the headquarters company of the 119th Machine Gun Battalion, died Jan. 12 in the base hospital at Camp MacArthur of lobar pneumonia — just hours before his mother arrived by train to tend to him.

* Elmer E. Ranck of New Jersey, a private in the 41st Recruit Squadron, 3rd Provisional Regiment, died Jan. 16 of pneumonia at the base hospital.

That first wave was mild compared to the strain of the Spanish flu that swept nations from August through November 1918.

In the two years the influenza ravaged the globe, one in five people worldwide became infected — and more than one in four in the United States. This flu was different from most, which normally targeted the very young or very old. The Spanish flu was most deadly for people in their 20s and 30s, leading to a virulent form pneumonia.

An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, 10 times as many as in the war itself. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the virus and not bullets: An estimated 43,000 soldiers mobilized for the war died of disease.

Sources: Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I, Carol R. Byerly; oral history of Benjamin S. DeBoice of Illinois, Sangamon State University (University of Illinois at Springfield); http://usgennet.org.