In "Two Faces of Death: Fatalities From Disease And Combat In America's Principal Wars, 1775 To Present," Vincent J. Cirillo persuasively argues that for the first 145 years of America’s military history more American soldiers died from disease than from action.
Illustrating this claim with hard statistics and a well-researched data table, Cirillo demonstrates that in nearly all of America’s major wars (the sole exception being World War I) the ratio of disease deaths to combat deaths was well over two to one -- several times reaching ratios higher than seven to one. Even the exception proves the rule, with World War I’s disease to trauma ratio equaling out at roughly 1.1:1.
For Cirillo, crowded, unhygienic army camps were more efficient as killing machines than anything the enemy could come up with: to use Cirillo’s exact phrasing, "microbes proved more deadly than bullets." Indeed, the deadly effectiveness of these microbes is the crux of Cirillo’s article. It was only after the widespread implementation of immunizing vaccines and the adoption of medical treatment with antibiotics that we begin to see a reverse in the disease-to-trauma trend, with combat deaths outnumbering deaths by disease in every war since World War II. Today, Cirillo explains, dying of disease is so rare for American servicemen and women that even deaths by suicide outnumber the deaths by disease in the present Iraq War.
The Disease and Trauma Eras
To better illustrate the demarcation between pre-immunization and antibiotic treatment and post-immunization and antibiotic treatment, Cirillo breaks the chronology in two, naming the first segment of America’s military history the Disease Era (1775-1918) and the second segment the Trauma Era (1941-Present).
However, he is careful to note that the coming of the Trauma Era did not see the end of the problem of disease, and explains that disease continues to inflict enormous losses to American forces. Malaria, for example, plagued the U.S. Army during World War II and Vietnam, and infectious diarrheal diseases touched the lives of more than half the soldiers fighting in the Persian Gulf War.
Thus, in concluding, Cirillo states that while death by disease has become a far less significant problem in recent times thanks to medical advances, there are still several types of fatal diseases that attack soldiers. Moreover, mental illness and trauma are becoming a more widely acknowledged problem, in present time, and the psychological damage of war can often be worse in their lasting effects than the physical injuries.
Sources
Cirillo, Vincent J. "Two Faces of Death: Fatalities From Disease And Combat In America’s Principal Wars, 1775 To Present." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, v. 51.
Robert Marcell - Robert Marcell received a B.A. in History in 2007 and an M.A. in the Social Sciences in 2008.
