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When conflict erupted on the Korean peninsula 70 years ago, many Britons feared the worst, anticipating a return to conscription and air-raids. So why, asks Grace Huxford, did anxiety soon turn into apathy – and why has that sentiment dominated British attitudes to the war ever since?
Today, not many people know the names Hewlett Johnson or Monica Felton. But during the Korean War (1950–53), these two figures were well known, even notorious, for their opposition to British involvement in Korea. Their stories tell us an alternative history of the Korean War, of the social response to the conflict back in Britain. Even though the fighting raged many thousands of miles away, Felton and Johnson show us the complex impact it had in Britain, the legacies of which we continue to live with today. To grasp why these two Britons opposed the Korean War so passionately, we need first to understand why the conflict erupted in the first place – and, to do that, we must return to the climax of the Second World War. When the Japanese empire collapsed in August 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the Korean peninsula into two occupation zones, along a latitude line – the 38th Parallel North. The Korean War “created a blood debt that is crucial to understanding North Korean behaviour ever since” By 1948, the two areas of occupation had become separate states championing bitterly opposing ideologies: Kim Il-sung’s communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north, and Syngman Rhee’s western-aligned Republic of Korea in the south. Over the following two years, tensions between the two rivals increased inexorably until, on 25 June 1950, North Korean troops invaded their southern neighbour. Britain soon become one of many nations to pledge their military support to the United Nations force – led by the charismatic American general Douglas MacArthur – tasked with defending the south. The war took on a whole new – and far more dangerous – dimension when the People’s Republic of China entered the fray in October 1950 to support North Korea. In short, for Britain, the Cold War got considerably hot in 1950. And the situation would remain serious until, after three years of rapid advances, retreats and then grinding stalemate, an armistice was signed in July 1953. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/2-RIA10-738566-7121c6f.jpg" width="2210" height="3508" alt="The Labour councillor and anti-war campaigner Monica Felton, pictured in 1952. After Felton visited North Korea on a “fact- finding mission”, one Conservative MP suggested that she should be tried for treason. (Photo by Topfoto)" title="The Labour councillor and anti-war campaigner Monica Felton, pictured in 1952. After Felton visited North Korea on a “fact- finding mission”, one Conservative MP suggested that she should be tried for treason. (Photo by Topfoto)" /> At first, many Britons supported the government’s decision to throw its weight behind the UN intervention. But not Hewlett Johnson and Monica Felton. Johnson was a senior Church of England clergyman, known as the ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury because of his support for leftwing causes. A committed pacifist, he and others claimed that the United States was using aerial “germ warfare” against the enemy (historians now overwhelmingly believe that such claims weren’t based on any credible scientific fact.). One report accused US air forces of dropping diseased rodents over three Chinese provinces in 1952. Johnson himself visited China and attracted considerable attention – and derision – for siding with the communists, not least from others in the Church of England. The Kent Branch of the British Legion even discussed moving their Remembrance Day celebrations away from Canter-bury, so that this “avowed communist” would not take their service during this time of war. Dr Monica Felton was the chair of the Stevenage Development Corporation, the first female chair of one of Britain’s new postwar towns, and a Labour councillor. In spring 1951, she visited North Korea as part of a sponsored “fact-finding mission” and similarly accused American and South Korean forces of widespread brutality, with Britain standing by. Felton even later claimed that she had visited Korea “for Stevenage”, to protect the postwar vision “for a new and better kind of world”. Listen | Grace Huxford describes the key events of the Korean War and explains how it played out in Britain Felton’s vision attracted a storm of criticism. When she returned to Britain, she found she had been sacked by Hugh Dalton, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Others clamoured for a harsher punishment. Nigel Fisher, Conservative MP for Hitchin, argued that she should be indicted for treason. He stated in parliament that if, during the Second World War, “a British subject had gone to Germany, consorted with the enemy, returned to this country and spread Nazi propaganda here, it seems to me he could have been indicted for treason… What is the difference in this case?” And in 1951, the punishment for treason was still the death penalty. Felton escaped this fate, but she never returned to public service after her fateful visit to east Asia. The uncertain peace Felton and Johnson’s opposition to the Korean War – and the backlash that their opposition provoked – shines a light onto Britain’s view of its place in the world in the early 1950s. Britain at this time was adjusting uncertainly to peacetime and was concerned about what the new Cold War would bring. When it pledged its forces to the UN effort as part of an allied “police action” (as US president Harry Truman termed it), it was still recovering from the massive social and economic effects of the Second World War. Many staple items, such as tea, were still rationed, and on the outbreak of war in Korea, many British people worried that they would again have to fight. A few even considered redigging their Anderson shelters or hoarding food. Yet for all the fear and the fury of the summer of 1950, over the following three years something strange happened: the Korean War retreated in the public consciousness, mutating from a cause celebre to a bloody sideshow. When news of an armistice filtered back to Britain in July 1953, it was greeted with widespread indifference. One newspaper quipped that the public had shown more enthusiasm for the England cricket team’s victory over Australia in that summer’s Ashes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/3-Rex__7355510a-332f53c.jpg" width="2992" height="2144" alt="Survivors of the Gloucestershire Regiment after the battle of Imjin river, 1951, one of the fiercest clashes of Britain’s postwar history. (Photo by Jim Pringle/AP/REX/Shutterstock)" title="Survivors of the Gloucestershire Regiment after the battle of Imjin river, 1951, one of the fiercest clashes of Britain’s postwar history. (Photo by Jim Pringle/AP/REX/Shutterstock)" /> That general indifference was far from short-lived: it informed attitudes to the conflict in the following decades. With the notable exception of the sitcom Fawlty Towers (Basil Fawlty was probably the nation’s best-known Korean War veteran), few British novels, TV shows and films remembered Korea – and the war was commemorated by only a handful of national memorials. So why did a conflict that cost more than a thousand British lives not become a bigger part of British culture? Why are Hewlett Johnson and Monica Felton now footnotes in modern British history? In short, how did we forget the Korean War? One reason perhaps lies in its location. Unlike other areas of east Asia, Britain had few historic links with the Korean peninsula. Many British soldiers could not even find Korea on a map prior to 1950. Despite this, some British troops had encountered their Korean counterparts just a few years earlier – recalling their harsh treatment at the hands of Korean guards in Japanese PoW camps. But not even these bitter memories could prevent Korea from seeming incredibly remote to most Britons. Ambiguous aims Another potential reason why the Korean War failed to capture Britons’ imagination was its ambiguous aims. Britain pledged first naval and then land forces to support the UN mission in Korea, eventually forming a crucial part of the 1st Commonwealth Division from 28 July 1951. In a broadcast in 1950, Labour prime minister Clement Attlee implied that it was in Britons’ interests to face down aggression in the far east, just as they had done in the last war. He told the British people: “The fire that has been started in distant Korea may burn down your house.” Forging alliances: Britain and the US in the Korean War Attlee’s government is often better known for the foundation of the postwar welfare state, most famously its establishment of a National Health Service in 1948. Yet this reforming administration dealt in warfare as well as welfare, becoming embroiled in violence in Kenya, Palestine, Malaya, Greece – and, of course, Korea. Such wars did not fit within Britain’s postwar vision of itself, so Korea and other wars in the 1950s slipped through the net of British national memory. China turns the tables But what did combating aggression and supporting the UN actually look like? In the first half of the war, it clearly involved repelling the invasion. But from autumn 1950, having turned the North Korean invasion into a retreat, UN forces pressed on beyond the 38th Parallel. When China joined the war in the autumn of 1950, it turned the tables completely, forcing the UN troops back south of the 38th Parallel. MacArthur even talked of using nuclear weapons against China, something that caused significant trepidation in Britain. For Britain, the war looked even more troubling by April 1951, when British forces engaged in one of the most ferocious battles in its postwar history, at the Imjin river. This was the scene of the Gloucestershire Regiment’s famous ‘last stand’ on ‘Gloster Hill’ (Solma-Ri). Some 527 British soldiers were captured and marched north to prisoner of war camps. Among them was their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Carne, who was awarded the Victoria Cross on his release in 1953 for “gallant and distinguished service in Korea”. A naturally quiet man, Carne withstood months of solitary confinement as a PoW; a stone cross he carved is still on display in Gloucester Cathedral, testament to his bravery. While Carne and his fellow PoWs were being held captive, the nature of the war changed again. With the sweeping retreats and advances of the first year of the conflict being largely replaced by patrols and skirmishes around the frontline – amid lots of watching and waiting – the war now lacked the narrative arc to capture the public imagination. As a result, it gradually slid off the front pages of newspapers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/4-GettyImages-84010521-5362abb.jpg" width="3565" height="5298" alt="This photograph, taken by Bert Hardy for the Picture Post, shows political prisoners in South Korean custody, Pusan, September 1950. The Picture Post’s editor, Tom Hopkinson, was sacked for refusing to withdraw images of South Korean atrocities and poor conditions in UN-run camps. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="This photograph, taken by Bert Hardy for the Picture Post, shows political prisoners in South Korean custody, Pusan, September 1950. The Picture Post’s editor, Tom Hopkinson, was sacked for refusing to withdraw images of South Korean atrocities and poor conditions in UN-run camps. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Above all, there appeared to be a growing disconnect between the war’s stated objectives and the reality of what was unfolding on the ground. One soldier wrote in 1951 that “the events of spring have gone” and the “futility of it becomes more and more apparent every day”. Korea did not match up with his idea of what war should be. That sense of futility was only exacerbated by Britain’s recent experience of conflict. The Korean War was fought in a very long shadow – one cast by the Second World War. Keith Taylor remembered how the reservists in his battalion “had seen it all before”, having carved out distinguished careers between 1939 and 1945, and “one acknowledged their great experience”. Back in Britain, too, Korea was often compared with the struggle against Nazism: in July 1950, the social surveying organisation Mass Observation captured many responses that referenced the Blitz, mass mobilisation and fears about the prospect of returning to air-raid shelters. Aerial bombing was never a real possibility, but that didn’t stop people feeling that it was. In comparison with the vast scale and clear moral imperatives of the fight against fascism, the Korean War appeared ambiguous and distant. Thirst for drama Of course, this sense of remoteness and futility didn’t apply to everyone. For many of Britain’s National Service conscripts, Korea offered a break from the monotony of their temporary military life. Lieutenant Gary Smith wrote to his family that the outbreak of war “is a wonderful opportunity to travel which I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise” and was desperate to get to Korea before it was “just policing”. For many, this thirst for drama went unquenched. As early as July 1951, the two sides had begun to negotiate, discussions that seemed to stretch on and on. One particular sticking point was the repatriation of prisoners of war: should Chinese and North Korean PoWs held by the UN be automatically repatriated back to their home countries when many had been forced to fight in the first place? China (and the Geneva Convention) suggested yes, but the UN forces were reluctant. The experience of British prisoners of war would have a particular cultural and political impact domestically. After their repatriation, military authorities interviewed many former British PoWs and began to hear more about their experiences. Some had been forced to take part in extraordinary ‘re-education’ classes in Chinese-run camps, asked to produce ‘confessions’, keep diaries and even take part in classes on the communist system. Most took this ‘re-education’ with good humour or bemusement, but some listened. One, Royal Marine Andrew Condron, even opted to travel to China at the end of the war to see a communist society in action. In 1961, it was discovered that British diplomat and secret service agent George Blake, who had been imprisoned during the Korean War, had become a Soviet double agent. His dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 caused even greater consternation, and led many to ask: what exactly had happened in those camps? A new word emerged that would have a long cultural afterlife. In 1950, American writer Edward Hunter wrote of “brainwashing”, a term based on the Chinese word hsi-nao, to describe these mind-control methods. While the scientific community largely distanced itself from this idea, its cultural power was immense: it featured in films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Ipcress File (1965) and was repeatedly used by politicians, commentators and ordinary people throughout the late 20th century to describe seemingly inexplicable changes in viewpoint. It remains one of the most enduring legacies of the Korean War today. There were other sensational stories that brought the Korean War briefly back to the front pages. Tom Hopkinson, the editor of the magazine Picture Post, was sacked for refusing to withdraw photographs of atrocities committed by South Korean forces and poor conditions in UN-run PoW camps. Opposition to the Korean War was an important prelude to the oppositional politics of the peace movement – most obviously the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which organised its first Aldermaston March in 1958. But, for all this, the anti-Korean War movement never gained the same momentum as the anti-nuclear or anti-Vietnam War campaigns. In the words of the historian Charles Young, the war’s subtleties and ambiguities failed to offer a “usable past” in the way that other 20th-century conflicts did. A sharp contrast The uneasy armistice signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 did little to provide clarity. In fact, as no peace treaty was signed, the war technically continues to this day. Soldiers returned home to “utter apathy on the part of the public”, the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer noted. Popular culture dwelt little on the experiences of Korean War veterans. There was but one British film on the war: A Hill in Korea (1956), starring a young Michael Caine, fresh back from National Service in Korea himself. Many veterans did not seek out their comrades again until they were retired, forming the British Korean Veterans Association in 1981. Some returned to the Korean peninsula, where they marvelled not only at South Korea’s economic progress in the decades after the war but the generous reception they were given by the country’s people. It contrasted sharply with their remembrance back in Britain. But despite decades of oversight, there are tentative signs that Britain’s amnesia over the Korean War is clearing. December 2014 saw the unveiling of a memorial to the conflict on London’s Victoria Embankment, and Korea has gained greater visibility in drama and television – even producing a traumatised veteran in Call the Midwife. Few people still know the names of Monica Felton and Hewlett Johnson. But their stories tell us something of how the Korean War influenced life back in Britain. In Stevenage, a pair of almond trees planted in Felton’s memory forms one of the only reminders of this fascinating chapter in Britain’s Cold War history. Grace Huxford is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Bristol. Her book The Korean War in Britain: Citizenship, Selfhood and Forgetting was published by MUP in 2018 This article was first published in the July 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
Grace Huxford describes the key events of the Korean War and explains how it played out in Britain
On the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, historian Grace Huxford describes the key events of the conflict and explains how it played out in Britain. The Korean War “created a blood debt that is crucial to understanding North Korean behaviour ever since” Forging alliances: Britain and the US in the Korean War
How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world
Atom bombs have been used in war just twice in history – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War Two. The results of this attack were so devastating that the threat of nuclear attack has shaped global politics ever since, says author Jeremy Black. He explores 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world...
What did not happen can be just as important, if not more so, than what did. A good example is provided by atomic weaponry. Nuclear bombs have never been used since 1945 – when they played a key role in ending the Second World War – yet they have shaped the post-war world. They were a cornerstone of the Cold War, helping ensure that rising tensions did not escalate to full-scale hostilities. During that period the creation of intercontinental nuclear forces capable of destroying the planet helped transfix the collective imagination, coloured public fears, and placed a heavy burden on leading economies. Nuclear capability casts a shadow over international relations to this day, and is central to modern pressure on so-called “rogue states”, such as North Korea. 1948: The Berlin Crisis As the Soviet Union became increasingly assertive in Europe, so the USA became more committed to its defence of Western European democracy. The Berlin Crisis was triggered by the Soviet decision to blockade West Berlin, which was occupied by British, American and French forces as part of the post-war settlement. In response, alongside an Anglo-American airlift of supplies into the city, America stationed B-29 long-range bombers in Britain, planning to drop atom bombs on the Soviet Union in the event of war. The Soviets had no nuclear capability at the time and the threat of attack helped bring a solution to the crisis. The bombers, however, remained. A brief history of Checkpoint Charlie – the famous Berlin Wall spot 1952: America tests the hydrogen bomb The USA believed it had reasserted its nuclear primacy when it tested the first hydrogen bomb, destroying the Pacific island of Elugelab. The bomb employed a nuclear explosion that heated hydrogen isotopes sufficiently to fuse them into helium atoms, a transformation that released far more destructive energy than the atom bomb. US superiority, however, was short-lived: Britain became the third atomic power in 1952, while the Soviet Union developed its own H-bomb in 1953. Debate: Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? 1949: The Soviet Union acquires the bomb Successful spying on Western nuclear technology enabled the Soviet Union to complete its development of an effective nuclear bomb. At a stroke, the USA’s nuclear monopoly, which appeared to offer the Americans a means to coerce the Soviets, came to an end. This development had required a formidable effort, as the Soviet Union was devastated by the impact of the Second World War. It was pursued because Stalin believed that only nuclear parity would permit the Soviet Union to protect and advance its interests. However, the policy was seriously harmful to the economy, as it led to a distortion of research and investment choices. It was also militarily questionable, as the Soviets used resources that might otherwise have developed their conventional capability. Listen | Historian Saul David revisits one of the bloodiest clashes of the Pacific War and explains how it played a crucial part in the United States’ decision to use atomic weapons against Japan Listen | Taylor Downing discusses the Able Archer scare, which nearly witnessed global Armageddon 1957: Launch of Sputnik I The launch by the Soviet Union of the first satellite to go into orbit revealed a capability for intercontinental rockets that brought the entire world within striking range, and thus made the USA vulnerable to attack. In strategic terms, rockets threatened to realise the doctrine, so often advanced in the 1920s and 1930s, that air power is a war-winning tool; at the same time, they rendered the nuclear capability of the slower bombers of the American Strategic Air Command obsolete. This new capability made investment in expensive rocket technology seem essential, altering the character of both anti-nuclear defence and nuclear deterrence. In the USA, President Eisenhower was alerted to the increased threat to national security by a secret report from the Gaither Committee. In their own words: the team behind Apollo 11 describe the 1969 mission to the Moon 1960: First successful underwater firing of a Polaris intercontinental ballistic missile Submarines could be based near the coast of target states, and were highly mobile and hard to detect. As a result, the firing of a ballistic missile by the American submarine, USS George Washington, off Cape Canaveral, Florida, represented a shift in force structure, away from the air force and towards the navy. The navy argued that its submarines could launch carefully-controlled strikes, permitting more sophisticated deterrence and retaliation management. Other states followed. Also in 1960, France became the fourth power to possess an atom bomb. 1987: Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty This was the first major step to remove the threat of nuclear war in Europe. Cold War tensions had increased throughout the early 1980s, as fears of Soviet aggression led NATO to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, carried on Cruise and Pershing intermediate-range missiles. The treaty banned land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,000 kilometres, and also set up a system of verification through on-site inspection. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, was willing to challenge the confrontational world view outlined in KGB reports. He was convinced that American policy on arms control was not motivated by a hidden agenda of weakening the Soviet Union, and this encouraged him to negotiate with the West. Did the Cold War ever really end? 1962: Cuban missile crisis The world came close to nuclear war as the Soviet Union deployed missiles in Cuba, a Communist state being threatened by the USA. With Washington in range of these missiles, the USA imposed an air and naval quarantine to prevent the shipping of further Soviet supplies. It also considered an attack on Cuba, and threatened a full retaliatory nuclear strike if the Soviet missiles were fired. The prospect of nuclear war may have helped prevent conventional military operations, which would have begun with a US air attack on the Soviet bases on Cuba. In the eventual agreement, the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles; in return, the USA withdrew their Jupiter missiles from their ally Turkey, and agreed not to invade Cuba. During the Berlin Crisis of the previous year, President Kennedy had reaffirmed the willingness to use atomic weaponry even if the Soviets did not, as West Berlin was particularly vulnerable to Soviet conventional attack. 1970: USA deploys Minuteman III missiles Equipped with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), which had first been tested in 1968, these missiles benefited from a greatly enhanced strike capacity. As a consequence, warhead numbers, and thus the potential destructiveness of a nuclear exchange, rose greatly. This was part of the race to enhance nuclear capability, which also saw the Americans cutting the response time of their land-based intercontinental missiles by developing the Titan II missile. The Titan had storable liquid propellants, which enabled in-silo launches and therefore improved the reaction time of the missiles in the event of a nuclear conflict. 1972: Anti-ballistic missile treaty SALT I, a treaty between the USA and the Soviet Union, was a major attempt to diminish the possibility of nuclear war. The treaty limited the construction of defensive shields against missile attack to two anti-ballistic missile complexes, one around a concentration of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the other around the capital. By leaving both powers vulnerable, SALT I was designed to discourage a first strike, on the basis that there would be no effective defence against a counter strike. Thus, atomic weaponry was to be used to prevent, not to further, nuclear war. The treaty, which limited the two powers’ nuclear arsenal, also served as the basis for further negotiations which led to the SALT II treaty in 1979. The Third Reich’s nuclear programme: Churchill’s greatest wartime fear 2003: Pakistan and India test-fire short-range surface-to-surface missiles The nuclear strength of these powers became more of a problem as Cold War tensions ebbed and as they developed their missile forces. India had possessed atomic weapons from 1974 and Pakistan from 1988, but they displayed their weaponry more openly as national rivalry grew in the wake of clashes over Kashmir in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Both nations publicly tested nuclear weapons in 1998. That year, Pakistan test-fired its new Ghauri intermediate-range missile, while, in 1999, India fired its new long-range Agni 2 missile: its range extended to Tehran and most of China and South-East Asia. Both countrys’ short-range, surface-to-surface missiles, tested in 2003, were able to carry nuclear warheads. Jeremy Black is the author of Using History (Hodder Arnold, 2005) This article was first published in the August 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine
Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past?
As Covid-19 dominates the news, read our interview with Laura Spinney (author of Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic known as Spanish flu) from the HistoryExtra podcast. In the interview, Spinney draws historical parallels with other pandemics in history and asks what we might learn from disease outbreaks in the past
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Coronavirus – a historical perspective Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Obviously, Coronavirus is something that’s hitting a lot of headlines at the moment. Why does it strike such a chord, why are we so afraid of pandemics? Laura Spinney: Well, I think it’s something very primitive in us really. I mean, we’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease, plagues if you like, to use a more kind of ancient and Biblical term, since we settled down in kind of semi-permanent settlements, since we started farming, that is, about 10, 12,000 years ago. And, you know, these diseases that kind of adapted to big groups of densely-living people, we call them the crowd diseases, and they kind of evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So it’s been a kind of arms race for a very long time, they know us very well and unfortunately because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to be a step ahead. They can just mutate and adapt and, you know, they’re just wherever we don’t want them to be before we can do anything about it and we’re seeing that again now. In some ways, there are many aspects, I think, of a pandemic which don’t change over time. There are many that do but there are many that don’t and those are the ones that speak to our, obviously speak to our most ancient fears. ME: And, of course, it’s natural for humans to look back at past examples of a similar thing to see if there’s any parallels or any lessons that could be drawn. Do you think there are particular pandemics from history that are most useful to look at in terms of parallels or is it just not a useful exercise generally? LS: No, I do think it’s a useful exercise, I just don’t know why we immediately rush to pick the worst possible example. Given that the Spanish Flu, or the not Spanish Flu, we should really call it the 1918 Flu, was pretty much forgotten for most of the last century, even though it killed a staggering 50 to 100 million people, the fact that we’re now, everybody’s talking about it, that’s the only parallel we can draw is somewhat ironic. I mean, if you just think about flu pandemics because obviously we’ve had pandemics of other diseases, although flu does tend to be considered the disease that lends itself most easily to pandemics, we have had three flu pandemics since 1918 and none of them killed more than about four million people. The last one we had was sometimes considered rather anti-climactic, if that’s not a politically-incorrect thing to say, given that lots of people died nevertheless. But 600,000 people died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic which is considerably less than in any other pandemic. So there are other kinds, other leagues of pandemics that we could be comparing it with and that we’re not. Why was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu? Portraits of a plague: the 19th-century pandemic that killed 12 million people ME: So is there a more useful historical parallel to draw? LS: Well, that’s the killer question, isn’t it? The thing is, there’s so much we don’t know about this bug yet. We don’t know, for example, exactly how lethal it is. And the other problem is that we don’t really know how lethal, for example, the Spanish Flu was, for different reasons. We don’t know how lethal this current one is because we don’t have very much data yet. So you might have seen a figure floating around of a case fatality rate of 3.4%, which refers to the proportion of people who catch the Covid-19 infection who go on to die of it. The number that’s often quoted for the Spanish Flu, for example, case fatality rate is 2.5% but it’s a very, very, very controversial figure because the numbers are so vague. I mean, we think that probably 50 million people died but there was no form of reliable test at the time so we can’t be sure about that and that just throws all the numbers out. So it’s really difficult to make the historical comparisons, even if you have accurate data now, which we don’t. So on both sides of the equation, if you like, it’s a moving target. ME: The other side of this, of course, is although we may not be able to draw historical parallels with a specific pandemic, there is something perhaps to be gained from how people dealt with them or how they reacted to them at the time. Are there useful parallels in terms of that? LS: Yes, there are. So we would obviously love to have a vaccine against Covid-19 now but we don’t and we may have to wait a year to 18 months for that. They had no vaccine at all in 1918. Or rather, they did make vaccines but they were useless, pretty much, because they were essentially vaccines against bacteria in the respiratory tract whereas, as we know, flu is a viral disease. So in terms of that, we are much advanced compared to 1918. But we don’t have that vaccine yet. We so have anti-viral drugs for treating the sick and we do have antibiotics which will be useful for treating the bacterial complications that may cause pneumonia in some cases, as they did also in 1918, interestingly. But the only thing that actually stops people falling sick is the vaccine and we won’t have that for a while. So what do we have? We have strategies of containment, strategies that are collectively known as social distancing. And those are surprisingly unchanged since 1918, or even since much, much before that. I mean, they’re basically things like quarantine, isolation, wearing masks, although masks have always been debateable. It depends on the pathogen but once again, it’s looking like they may not be as effective as we hoped they would be. And hand washing is another thing. Basically, any kind of barrier technique that keeps the sick and the healthy apart and therefore reduces disease transmission. Because it’s looking pretty much now, at this stage, with the WHO having declared the pandemic, that it was a pandemic yesterday, as if containment is not going to work very well, if at all. And so what the governments are moving to now is more a sort of delay tactic, which will push off the peak of the epidemic, hopefully, until later in the year, towards the summer. And what everyone’s pinning their hopes on is that this bug will be a sort of seasonal bug, a bit like flu, and will kind of recede when the warm weather comes. At the very least, they want to push off that peak while the health systems are already coping with many other winter respiratory conditions and so try and lessen the burden on them. But basically, whether you delay or whether you contain, as long as you’re before the sort of mitigate stage, which is where Italy and South Korea and Iran are, you know, they’ve got widespread community transmission and they’re just trying to treat everybody and, you know, reduce morbidity and mortality as much as they can. We’re the step before. But essentially the techniques for delaying that peak of the pandemic are pretty much the same as containment and they all involve social distancing. So that’s where we are, and that’s a long-winded way of saying that historical parallels are useful there because the techniques for containment were the same in, for example, 1918 or 1957 when we had another flu pandemic, or 1968 or 2009 and today, they’re all the same. ME: To what extent does today’s transmission of the panic or of the media coverage of this epidemic compare to that of 1918, say? LS: Well, I think it is different. I mean, fake news is not a new phenomenon, fake news is as old the hills. But, you know, with the advent of the internet, the speed and the volume of both information and fake information that we can transmit have just, you know, been amplified to an extraordinary level. So we’re dealing with the disadvantages and the advantages of that. In 1918, you know, most people read the newspapers, that’s how they got their news, so it was a slower medium. And then, on top of that, there was a war on, at least for the first part of the pandemic and so you had things like wartime censorship interfering with things. And many countries, at least at the beginning of the pandemic tried to suppress the information that they had this illness spreading in their populations because they didn’t want to supposedly lower morale of their populations while everybody was concentrated on the war effort. And of course, that slowed down, you know, even if they had had techniques for dealing with this disease, it would have slowed down any response beyond any hopeful stage. Because one of the key things you need to do with an epidemic is to stop it or to contain it as early as you can. Because you get this kind of exponential growth in cases at the beginning because everybody is susceptible to this bug. ME: I’m really interested in the other social forces that might have changed since earlier pandemics. Organised religion, for instance, seemed to have played a big role in the past but doesn’t so much today, is that right? LS: Yeah, I think so. And I think that also has a positive negative aspect to it. So for example, to start with the positive, in 1918, doctors were pretty useless in the sense that they had nothing in their medicine cabinets really to offer, apart from aspirin. In fact, the people on the sort of conventional medicine side who were the most useful were nurses. They’re the only ones who can make any difference between life and death by keeping patients warm and hydrated and so on. But because doctors really had nothing to offer and because they were nevertheless, in many cases, very brave and, you know, in the front line and falling sick in droves themselves and often dying, others had to step into the breach and perform that kind of, if not doctor, then nursing role. And very often you saw it was priests and nurses and, you know, other people from the main faiths, or even the lesser faiths. So on the positive side there was that. "Far too little, too late": what happened when Spanish Flu hit Britain a century ago? Could flu really kill thousands again? On the negative side, because I think organised religion was much more powerful, they could have a nefarious effect on the messaging occasionally. I mean, you would always hope that the powerful leaders and the powerful influencers will, you know, coincide with the message that reinforces the public health message. But that didn’t always happen. So I can give you the example of Zamora, which is a town in north-western Spain, which was and in fact still is, very pious Catholic city. And there was a very charismatic, very influential bishop there at the time who basically just defied the provincial authorities. And at the height of the pandemic, in the autumn of 1918, ordered his flock into the churches to pray for forgiveness for their sins, which he insisted was the cause of this terrible punishment, divine punishment. And so everybody crowded into the churches and made their prayers to St Roch, who is the patron saint of pestilence and plagues. And that meant lining up to kiss his relics, everybody kissing the same relic. And Zamora went on to record one of the highest death rates from that flu in the whole of Spain, if not in the whole of Europe. So, you know, very kind of clear effect there. And I think today, you know, you do see the effect of religion but it’s very kind of marginal. So there are reports of people in the Iranian shrine city of Qom licking the shrine defiantly. And we hear that some of the early clusters in South Korea came from churches. But, generally speaking, there has been much less of an effect of organised religion, I think. ME: Is that the mechanism by which people in the past would have found out about pandemics or would they have learnt about it from another source? LS: I mean, I think that if your community leader was also your religious leader, that was quite often the way you found out about it, was probably also the source you looked to for guidance and how to live through this terrible thing and how to mitigate it, if possible. Of course, there were much higher levels of illiteracy in the world at that time, even in the supposedly advanced countries. And so that was much more of a feature, literate people obviously read newspapers but that wasn’t necessarily the most common means of information moving around, no. ME: Another way in which the world is different today is that it’s much more globalised and much more interconnected. Do you think that makes it much harder or even impossible to contain or stop such pandemics as this? LS: Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it? I mean, as soon as the WHO declared, because the WHO declared a pandemic yesterday but it had already declared a global health emergency on the 30th of January. And, you know, that was the step that unlocked its maximum resources and powers for dealing with this disaster. The word pandemic, it depends who you ask, did it matter that declaration yesterday? I think the WHO made it because it was worried that people were being too complacent and not acting in time, and previously they were trying to avoid panic, which is also counterproductive. But they declared a global health emergency on 30 January and, at the same time as they did that, they basically put out the advice not to close borders because we know it doesn’t work, we’ve learnt it over and over again through previous pandemics. And many countries promptly did exactly that. And now what they’re finding is that the virus is inside their countries and they are less than prepared for it. So not only did it not help, I think, it also meant that they were more on the back foot when it came to actually beginning testing and detecting and all the rest of it that goes into good containment which, you know, maybe it’s too late for that anyway. So are we globalised, of course we are. There was no commercial, there were no commercial air flights in 1918 and so the fastest people got around was by steam ship or train. And now, you know, a person and the germ they’re carrying, can travel round the world in days, if not hours. And, you know, we’ve seen the lightning speed with which this germ has got around the world. And so I think, I don't know, you know, perhaps we could have slowed it down but we also know that screening at entry and exit points is less than completely effective. Not only because there’s a question over whether people may be infected and asymptomatic but mainly because there’s an incubation period, which is on average three to five days, can be up to 14. So that means people can be infected but they’re not yet showing the symptoms and if they’re travelling across a border in those three to five days, then fever screening, temperature screening won’t pick them up. Spanish Flu: the virus that changed the world 10 facts about the Black Death ME: You mentioned national borders there, and alluded earlier to the idea that Spanish Flu got that name, and perhaps we shouldn’t call it that. What does that name tell us about this part of the story? LS: So it’s called the Spanish Flu because when it first manifested itself in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 1918, the world was still at war and the belligerent nations, which already had flu within their boundaries and they included the US, Britain and France, kept that information out of their newspapers, they were censoring them. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the stated goal, or the later stated goal being to protect the morale of their populations. And so even their populations weren’t necessarily aware that there was flu in their midst. Spain, on the other hand, was neutral in the war and so didn’t censor its press and so when they had the first cases there, in the spring of 1918, they reported them. And so it seemed to the whole world, including the Spanish, including people in the other countries that were already infected, that this disease was rolling out from Madrid. And the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, was among those early cases, he went onto recover, but his case sort of lent it a great deal of visibility. Of course, it’s unhelpful. One of the few certainties we have about that pandemic is that it didn’t start in Spain, we actually don’t know where it did start but we know it didn’t start in Spain. And the Spanish felt, and to a very great degree were, stigmatised by it. In 2015, the WHO put out guidelines for how to name a disease and I think the motivation for that was mainly to avoid this kind of stigmatisation, this kind of kneejerk naming of a disease after the place it appears to first manifest itself, or the sector of the population or the animal it first appears in. because remember, 2009, H1N1 flu was initially called swine flu. You could think about AIDS which was initially called gay-related immune deficiency and stigmatised the homosexual community, unhelpfully for everybody, including heterosexuals, who nobody thought about how it might be being transmitted in that community. Meanwhile homosexuals were getting stigmatised for being the ones who transmitted it, so it was unhelpful to everybody. The swine flu name was unhelpful in many ways, for example, the Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the country’s swine herd, which was mainly the property of the minority of Coptic Christians in that country, so their local economy was wiped out in one stroke. And in fact, by the time it was in humans, it was a disease that was being transmitted from human to human so it made no difference either. And in fact, to go back a little bit further in history, that swine flu was given to pigs by humans in 1918. So it came back from pigs to humans in 2009, you know, ironic historical reprisal. So naming doesn’t help. And this time, I think, it’s really interesting and one of the small things we can applaud ourselves for is that we have not given this outbreak a stigmatising name. It’s not the Chinese Flu, it’s not the Pangolin Flu, it’s Covid-19, which may sound mundane but it’ll do the job. ME: Do you think the responses to this particular pandemic in various parts of the world tell us about historical situations in those countries or historical pandemics in those countries? LS: So one of the things that public health experts are absolutely clear about is that the best way to impose a public health, a set of public health measures is not to impose them in the authoritarian way that the Chinese did. But if you can possibly manage it, to have people complying with you voluntarily, because you’re much more likely to be able to contain that disease that way. People don’t like to be told what to do. But if you want people to comply with you voluntarily two things are needed. The first is they have to be properly informed about the threat they face, so that they understand why you’re asking them to do these things and to restrict their normal lives in certain ways. And the second thing is they have to trust the authorities, they have to trust that those authorities are acting in their collective interest. And the thing is, that if that trust isn’t there when the pandemic breaks out, then it’s too late to build it. So I think you could look, for example, at the case of South Africa in 1918, where as in many other countries, when the epidemic arrived, doctors and scientists scrambled to produce a vaccine. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the candidates, the vaccines they developed were fairly, uniformly, useless because they were against bacteria and not the virus. But they launched a national, a nation-wide vaccination campaign and white South Africans dutifully lined up to get the vaccine and black South Africans basically boycotted it. Because white, the predominantly white doctors had never shown much interest in their health before and they couldn’t understand why they were doing so now. And there were rumours that circulated in the black population that the doctors were trying to kill them with their long needles. So, you know, that’s a very clear and graphic illustration, I think, of how if the trust is not there, if you don’t believe that the authorities and the doctors coming towards you in their white coats are acting in your interest, then you will not do what they want you to do, certainly not voluntarily. ME: The Spanish Flu destabilised social and political orders for decades, do you think that that is possible in this case? LS: Well, yeah, it’s certainly possible. You can already see the economic damage it’s doing and people have a tendency to look at their governments after some terrible disaster and to hold them responsible for what happened. So, you know political consequences are also possible. And then when you’ve got the two things together in concert, if the economy suffers then the politicians are likely to be blamed for that as well. Of course, the politicians are doing their best to shift the blame. I mean, you saw Mr Trump’s announcement yesterday that he was restricting travel to the United States from Europe with the heavy suggestion that Europe had somehow mismanaged the disaster in the same way, or just as badly as the Chinese had, to, you know, reproduce his narrative. Whereas the plain fact of the matter is that the disease is already in the United States, there have been reports that they haven’t been testing for it properly. So the problem is very much theirs as much as it is Europe’s. But Mr Trump has decided to play a political game with it and I’m sure that’s not unconnected to the fact that there is a presidential election coming up this year. Listen | Catharine Arnold explores the story of the Spanish Flu outbreak that caused devastation across the globe a century ago ME: Finally, what lessons do you wish that we would learn from the past, but don’t, and why do you think we don’t learn from them? LS: Well, I think the lessons we should learn in a very general sense are to try and, because we go through this cycle of panic and complacency. So we panic when it happens, when we should think calmly and rationally and just do, you know, what the experts tell us to do. And then when it’s passed, we immediately forget about it and become complacent again and don’t do any of the long-term things that the experts ask us to do. So for example, when the WHO declared its global health emergency on 30 January, it even took that opportunity to repeat a message that it’s been saying for a long time, which is we need to invest in the long-term in better health infrastructure in the poorer parts of the world, because when a pandemic strikes, we are only as safe as our least-safe place. So, you know, we should be doing things like that, when the pandemic passes, which of course it will, eventually. Will we remember to do that? I very much hope so. I think this pandemic is throwing up other things which are really interesting which we should take on board and discuss when it’s passed, how to fix to so they’re not weaknesses again. I can mention two. I mean, I think the first is how we get our news out. The fake news problem. A lot of young people have said to me the problem is that good information is behind paywalls where as fake news is free. The assumption there is that they shouldn’t have to pay for the information and I think older generations were used to paying for their news but that’s not the expectation with the internet anymore. So we desperately need a new business model, we’ve been talking about that for a while in news circles but I think this pandemic has really thrown it into relief how important it is that we have ways to get quality information out there and that people know which is which. So that’s one thing. And my list is not exhaustive, by the way. Another thing that I think is really interesting is that it’s showing up the weaknesses in our various health systems, national health systems. So the problem in the United States has been that lots of people have been excluded from testing and from care, and not just for this pandemic but this pandemic is really highlighting that. A lot of people were not getting access to Covid-19 testing when they needed it. And of course, you can’t control an outbreak of disease if you don't know who’s got it and who they’ve been in contact with. On our side, in Europe, where we have more socialised medical healthcare systems, which by the way, were the kind of fruit of the 1918 pandemic, when they realised how important this was. Our systems tend to be paid for indirectly by taxes or insurance, national insurance schemes and we get our healthcare free at the point of delivery. So that means that, in theory, anyone can get tested for Covid-19, assuming the tests are available. There have been some reports that they haven’t been but that’s another problem. But the problem is that our health systems are completely overloaded. They are arguably no longer fit for purpose. They were built for much smaller and much younger populations and they’re struggling to support older and bigger populations and not doing very well. So we may have to have a rethink on our side about how we fund our health systems and how we adapt them, going forward, for a different kind of population. So those are just two things that I think that we could be thinking about in the long term, once this pandemic passes. Listen to the full podcast interview with Laura Spinney here Matt Elton is the editor of BBC World Histories Magazine Laura Spinney is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer
As COVID-19 dominates the news, Laura Spinney asks what we might learn from pandemics in the past
As COVID-19 dominates the news, Laura Spinney draws historical parallels with other pandemics in history and asks what we might learn from disease outbreaks in the past Read our transcript of the podcast interview here Why was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu?