There were roughly 725,000 reported cases of mosquito-borne disease among American troops during the war, including approximately 575,000 cases of malaria, 122,000 cases of dengue, and 14,000 cases of filariasis. Mosquito-borne disease equated to 3.3 million soldier sick days. It is estimated that 60% of all Americans stationed in the Pacific contracted malaria at least once. Famous wartime recipients include naval lieutenant John F. Kennedy, war correspondent Ernie Pyle, and Private Charles Kuhl. In August 1943 during the Allied invasion of Sicily, Kuhl was one of two soldiers famously slapped by an enraged General George S. Patton, who accused them of cowardice for faking “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” With a soaring temperature of 102.2 degrees, Kuhl was in fact suffering from and subsequently diagnosed with malaria. The Axis military records are spotty when it comes to statistics on mosquito-borne disease. Based on the best estimates, though, they were comparable to Allied infection rates, if not slightly higher.
Allied servicemen, particularly in the Pacific theater, were drowning in mosquito-borne disease, which prompted a pacing General Douglas MacArthur, commander of US Army Forces in the Far East, to ominously thunder, “This will be a long war if for every division I have facing the enemy, I must count on a second division in the hospital with malaria, and a third division convalescing from this debilitating disease!” The carpet bombing of tiny volcanic atolls during the American island-hopping campaign across the Pacific increased the breeding grounds, and mosquito populations boomed. The 1st Marine Division was gutted by malaria during the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal, nicknamed “Operation Pestilence,” during which 60,000 cases of malaria were reported among US forces. Following the Japanese evacuation in February 1943, it was evident that the Japanese had also been swimming in malarial fevers. Nearly 80% of Australian and New Zealand troops in Papua New Guinea contracted malaria, whereas Japanese troops on Saipan were shredded by malaria during the American invasion in the summer of 1944. In Bataan, the mosquito sided with Japan and reduced the American defenders and their Filipino allies to skeletons, with thousands marching to their deaths on the way to ramshackle POW camps, where many more suffered the same fate.
“Operation Pestilence”: A member of the 1st Marine Division (US) being evacuated with malaria during the Battle of Guadalcanal, September 1942. Over 60,000 cases of malaria were reported among US forces between August 1942 and February 1943 during the Guadalcanal Campaign. (Library of Congress)
Led by malariologist Dr. Paul Russell, who had MacArthur’s ear and backing, blanket DDT spraying in the Pacific and Italy began in 1943. Upon their first meeting, MacArthur stood up and squarely muttered, “Doctor, I have a real problem with malaria.” Russell, who only three days earlier was stateside, did not realize that MacArthur had personally summoned him by wiring the chief of staff, General George Marshall, the simple plea, “Find Dr. Russell. Send him to me.” Early on in New Guinea, Russell was approached by a hardened infantry commander who snorted, “If you want to play with mosquitoes go back to Washington and stop bothering me, I’m busy getting ready to fight the Japs.” Another passerby chimed in, “We are here to kill Japs and to hell with mosquitoes.” When Russell informed MacArthur of the exchange, it was the officer who was sent packing.
American Malaria Survey Units were on the ground in MacArthur’s areas of operation by March 1943, spraying DDT, sanitizing mosquito breeding grounds, and swamping GIs with atabrine and advertisements. Soldiers joked that if they so much as spilled even a drop of water or spit on the dirt, within seconds “a dipstick” appeared out of thin air to suck it up or spray it down. The “mosquito chasers” also spread almost 12 million gallons of kerosene oil on mosquito breeding grounds across the Pacific, the rough equivalent of the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. By the end of 1944, more than 4,000 “mosquito-killers” were active at 2,070 camps in over 900 war areas. It appeared DDT was unstoppable. American production increased from 153,000 pounds in 1943 to 36 million in 1945. At last we had found our war-winning ammunition against mosquitoes. While DDT targeted mosquitoes, an educational component of the Malaria Project was trained on the troops themselves. Across the Pacific (and other malarious fronts) a torrent of mosquito-driven propaganda complemented and reinforced Russell’s eradication teams absorbed in their mission of drowning mosquitoes in DDT.
The Malaria Project: An American soldier being showered with DDT, 1945. During the Second World War, DDT was an indispensable weapon in the war against mosquitoes, waged by the US Division of Tropical Medicine and its Malaria Survey Units known as “Mosquito Brigades” or “Dipstick Soldiers.” DDT proved to be a lifesaving mosquito-killing chemical. (Public Health Image Library-CDC)
Walt Disney’s 1943 malaria prevention film, The Winged Scourge, with cameos by Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, was a howling hit among troops. The lusty mosquito handbook This is Ann: She’s Dying to Meet You was also released in 1943 to great acclaim and became a favored GI bedtime story. The hypersexualized pamphlet was penned and illustrated by none other than Dr. Seuss. His risqué mosquito was personified as a tangible yet tantalizing succubus, seductress, and local village prostitute who ensnares and feeds on eager, unprotected troops. “Ann really gets around. Her full name is Anopheles Mosquito and her trade is dishing out Malaria. . . . She works hard and Ann—knows her stuff. . . . Ann moves around at night, anytime from dusk to sunrise (a real party gal), and she’s got a thirst. No whisky, gin, beer, or rum coke for Ann . . . she drinks Blood. . . . By and by Ann wants Just another little drink and off she goes looking for a sap who hasn’t got sense enough to protect himself.”
“This is Ann . . . she drinks blood! Her full name is Anopheles Mosquito and she’s dying to meet you!”: This 1943 flyer was one of many malaria/mosquito posters and pamphlets created for the Special Service Division’s war animation department by Captain Theodor Seuss Geisel, our beloved Dr. Seuss, warning troops about the dangers of mosquitoes while promoting protective and defensive measures. The map outlines the geographic range of malaria. Ann, a hypersexualized, risqué mosquito, makes frequent appearances in his wartime print and screen animation. (U.S. National Library of Medicine)
During the war, Captain Theodor Seuss Geisel, our beloved Dr. Seuss, created numerous posters, pamphlets, and training films on the dangers of “Ann” for the war animation department.* While she could not compete with the likes of Rita, Betty, or Jane, the pinup mosquito model and actress Ann makes frequent appearances in Seuss’s wartime work, including a starring role in three mosquito-themed, sexually stylized episodes of Geisel’s comical instructional military cartoon Private Snafu (slang GI acronym for “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up”). The popular animated series produced by Warner Bros. was infused with Looney Tunes music and the familiar voice of Mel Blanc, voice actor of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig.
Hundreds of cartoons, pamphlets, and posters marketing and advertising the dangers of mosquitoes and malaria were produced for Special Services throughout the war. To grab the attention of female-starved GIs, many, like those of Dr. Seuss, were highly suggestive. A half-naked beautiful, buxom woman covered a billboard in New Guinea with a four-word caption REMEMBER THIS, TAKE ATABRINE! Similar billboards depicting naked women with comparable messages greeted troops across the Pacific, Italy, and the Middle East. Others painted mosquitoes as bucktoothed, slanted-eyed Japanese squinting through round glasses. General MacArthur lauded the combined efforts of both the malaria propaganda crusade and Russell’s DDT mosquito crews to eliminate disease and curtail its draining effect on his operational manpower. MacArthur “was not at all worried about defeating the Japanese,” recalled Russell, “but he was greatly concerned about the failure up to that time to defeat the Anopheles mosquito.”
“Is Your Organization Prepared to Fight Both Enemies?”: A highly racist American antimalaria poster from the Pacific theater during the Second World War highlights the lethality of the mosquito and her infl
uence on fighting efficiency and combat strength. There were roughly 725,000 reported cases of mosquito-borne disease among American troops during the war. (U.S. National Archives)
Like his American counterpart Douglas MacArthur, while directing British forces battling the Japanese in Burma, Field Marshal Sir William Slim also agonized, “For every man evacuated with wounds we had one hundred and twenty evacuated sick.” What Slim didn’t know was that his forces actually held the malarial advantage during the brutal Burma campaign, which was defined by slashing monsoon rains, unforgiving jungle terrain, and crippling, untamed disease. Japanese infection rates in Burma rang in at an astounding 90% against a British incidence of only 80%. War-ravaged China (and its Japanese occupiers) also continued to suffer, averaging roughly 30 million malarial infections per year during the war.
In the North African and Italian campaigns, the allegiance of the mosquito was fleeting and fickle. Across the ancient desert sands from Morocco through Tunisia and Libya to Egypt, the malarial rate among German and Italian troops was twice that of Allied soldiers, before balancing out in Sicily. With the Germans occupying high-ground defensive positions, malaria (and louse-borne typhus) hit the Allies harder during the mainland Italian campaign, specifically around Salerno/Naples, Anzio, and the northern Arno and Po Rivers. Overall, however, as DDT-spraying mosquito teams accompanied the plodding Allied advance, malaria and typhus rates continuously decreased among both combatants and civilians on the Italian peninsula. “Cardinal points in the successful execution of the typhus control program,” declared Colonel Charles Wheeler, were “the use of a lousicidal [sic] powder such as DDT.” This same DDT “dusting” applied to mosquito-borne malaria as well.
“A Day in the Life”: Surrounded by ancient desert sands, two British soldiers write letters home through the lens and protection of mosquito netting, Egypt, 1941. (Library of Congress)
For all nations embroiled in the Pacific theater and Italy, malaria proved to be the “Great Debilitator.” In short, on a strategic scale, mosquito-borne disease was an opportunistic enemy and afflicted all belligerents relatively equally and did not tilt the balance of combat in either the European or Pacific wars in the Allies’ favor. The Soviet body count of 25 million dead helped win the wars. The Achilles heel of the Axis powers—dire shortages of petroleum and steel, among other scarce resources—helped the Allies win the wars. Unrivaled and unparalleled American military-industrial output, including petroleum and DDT, and futuristic technology, including nuclear weapons, helped the Allies win the wars.
While Russell’s DDT combat units and Dr. Seuss’s provocative cartoon propaganda were engaging the “Ann”opheles mosquito, she was also being primed by the Nazis as a contract killer for a sinister cloak-and-dagger operation. At Anzio in 1944, they unleashed mosquito-borne biological warfare against the invading Allies and the Italian people, who had recently renounced their Nazi associates. It was in September 1943 that Italy had substituted the Axis for the Allies. Hitler was enraged. This treason only cemented his delusional prewar suspicions about the substandard Italian racial pedigree. In his view, the Italian traitors needed to be punished. The defense of Italy and the suppression of its insurgent population was left to the Wehrmacht, with an occupation policy of “war against civilians.”
After the loss of Sicily in 1943, the Germans successfully defended the Gustav Line south of the Pontine Marshes, necessitating an Allied landing at Anzio in an effort to outflank the German positions. By this time, however, mosquitoes and malaria had been methodically restored to the marshes and subsequently to Italy. In October 1943, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, or perhaps even Hitler himself, issued the order to purposefully regenerate mosquitoes and disease in the Pontine Marshes—a textbook example of biological warfare. Kesselring had ordered his units to proceed “with all the means at our disposal and with maximum harshness. I will back any officer who in his choice and harshness of means goes beyond our customary limits.” Hitler agreed that “the battle must be waged with holy hatred.”
For starters, the Germans confiscated and warehoused all quinine supplies and mosquito netting from civilians and compromised the windows and screens on private homes. Moreover, Italian veterans returning from the Balkan Front brought back quinine-resistant strains of falciparum. The Germans then reversed the draining pumps and opened the dikes, refilling 90% of the marshes with brackish water interspersed with land mines and defensive obstacles, felling the pine trees so carefully planted during the reclamation project. The Nazi inner circle was being advised by German malariologists that the return of salt water would encourage the proliferation of the deadly mosquito species Anopheles labranchiae, which thrives in brackish environments (the mosquito of choice, as it transmits falciparum).
The flooding was not only an act of biological warfare against the advancing Allied soldiers, but also revenge against the turncoat Italian civilian population, who would suffer the effects long after the war was over. “In pursuit of these twin ambitions,” notes Yale University historian Frank Snowden in his consummate study of malaria in Italy, “the Germans carried out the only known example of biological warfare in twentieth-century Europe. . . . The medical emergency caused by the German plan lasted for three epidemic seasons and exacted a fierce toll in suffering.” It was along the Mussolini Canal at Anzio in 1944 that my wife’s grandfather, Sergeant Walter “Rex” Raney, your average, archetypal American GI, received his malarial seasoning. What he did not know until I told him seventy-three years later, in the spring of 2017, was that he was a victim of premeditated Nazi biological warfare.
Born in a small farming community in western Colorado, Rex enlisted with the 45th “Thunderbird” US Infantry Division in 1940. In the spring of 1943, he fought his way through North Africa, and participated in the invasion of Sicily in July of that same year. During the five weeks of fighting on the island, there were 22,000 cases of malaria among the American, Canadian, and British troops, and comparable rates among the Italian and German defenders. In September, Rex landed on the Italian mainland at Salerno and battled his way to the gates of Monte Cassino and the German Gustav Line by January 1944. He participated in the amphibious landings at Anzio, to the rear of the Gustav Line, that same month.
From January to June, Rex and the 45th Division were bogged down along the Mussolini Canal. “We dug in along that waterlogged canal and didn’t move a heck of a lot until we were taken out of the line in June to prepare for the invasion of southern France in August 1944,” Rex recalled. He then recounted the English translation for place names upon his landing at Anzio, suggesting a long struggle with deadly mosquitoes: Field of Death, Dead Woman, Dead Horse, Field of Meat, and, in honor of the underworld ferryman of the deceased crossing the River Styx, Charon. “Those cold-blooded mosquitoes were everywhere at Anzio. I think those critters there were even worse than during our prewar training and maneuvers in Pitkin, Louisiana. Those blasted mosquitoes were more relentless than the German shelling,” Rex reminisced to me while reclining in his La-Z-Boy armchair, sipping on his standard after-dinner Scotch. “By the time those mosquito-spraying fellows came around and drenched us and everything else they could aim at with DDT, I guess, given what you said about those German marsh mosquitoes, it was already too late for me.” Rex remembered a sign written and posted in classic GI battlefield humor along the Mussolini Canal: “It said something to the effect of ‘Pontine Marshes Fever Company: Malaria for Sale.’” He looked up at me with a wry grin and with his typical dry wit said, “I must have purchased a few rounds of that malaria for myself.” During the four-month operations at Anzio, 45,000 American soldiers, including Sergeant Rex Raney, were treated for malaria and other afflictions despite the use of over 500 gallons of DDT. Mark Harrison points out in his intricate study Medicine and Victory that, as one might expect, this biological warfare was “a decision which backfired on the Germans, who themselves suffered high rates of malaria as a result of th
eir actions.”
“Jane’s OK—She’s Not at Anzio”: A British soldier admiring a malaria warning sign on the Anzio Front in Italy, May 1944. To grab the attention of female-starved GIs, many signs like this one were highly suggestive. Similar billboards depicting naked women and comparable messages greeted troops across the Pacific, Italy, and the Middle East. (Imperial War Museum)
Following his malarial seasoning at Anzio, Rex, now a sergeant major, soldiered through his sickness and in August 1944 participated in the Allied landings in southern France, before suffering through the Battle of the Bulge during the wanton winter of 1944–1945. His 45th Division then smashed through the Siegfried Line in mid-March 1945 and crossed the Rhine River into Germany. On April 28, Rex received “puzzling and strange orders for fighting troops.” The notice read: “Tomorrow the notorious concentration camp at Dachau will be in our zone of action. When captured, nothing is to be disturbed. International commissions will move in to investigate conditions when fighting ceases. Upon capture of Dachau by any battalion, post air tight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.” On April 29, the eve of Hitler’s suicide, Rex and his comrades liberated the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich and came face-to-face with the horrors perpetrated by the Führer’s now crumbling Third Reich. When I asked Rex to elaborate, he solemnly lowered his tearing eyes and tabled his shaking Scotch. “That was a dark day,” he hauntingly whispered. “One I rather wish I could forget.” I didn’t press him further.
“I Thought I Was a Goner”: Sergeant Rex Raney at Anzio, Italy, in May 1944, shortly before contracting malaria, unleashed as a premeditated Nazi biological weapon in the Pontine Marshes to slow the Allied advance. When liberating the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945, Rex was infected with a second round of malaria courtesy of experimental malaria mosquitoes of the Nazi tropical medicine program. (Raney Family)
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