Finding love from a distance after surviving a pandemic

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    ST. LOUIS, MO (KMOV) — If my great-grandfather had not been a litterbug, I would not be here today. My sister recently saw an Instagram post from the Missouri History Museum. It told a story about Joe Broz from back in 1918. Joe Broz is my great-grandfather on my mother’s side.

At that time, Joe was 19 and had volunteered to fight in World War I. He was an engineer with the Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps. In January of 1918, while on the way from training in Texas to New York, the troop train stopped outside of Bismark, Missouri in St. Francois County. While some soldiers hopped off the train to stretch Joe decided to de-clutter and started separating his letters from envelopes. Having no trashcan, and the concept of recycling was decades away, he simply tossed them out the train window.

A young boy hanging out in the train yard spotted the envelopes falling from the train and snatched them up so he could play Post Office. He headed home to Fredericktown and when he got there his older sister, Josephine noticed the letters were all addressed to a soldier named Joe, she decided to write to him based solely on the fact that they shared a name. Joe and Josephine.

Joe received his first letter from Josephine when he arrived in France and lucky for me, he wrote back. The two kept up their correspondence throughout the war.

In November of 1918, as the War ended, The Spanish Flu Pandemic made its way through the American Military in Europe. As Joe stated in his journal he “was one of the unfortunates.”

The war fostered influenza in the crowded conditions of military camps in the United States and in the trenches of the Western Front in Europe. The virus traveled with military personnel from camp to camp and across the Atlantic, and at the height of the American military involvement in the war, September through November 1918, influenza and pneumonia sickened 20% to 40% of U.S. Army and Navy personnel. In all, more than 500 million people were infected during the pandemic of 1918, about a third of the world’s population at the time. The death toll is estimated to be anywhere from 17 to 50 million.

To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Newspapers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the name “Spanish” flu.

Joe wrote that the pop-up field hospitals were poorly assembled and wind blew snow in through the cracks. He stated quite a few men developed pneumonia and died.

“I dreaded to hear the tramping of the heavy boots of the stretcher bearers,” he wrote in one journal entry. Due to a paperwork mix-up, Joe was released from the hospital after 15 days, even though he still had a fever. He eventually went back to the hospital and was hospitalized for 2 months. He was finally discharged on March 27, 1919 but when we returned to his barracks he found almost all of his personal items were stolen. He wrote “I was still weak and considered a hospital casual which meant I could look forward to going home shortly.” He also wrote that he never did fully recover from the ill-effects of the cause for his hospitalization.

Joe returned to St. Louis in 1919 after being honorably discharged from the Army. Once home, he took the train down to Fredericktown to meet his pen pal in person, Joe and Josephine hit it off instantly. As my great-grandfather wrote in his journal, “I liked her immediately … Subsequently we married and lived happily ever after.”

My sisters and I had never heard this story and I’m sure glad my sister Katie was following the Missouri History Museum on Instagram. It turns out that my great-grandfather collected all of his writings and photographs of his time in World War I and put them together in an album and my grandfather donated that to the museum. As he wrote in the prologue of the album “I was not a hero and lay no claim to the distinction of any kind. But, I served with men who were heroes, in life and death.”

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