At the close of the First World War, Eastern and Central Europe were attacked by a virulent typhus epidemic, and the United States dispatched a 500-man military contingent to combat it. This book chronicles this almost forgotten episode of America's crusading humanitarianism era.

Poland was in ruins after World War I. The fighting front had rolled through some areas more than seven different times, and the result was the almost complete destruction of the roads, railways, bridges, water systems, and power plants. The government was based mainly on civil servants of Polish descent who remained on the job after the fall of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. Even after Poland regained her independence in 1918, the borders were not yet defined and the nation was vulnerable to continued threats from Germany and Russia. This work presents the story of the Kosciuszko Squadron, a small group of American flyers that formed without the support of the State Department and the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, to defend Poland from the Bolshevik armies and to prevent the communist revolution in Russia from uniting with a Germany frustrated by provisions of the Treaty of Versaille. The book covers the events leading up to the formation of the squadron and the first efforts to enlist American military help for Poland in 1918. It explores why that small group of Americans felt compelled to fight for Poland and what they knew about who and what they were fighting for and against, and discusses the people, events, and issues that figured prominently in the war. The Squadron was named, of course, in honor of Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who famously came from Poland in 1776 to join the Colonial forces fighting the War of Independence from Britain.

“Thought-provoking…[Allen] writes without sanctimony and never simplifies the people in his book or the moral issues his story inevitably raises." —Wall Street Journal Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed—refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples—causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl. In the 1920s, Weigl had created the first typhus vaccine using a method as bold as it was dangerous for its use of living human subjects. The astonishing success of Weigl’s techniques attracted the attention and admiration of the world—giving him cover during the Nazi’s violent occupation of Lviv. His lab soon flourished as a hotbed of resistance. Weigl hired otherwise doomed mathematicians, writers, doctors, and other thinkers, protecting them from atrocity. The team engaged in a sabotage campaign by sending illegal doses of the vaccine into the Polish ghettos while shipping gallons of the weakened serum to the Wehrmacht. Among the scientists saved by Weigl, who was a Christian, was a gifted Jewish immunologist named Ludwik Fleck. Condemned to Buchenwald and pressured to re-create the typhus vaccine under the direction of a sadistic Nazi doctor, Erwin Ding-Schuler, Fleck had to make an awful choice between his scientific ideals or the truth of his conscience. In risking his life to carry out a dramatic subterfuge to vaccinate the camp’s most endangered prisoners, Fleck performed an act of great heroism. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with survivors, Arthur Allen tells the harrowing story of two brave scientists—a Christian and a Jew— who put their expertise to the best possible use, at the highest personal danger.

Research into public health policies and expert instruction has been oriented traditionally in the national context. There is a rich historiography that analyses the development of health policies and systems in various European and American countries during the first decades of the twentieth century. What is often ignored, however, is the study of the great many connections and circulations of knowledge, people, technologies, artefacts and practices during that period between countries. This book redresses that balance.

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

In Awkward Dominion, Frank Costigliola offers a striking interpretation of the emergence of the United States as a world power in the 1920s, a period in which the country faced both burdens and opportunities as a result of the First World War. Exploring the key international issues in the interwar period—peace treaty revisions, Western economic recovery, and modernization—Costigliola considers American political and economic success in light of Europe's fascination with American technology, trade, and culture. The figures through which he tells this story include Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Stimson, Charles Lindberg, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Ford.

Recounts how the inspectorate became one of the most consistent and important agents for change within the War Department. Provides the analyses, much of the criticism, and most of the description of the Army's metamorphosis.