Circumstances aboard the massive troop ship Leviathan proved to be the worst of all. The giant transport ships, with their confined decks and crowded bunks provided the ideal conditions for incubation of the virus. She would now be put into service transporting fresh American troops to the port of Brest in France to bolster the exhausted French and British forces.īy late September 1918, the second wave of the epidemic flu was beginning to spread through the troops destined for the front. In 1917, when the United States entered the Great War, the Vaterland was seized and rechristened as the SS Leviathan by President Woodrow Wilson. When the guns of August began to fire, the return trip was determined to be unsafe, she was laid up at her Hoboken, New Jersey terminal and remained there for nearly three years. It was late July 1914, when the SS Vaterland made her crossing to New York City, USA. The three German ships had the ill fortune of being launched just prior to the outbreak of World War I and thus spent little time in the service of Hamburg-America before being laid up in port thanks to British domination of the seas. The Bismarck* would hold the title of largest ship in the world until 1935. These were famous liners like White Star Lines’ Titanic and her sister ships Olympic and Britannic, Cunard’s Lusitania and Mauritania, and even larger –Hamburg-America’s Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck. The early 1900’s and 1910’s saw the launch of many famous super liners –ships designed to carry thousands of passengers across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to the Americas in luxury and comfort. I hope you find it interesting and don’t mind me recycling! ~ Meg

The epidemic will play a central role in the historical timeline. I wrote this post in 2016 during my Spanish Flu research. Some of the older material I’m reposting in order to better organize it.

To write the period accurately, I’ve been reading and studying the war and the surrounding events.

I’m researching The Great War for my current work in progress: a historical novel set partially during that time.

Leviathan ww1 book