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Re-emphasizing that the 1918 influenza pandemic only became known as the Spanish Flu because its journalists untethered by war-time propaganda and the need to uphold troop morale and public confidence were free to report on the emerging public health crisis, from the American perspective, according to convention, the first cases of the particularly deadly viral strain were recorded in the hospital wards of Camp Fuston, a training centre for new army recruits and part of the compound of Fort Riley outside of Manhattan, Kansas on this day in 1918. Though impossible to reconstruct a century on, epidemiologists believe that either this military installation in the US or a British staging hospital in Étaples-sur-Mer near Calais—with troops from the former’s 89th Division were deployed to France in the Spring of 1918.