The Deadliest Ally | America in Pursuit

This is America In Pursuit, a limited run series from THROUGHLINE and NPR. I'm Ramtin Arablouei. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America that began two fifty years ago this year when those rights, unalienable rights, were laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But Americans had to fight for them, beginning, of course, with an all out revolutionary war that lasted years. So for our first episode, we're going to go back into the archives to bring you a story from that revolutionary fight, which you probably know the basics of. People were mad about taxes and were tired of answering to a king. The Boston Tea Party broke out. George Washington and his crew took up arms and defeated the imperial British army with unconventional tactics. But there's a big, or should I say small, part of this story that's rarely mentioned, mosquitoes. It's still the animal that kills more human beings on the planet than any other animal to this day, and that's including other humans. That's doctor Tim Weingard. I'm a history professor at Colorado Mesa University, also the head coach of the hockey team, being Canadian. And I wrote, the book, The Mosquito, a Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. The specific mosquito we're talking about today is known as the anopheles, a species of mosquito that thrives in marshes and swamps and is known for spreading malaria, a deadly disease that has changed the course of history in all kinds of ways. We like to think we get to make our own history, that we did this as human beings, and that's not necessarily the case. We head to the battlefield with the Annapolis mosquito when we come back. It's 1778, three years into the American Revolutionary War. The first half of the war was fought almost entirely in the North. George Washington and the Continental Army were having mixed success and spent a lot of energy running from the British Army, trying to buy more time. The British are very upset that General Washington won't essentially commit to a decisive battle to end the war. And Washington knows he can't do this because he doesn't have anything. If he commits to a decisive battle and loses, the revolution's over. But as long as he can keep an army however ill supplied and under equipped in the field, the British have to defeat and chase this army. All the while, he's desperately waiting for help to come. He waits for his political lords essentially in the Continental Congress to get some supplies, get some allies, get some weapons, and hopefully get France on board. This is essentially playing cat and mouse, and it frustrates the British. So they changed their strategy. The British concentrated their forces in the southern colonies of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Charleston with 9,000 British soldiers. And these soldiers come primarily from Northern England and Scotland, these British soldiers. So …