Content area
Full Text
The American Red Cross Blood Donor Service was a remarkable World War II achievement. From early 1941 rhrough rhe end of the war, the Red Cross collecred blood from millions of donors across America; a dozen laboratories processed it into substitutes called plasma and serum albumin; and the military then shipped these substitutes, and whole blood as well, to service personnel fighting overseas. The entire operation - run jointly by the military and the Red Cross, an organization whose authority and mission came from the federal government but whose workers and funds came from the private sector - was staggering in scope. By the end of the war, 6.7 million volunteers had donated over 13 million pints of blood at thirty-five fixed donor centers and sixty-three mobile unirs. These units, "self-contained collection centers on specially built trucks," visited more than two thousand Red Cross chapters and branches, some six hundred factories, and 250 military establishments. At the program's peak, the first six months of 1944, total weekly donations averaged nearly 1 11,000 pints of blood or roughly one pint every two seconds. Over the course of the war, rhe Donor Service relied on 100,000 volunteer workers, hundreds of nurses, and dozens of doctors. Packers of plasma, serum, and whole blood were flown all around the world and transported to fighting fronts "on the backs of mountain-climbing mules, on litters carried by natives in the jungles of the South Pacific, and in planes which at times dropped the plasma by parachutes to troops on land isolated from normal supply."1
The program saved many lives. "Thousands of men are alive today because someone, somewhere, took the time to donate a pint of blood," both the army and navy surgeons general asserted. Beloved wartime journalist and chronicler of the G.I. experience Ernie PyIe remarked that wherever he went in North Africa, medical officers urged him to stress rhe imporrance of blood ro people back home: "Wrire lots about it, go clear overboard for it. . . . Say that plasma is the outstanding medical discovery of this war." General Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: "If I could reach all America, there is one thing I would like to do - thank them for blood plasma and whole blood. It...