Life blood: Britain’s war-winning medical innovation.

When the ‘butcher’s bill’ is settled on the battlefield, the price is literally paid in blood. But among the many lists of ‘war-winning’ innovations of the Second World War, one is consistently missing: the widespread availability of blood and plasma transfusions for wounded Allied personnel. It is taken for granted today as a fundamental component of casualty care, but when war broke out in 1939 Britain was the only combatant nation whose armed forces had an established blood-transfusion service. Aware of the innovations in the use of stored blood and mass donor recruitment that occurred during the Spanish Civil War, the Army Blood Transfusion Service (ABTS) was established