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 within the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1938. With its headquarters and logistical hub – the Army Blood Supply Depot (ABSD) – set up at Southmead Hospital in Bristol in 1939, it was led by Colonel (later Brigadier) Lionel Whitby. And Whitby was certainly the right man for the job. He had deferred a scholarship to Cambridge University to enlist as a private in the army in 1914, been commissioned as an officer, and been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry at Passchendaele. But he was also the living embodiment of the importance of blood transfusion on the battlefield: in 1918, a German artillery shell had severed his femoral artery, but his life had been saved by the skill of an American surgeon and a transfusion directly from his batman.
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