How blood banks saved Britain in WW2

How did the sign of the Red Vampire help British surgeons during the Second World War? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Roderick Bailey, author of The LifeSavers, explains to David Musgrove how Britain led the way in blood banks during the war, and how such prowess saved lives, strengthened the war effort, and boosted morale. The Second World War is real, is a real turning point. We take blood transfusion today, you know, for granted. We give blood, we receive it, if we're unfortunate or lucky enough in in hospital environment to receive a blood transfusion.

But we don't often think about where it where it comes from. And we don't think about how that might have changed over over time, I don't think. But the Second World War really is a is a watershed. moment in terms of how blood is is drawn on a massive scale, if you if you need it, and how it's delivered, and how it's stored, and how it's moved and transported and and how it's put into where the positions where it needs to go as quickly as possible. So with the First World War, blood was very much arm to arm.

You'd have one casualty lying by the side of another casualty and perhaps a a a tube or a or a complex glass instrument used to move blood very, very quickly because there was nothing to begin with, there were no anticoagulants, no preservatives. So you had to move blood as quickly as possible before it before it clotted. The Second World War, these sort these things start to change. You can you can store blood for for days, for weeks.

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