"Red Cross, Double Cross": Race and America's World War II-Era Blood Donor Service

Abstract

The American Red Cross Blood Donor Service was a remarkable World War II achievement. From early 1941 through the end of the war, the Red Cross collected 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 units. 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 111,000 pints of blood or roughly one pint every two seconds. Over the course of the war, the Donor Service relied on 100,000 volunteer workers, hundreds of nurses, and dozens of doctors. Packets 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