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- [00:01]
A
What can we learn from history's most powerful people? Join me, Mike suiter, author of NextGen CEO, in History Extra's new podcast series, History's Greatest Leaders. To find out, listen wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
- [00:46]
B
The Second World War is a real turning point. We take blood transfusion today for granted. We give blood, we receive it, if we're unfortunate or lucky enough in hospital environment to receive a blood transfusion. But we don't often think about where it comes from and we don't think about how that might have changed over time, I don't think. But the Second World War really is a watershed moment in terms of how blood is drawn on a massive scale, if you need it, and how it's delivered and how it's stored and how it's moved and transported and how it's put into the positions where it needs to go as quickly as possible. So in 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 tube 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 clotted. The Second World War, these things start to change. You can store blood for days, for weeks. Ultimately, by the end of the war, it's several weeks. You can store it before you have to use it. And that transforms what you can do with it. You can move it around in the context of the Second World War, you can move it around and store it in readiness for battles. You can prepare it, you can make sure that the soldiers who are going into battle know that there will be blood for them if they're hit. And that's an enormous morale boost sometimes to know that there will be care waiting for you should the worst actually happen. And that's a world away from the early years of the First World War.
- [02:22]
C
Let's just go back as far as we can. When was the first blood transfusion that we know about?
- [02:28]
B
Well, so the first human to human transfusion is what really counts in our conversation, because hundreds of years before that, people were experimenting with all sorts of animal Blood and things like that, but human to human, was an Englishman, Blundell, at the beginning of the 19th century. So it's relatively early, only 100 years before the First World War. And actually, by the time the First World War comes around, not a great deal has changed in terms of how that's done. It's still very much arm to arm. It's still moving blood as quickly as possible as you can from one individual to another, because you know that if you don't move it quickly, it'll coagulate and then it becomes dangerous, difficult to transfuse. And it's only really in the First World War that they start experimenting properly with anticoagulants, preservatives, and it means that you can start storing blood, you can start keeping it, preparing it for what you might need on a larger scale.
- [03:22]
C
So was the First World War experience sort of formative for the preparations for the Second World War? So in the 1930s, people were sort of probably mindful of the political situation, thinking that there could be conflict brewing. Were people thinking about the experience of blood transfusion in the First World War and thinking, we need to get this right if we're going to be at war again?
- [03:44]
B
Very much so. But at the same time, it's important to remember that the First World War lessons weren't really applicable to the peacetime period. So these lessons had to be consciously relearned. It took imagination and a degree of fear. I think there was a degree of anxiety about the scale of the coming conflict that encouraged people to think, well, what do we need here? We need something that's been used on a massive scale before in a huge conflict. And there'd be nothing comparable to that in the interwar period, except for the Spanish Civil War. So people started casting their eyes back to techniques of the First World War that had been useful, such as preservatives and anticoagulants that had been used then, and also the mass use of donors. And in the intervening period, the interwar period, blood transfusion had not been based on blood banking as we'd experience it today, as we associate with it today. But blood banking, the storage of blood, the careful handling of it in enormous quantities, was something that the Second World War demanded. And when it came to the eve of the Second World War, the UK in particular was consciously casting an eye back to previous conflicts to try to learn, well, how do we do this? How do we do this with maximum efficiency? And so they started to look deliberately backwards.
- [04:58]
C
Okay, we'll talk about sort of the UK's experience versus the other competence in the war in a minute. But I just want to drill into that question in the 1930s a little bit more closely. So who, if anyone, was sort of driving that conversation and saying, hey, we really need to think about this and how close to the start of war did planning sort of really ramp up?
- [05:19]
B
You see a definite change in thinking when the Spanish Civil War begins, because you see the introduction of modern forms of warfare, aerial bombing, the targeting of civilian populations, women and children becoming targets as well as victims, and spikes in casualty rates. And you see also a response in Spain. So this is late 30s, a response in Spain in the form of blood banking, in the form of mobilizing a whole civilian population to give blood, which can then be sent forward to help frontline soldiers. And that's the very first time that had been done. And there are interesting features of that which hadn't been seen before, which are things like not just the mobilization of a civilian population, but also the use of refrigerated trucks, even refrigerated railway carriages, to try to move that essential resource, that life saving resource, as quickly as possible to the front lines so that it can be used as soon as it can possibly be.
- [06:14]
C
So at what point did someone say, right, we're going to need a blood bank if we're going to be successful in fighting this war?
- [06:21]
B
So the penny starts to drop when casualty estimates have started to be formulated for a coming war with Nazi Germany. So 1938, 1939, some quite horrifying figures start to be published in the UK about what might lie in wait, what might happen if Nazi Germany and these new styles of warfare. So that's aerial bombardment, which everybody expected to happen, would hit the UK in particular. So you find min professional minds turning to what might happen and something significant might have to be done in 1938, 1939, as the European situation and the world situation starts to deteriorate and war becomes on the horizon. What war becomes seems to become more likely and steps are deliberately taken to prepare for that. And some of those are to do with building up a reserve of blood, preparing the skills and the logistics that are going to be potentially needed when, when war on that scale finally, finally arrives.
- [07:21]
C
And what's the science here? Were there particular developments that were put in place in this period?
- [07:26]
B
Slowly, yeah, there's plasma is being developed in the United States at the time, but it's very fledgling. So plasma is the fluid part of blood, it's not the red blood cells and white blood Cells, it's the fluid that carries them around the body. It can be transfused, but really, by the time World War II begins, that's essentially the only recognition there is of plasma's value. It hasn't been tested yet in a wartime environment. So people are relying on whole blood, which is the blood that runs through our veins and the conditions that make that usable. In other words, it's very short shelf life, which is at that time, about two weeks. It's about keeping it cold. It's about understanding that we all have different blood groups and some of our blood is not compatible with somebody else's. So those are the key considerations when the war begins, that you have a fragile fluid, whole blood, with a very limited shelf life, and it needs to be handled extremely carefully. And at that stage, that's really all people are talking about and thinking about. It's whole blood and its very extreme limits, the limits with which you can use it safely.
- [08:29]
C
What about the role of Bristol in this story? So this important city in the southwest of England in your book, that seems to have a fairly pivotal place in the story?
- [08:38]
B
Yeah, Bristol's pretty key because they're looking for somewhere to base all of this. They need a place where they can make a depot which they can use to bring in the blood that gets collected from the local population, because they have to rely on civilians for the blood. They need a lot of it and they're going to have to turn to the home front for that. But you need somewhere too, which is not going to be bombed. So London's right at the start is ruled out because of the high likelihood that it would become a target and that any very fragile, delicate base that they're going to use for collecting vast amounts of blood is not going to become a danger and become wrecked early on. So they decide that Bristol's the way to go. It's quite far. It's in the southwest of England, it's a few hundred miles away, it's secure. There's an airfield there which might be very useful, which is very close to the hospital, South Mead Hospital, that they decide to base this at. And that's where so much of it happens. It also means that the donor pool, the donor panel, the donors that are going to give blood to this base, have to come from quite close to Bristol, because in those days, it's all about pace, it's all about speed and how fast can you move that blood. It's got to be moved quickly because the minute you take it, it starts to deteriorate and decay. Even with preservatives in, it starts, deteriorates. So you have to move it as soon as you get it. So Bristol in that case, relies on donors all the way around and counties around. So those are the regions around Bristol and not much further than that. It's the blood of southwest England, really. That is the blood that's moved into the veins of soldiers all around the world.
- [10:03]
C
How did they get people to actually donate? Because presumably this was a new idea. People weren't familiar with the concept. How did they persuade people?
- [10:11]
B
Yeah, that's right. I mean, today we're used to it, we're used to what the point of it's about. We know that it's safe, we know where it's going, we know how important it is. In those days, all of that had to be learned by the population. Giving blood was not a tradition in the uk. There were small pockets of it. Cities around the UK had started to have little groups of blood donors, but nothing on this scale. And if you're turning to the general population, who you're going to depend on, you're going to need them to provide potentially hundreds of thousands of pints of blood. You're never going to get that from tiny little teams, tiny little communities of a dozen donors in Bristol or a few hundred in London. You need to mobilize the population. And that was understood from the start as a major effort. That's got to be something that hasn't been done before. That's about convincing large numbers of population that, first of all, as you say, that donating is safe. This involves needles going into veins, blood being drawn out. People aren't used to this. They're aware of it as a thing, but it's not something that has been burned into the national mind as it is today. Now, it's a natural thing. In those days, it was all new. And we can easily overlook, I think, the amount of effort required to put in to win over minds, really on a massive scale. So that's publicity propaganda, that's stopping people in the street to try to explain what you need. It's knocking on doors, it's putting slides up in cinemas, it's putting posters up in shop windows and on walls. It's a major effort, which we haven't seen since. And I think if it was today, we'd find it quite unfamiliar.
- [11:43]
C
Was there sort of a fear about sort of the vampirical aspects to this? Like, you know, were people concerned about. About vampire fiction and thinking, oh, I'm not sure.
- [11:53]
B
No, I've found no trace of that. But I found them understanding the connection right from the start. Right. So they put bats, they put an image of a bat. They put that over all their equipment. They put that on their signage. So in the middle of a battlefield, you find a post with a big bat on the top of it. And if you're a medic, you know, if you're a surgeon looking for blood, that's where you go to. That's where you want to go. You're looking for the sign of the bat or the sign of the red vampire, as someone called it. It's everywhere. So even the in house magazine of Bristol was called the bat. They had bat insignia on their tunics. So it was. Yeah, it was everywhere. And they were very proud of that. Even today, like post war, the army blood supply depot had its bat emblem for a long time. Yeah. So it's still around and it predates all of the comic bat insignia. It looks exactly the same in some cases, but it's 20, 30 years before that.
- [12:47]
D
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- [14:10]
C
What was the experience of giving blood like?
- [14:15]
B
Okay, so they had to go out to get the blood, so you would get some donors in England. But because they had these counties around these regions, around Bristol as well to tap. They would send out small teams, and that's more typical, really, of the experience. Tiny teams, mainly of women who would go out, doctor and a nurse and some admin staff would go out. They would go to a village hall, a community center, whatever it would be something small that could be then converted essentially into a tiny little hospital ward. And then for a day, a day or two, local people would come in and they had their blood taken. The process was, I think it would be recognizable today that, you know, you'd be met, you'd be looked after, you'd be talked to, someone would lie you down, the needle would go in, the blood would be drawn off. Someone keep chatting to you, and you can have a biscuit and perhaps a cup of tea, coffee, you'd be giving some iron tablets, which doesn't happen anymore. Perhaps it should. But that essentially is the same now as it was then. As I say, I think you'd recognize it if you went today. But the big difference, it was on just a massive scale. This was happening every day, weeks and weeks, months and months, all the way through the war, because they needed a constant supply of a large amount of blood.
- [15:23]
C
So it sounds like in the southwest of England, then this would have been quite a big thing. Like, you know, people. There would have been queues of people, people would have been talking about this would have been part of the conversation.
- [15:34]
D
Right?
- [15:34]
B
Yeah, yeah. If you look at local newspapers, they're full of it. And it's interesting because the editors are very much on board. So they're all, you know, the stories they run are a mixture of saying, well, look, you can come along to, you know, ex village hall, whatever. There are going to be people that want to test your blood and take it. But there's also articles in there about that it's safe, you know, that it's. That it's, you know, it shows courage, bravery, duty to give blood. And sometimes it spills over to shaming those who are not prepared to give blood, which is a complex area because some people have good reasons not to give blood. But nevertheless, there's quite a complex picture is drawn in the newspapers where on the one hand, as I say, there's a big push for blood, lots of publicity, propaganda, but on the other side, there's also some levering going on. It's trying to get into the minds of your prospective newspaper reader and potential donor to try and get them, you know, get them to take action.
- [16:24]
C
But they do, and they manage to mobilise the masses to give blood. And so we start to get this volume of blood. What happens to it? How do they get it to where the soldiers need it?
- [16:33]
B
Okay, so the first stage, obviously, quickly as possible, bring it back to Bristol. If it's whole blood again, that's the blood that runs through our veins. And the fighting was quite close to the UK. So that's France in 1940, and then after D Day, all the way through to the end. That's quite close. You can fly whole blood there quite quickly, so you don't have to worry too much about it going off, as long as you move it fast and you don't. So you get it from the donor, you process it, bottle it, get it on the plane, fly it out, keep it cold, get it to the front and then someone can use that. When it comes to fronts further away, it's a lot harder. So when it comes to North Africa, when it comes to Italy, in the Mediterranean, when it comes to Burma and the Far east or the Pacific theater, it's a completely different ballgame then, because it takes weeks to get anything out there. By the time any blood was going to be sent out there, because you can't fly it, it's too heavy. If you're going to ship it out, it's going to go off. Even if it survives the enemy U boats that are trying to sink ships, it's going to go off. It'll never make it intact. So what do you do? So then there are different solutions that have to be put into practice. And really the most overwhelming and most impressive one is the use of plasma. Plasma lasts a lot longer than blood. You can store it on the shelf for a long time, it can be kept at room temperature, it can be. It can last months. And it's especially durable. At least they felt it. So at the time, if it was dried. So you essentially, you dry that into a powder and you can keep that on the shelf for ages, for months and months. And all it needs is a bit of distilled water, a bit of sterile water that gets entered back onto the powder. You have a. Basically a bottle of powder that gets rehydrated with that water. Give it a shake and you can transfuse that. It's not the best. It doesn't have the red blood cells and that give us oxygen. But it's certainly very effective at moving any remaining blood cells around. It stays in the veins, it doesn't filter into the tissues, it transports nutrients, it has all sorts of things in the blood, which are still useful to us and anyone can give it, it can be extracted from anybody's blood. So you can make quite a lot of it from anyone. Any donor can turn up, not just the A's or the ABS or the B's, you can turn up. Anyone can give blood that can be then converted into plasma. And they realized quite early on that it had the promise to make a radical impact on the battlefield. And it did. But it was also very much a process of trial and error because this was a very novel technology. It was something the Americans had recommended, but had really done very little testing on. So you find this organization, this tiny little organization based in Bristol, not only manufacturing plasma and eventually mass producing plasma, but also essentially starting from scratch, it is a real groundbreaker and they use it on a massive scale. And in fact, plasma is used more than whole blood. If you look at the figures that are used throughout the war, plasma is used more than any other fluid. And dried plasma, this very novel thing which the British were at the forefront of developing in 1941, that's used more than anything else. That's very much the backbone of the British army and actually the UK armed forces. In anywhere where conditions are so difficult that you can't keep blood cold or you, you can't have any supplies reaching you with any degree of certainty. You can rely on dried plasma. If you've got that and some distilled water, you can have that up front for weeks, months on end, until you need it.
- [19:53]
C
Okay, so this was definitely a Second World War innovation and one which was driven by the uk. And did this help to secure the supply for these more far flung places? And further, did they try and institute any sort of local blood gathering institutions in those places?
- [20:14]
B
Yeah. So the dried plasma is a real game changer. It means you can supply airborne operations, airborne assaults, seaborne assaults. If you're landing on an enemy coast against an enemy, again, you've got no guarantee that your supply lines are going to be able to bring in what you need. So if you land people with dried plasma or plasma to hand and you can keep it, you don't need a fridge for it, then that makes a huge difference. You don't have to have energy supplies, you can have it there when you need it. So you see it being used in ships. The Royal Navy makes a great deal of use of it because they can be floating around at sea for months on end with no resupply whatsoever. They use plasma, dried plasma especially, they drop it to guerrilla groups, special forces, Working in enemy territory. Plasma is pretty much the main fluid that goes to partisans in the Balkans. It goes into southern France prior to the invasions there it goes into occupied France, it goes into Poland, it's dropped into Warsaw. That's plasma. That's produced by British, some of it actually from Polish troops in Scot. They provided the blood. So plasma, yeah, it's a real game changer. But at the same time, as I said, it's not the ideal. It's not the optimal fluid in transfusion medicine. Quite often it is with burns. Where you have plasma is the main fluid lost. And in North Africa, for example, you might have tank injuries, and burns are a common injury in tank battles. So plasma had its role there for burns as well. But yes, at the same time, this little organization in Bristol also dispatched teams to work on battlefields to provide blood. And these are really key to explaining and understanding how the blood reaches the sharp end. And in some cases, they are working in countries like Egypt, sending stores into the desert. And yes, they also take blood. So they use what are essentially what we call now walking blood banks, which are essentially soldiers. Soldiers. They take blood from soldiers who are serving nearby. They bottle it, keep it cold, and they somehow push it in trucks which have refrigerators. They push them into the desert and they get the blood up to the front as quickly as possible where it becomes usable. And that's a model that's used everywhere as well. So Italy, Sicily, Burma, northwest Europe as well. You have blood being taken on the ground from soldiers and also administrative staff, sometimes other armies as well give their blood, and that is bottled and sent up to the front very quickly because, of course, you can take that, that's closer. Those donors are much closer to the front. It makes sense. There are hazards to that. Big, big ones. There are challenges. It's not as aseptic. These are not perfect conditions for taking blood quite often. So you find contamination sometimes creeping in. But this is a case of striking balances. Sometimes you might not have any plasma. Maybe the plasma hasn't turned up. The supplies in Bristol have been torpedoed on route. So you're left with blood. How do you get that? And the only thing you've got are local donors. And sometimes it's not ideal, sometimes the conditions are poor, but that's all you've got. So you have to take that decision. What do we use? We either give them nothing or we've got blood from these unusual sources.
- [23:14]
C
Again, this is a thing which I really hadn't thought about at all because it sounds like this would have been a normal part of the soldiers experience in these theaters, then they would have been asked to give blood and presumably they would have been happy enough to do it because they recognized that they might be the recipients of that sort of blood. Is that right?
- [23:32]
B
Yeah, that's right. What's interesting actually is the volunteer aspects of giving blood in the UK is matched by the British army and the British armed forces overseas. So in the UK there is a tradition of giving blood for free. Like it's a voluntary based system. There's no payment. Well, biscuits or biscuits, except for biscuits and perhaps your iron tablets. Yeah, and a pat on the back and a thank you. And that's all you can hope for. And it's all that people expect. And it's understood from the start that that is a good way of doing things because you're not going to get chances turning up after their 10 pounds, 50 pounds, 100 pound payment, pretending that they've got blood that's trustworthy, that they can be trusted, that they can hand over blood that is safe to use. Because in those days some of the blood testing was fairly elementary and some diseases were missed. So in those days there was a great deal of reliance placed on voluntary, on the logic of voluntary donation. And that is also rolled out. And that's what, that's what's expected from British soldiers overseas. So again, you see biscuits, the most that they get that's beyond biscuits, is beer. So they give them beer sometimes and in Burma there's a bit of rum, but that's it. But if you compare that to the Americans where they're handing out $10 apiece, which is quite a lot in those days, and that is connected to a high degree of risk with the blood that they are producing. Because there is a definite suspicion in those days that if you're paying people for blood, in other words, if these American soldiers are giving blood in return for money, then you will be upping your chances of some of that blood being unsafe. That's quite resonant today when we're drawing blood from. We still take blood from US sources and other places where there is a history of contaminated blood because of the exchange. The deal that is made. Often money is involved in that exchange, which jeopardizes the trustworthiness of that blood. And there's a very demonstrable history of that. So the British approach was very different. But yes, it did extend to biscuits and beer, but that's as far as it went.
- [25:35]
C
So you just mentioned the US there and I said we would talk about the sort of the non UK experience. It sounds like the UK was kind of on the front foot here in terms of their approach to blood banking in the Second World War. Is that right? And what did Britain's allies and Britain's enemies do in terms of their blood banks?
- [25:52]
B
Yeah, that's correct. The Americans were somewhat behind the curve on this, surprisingly so. When they entered the war in 1941 and they sent their first forces into North Africa in 1942, the end of 42, they had very little in the way of any organized blood service behind them that was comparable to the British. And they got into terrible trouble in North Africa with the blood sources that they had. They had some plasma and that was very useful in terms of having something to hand, but they had very little mechanism for providing whole blood, none of those walking blood banks that the British were using, and they suffer for that. And then they cast around for ways to do this better and to improve themselves. And yes, they do hit on the wisdom of comparing themselves to the British and trying to learn from them what they've been doing, which is so effective. So they're able to compare their own system, which was a flawed one, to a successful British one. And there's no question that key elements of the American system that's developed owe themselves to what the British and what the UK had been doing with its blood up to that point. That said, of course, the us, with its enormous resources then outstrips by far what the British, what the UK is capable of producing. So in the Pacific, for example, the USA provides enormous amounts of blood with a really humming logistics network that is extremely efficient and gets what it needs to where it needs to go as quickly as possible, with also using the resources of. Of the US population at home, they're able to take blood from donors in the US and fly that all the way to the Pacific. But that all starts really from watching what the UK was doing early on.
- [27:33]
C
What about the enemies?
- [27:34]
B
Yeah, so the enemies too are in a worse state. So if you look at Nazi Germany, they never have anything comparable to what the British or the Americans have. It is right until the end of the war, they're still using syringes essentially as a way of taking directions, transfusion, moving blood directly from one person to another. I mentioned that earlier, these First World War techniques of hurriedly taking blood from someone, rushing to the other side of the room, putting that blood into somebody else's vein before it coagulates, before it deteriorates, they're still doing that in the Second World War, they're still doing that at the end, using very high tech syringes, but moving it as quickly as they possibly can. But it means they can't store it. They have no real use of plasma. The only substitute that they make mass use of is an entirely synthetic one made from a byproduct of vinyl. And they use that which has some effect. It stays in the veins. It's quite in the same way that plasma does, but it has no power, it can't move nutrients around and it can't do the things that plasma does naturally. And so they suffer for that. And there are plenty of cases of German doctors with very few resources to hand. Major campaigns that the German army is involved in, where they have very little beyond saline, which is just a salt water mixture. That's all they have when they go into Poland, for example. So there is a gulf between what the Allies are doing and Nazi Germany is doing.
- [28:56]
C
So with that, then, and with your military historian, hat on, does Britain's success with blood banking make a material difference to Britain's contribution to the Second World War?
- [29:08]
B
To a degree, it is measurable. You can see soldiers who are hit, who are patched up, they are, as a consequence of receiving transfusions and their health recovers to a certain degree, which puts them back to full health. And you see them returning to the front lines. So you can see that as a measurable degree of success. It's hard, the records are patchy, but there's no question that it was a common experience for soldiers who would have had wrecked health in a comparable earlier conflict, benefiting from this unique treatment which sends them back to a point where they can recover and are fit enough to fight again. Morale as well, that's something that had been flagged in the First World War. It was something at the heart of it in the Second World War. Not just the soldiers at the front line as well, but also it's a stimulus to the home front. It enables people to believe that they are actively helping, which they were. There's no question about it. You donate your blood in your Somerset village hall, you know that that's going to be put to good use. And it was. And it was. Whether it's whole blood or whether it's converted into plasma, that would be on its way to the front line, where it would be of inestimable use. So there's no question of the value. And then you start looking towards the sources that are left by surgeons, and there, that just gives you a really powerful consistent image of the remarkable effect the blood has in surgery. So blood is essential way of keeping or preparing a casualty for emergency surgery, keeping them alive while they're undergoing surgery and then helping them recover afterwards. And these are surgeons who are able to see at a glance the difference between having blood and having not. They can see the difference between plasma and blood, they can see the difference between what the Germans are doing, what they're doing. And there's no question about the impact that blood has as a life saving resource.
- [30:55]
C
Well, this is absolutely fascinating and there's so much here that I hadn't thought about, but we need to wrap up. And the thing I want to get to now is just to think about how the experience in the Second World War has shaped what we do today in the UK and globally in terms of, of blood banking and blood transfusion.
- [31:12]
B
So on one level, if you look at Bristol, the War Office's blood setup in Bristol during the war, then later became the headquarters of NHS Blood Transplant down in the southwest, and that's today where NHS Blood Transplant has its headquarters. So there's actually a tangible, there's a traceable link between precisely what the army was doing and the heritage that it's left for the NNHS in the UK that includes this idea of using large numbers of donors, mobilizing large populations, transporting blood, moving it around, the use of plasma and so on. The use of dried plasma is perhaps one of the greatest impacts, but it's one that went out of favor after the Second World War quite quickly because it's a product that's used in emergency situations. So it's an emergency measure. It's not ideal, but it's perfect if you're in austere environment, if you have few other resources and you've got no power and so on. Dry plasma is absolutely perfect. So you see it making a breakthrough, a return to use here actually in the UK in civilian medicine. And today in Cambridge, the mod and the NHS are also finally, decades after producing dried plasma before, are also restarting to produce dried plasma. That is partly as a conscious response to the potential threat that we're. The threats that we're faced face today, where there is the possibility of large scale conflict that we haven't been involved in for a very long time, returning on a scale comparable to that in Ukraine, when we will have to think very seriously about how do we find the vast amounts of blood that we used in the Second World War, how do we do that again? So dried plasma is almost certainly a solution to that
- [32:49]
A
that was Roderick Bailey speaking to David Musgrove. Roderick is a research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities at the University of Oxford. If you want to hear more from Roderick, check out the History Extra Life Lessons from History podcast feed to hear his views on how we can take inspiration from the Second World War Special Operations Executive to help build our confidence and resilience today.