Lives Saved by Plasma (August 1943), a Red Cross Blood Donor Service sheet for local papers

Lives Saved by Plasma is an August 1943 news sheet from the American Red Cross Blood Donor Service in Washington. Quotations from the Navy and Army surgeons general frame columns of stories and photographs of wounded servicemen, written for newspapers to reprint (NAID 514903).

A page built for reprinting

Content note: the sheet includes photographs of wounded servicemen, one of them bloodied and receiving a transfusion, and its text uses period wartime wording, including a slur, for the Japanese enemy. This page quotes them as they appear.

This is a newspaper page, laid out by the Red Cross so that local editors could lift stories from it. The archive describes columns of servicemen's stories, photographs, and numbered mats. The masthead sits between two quotations from the military's medical chiefs.

"Only 1 percent of the Navy personnel wounded in the South Pacific died, thanks in large part to plasma."

-Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General, United States Navy

LIVES SAVED BY PLASMA

"Plasma ranked first as the foremost life-saver used by the Army Medical Corps in North Africa."

-Major General Norman T. Kirk, Surgeon General, United States Army

August, 1943

American Red Cross Blood Donor Service

[...]

Acting on orders to intercept a Japanese convoy bringing reinforcements and supplies to Jap troops still holding out on Guadalcanal, [...]

[...]

"I haven't a single doubt but that without blood plasma I wouldn't be here now," [...]

The stories

The lead story is about Father Arthur McQuaid, a Lowell, Massachusetts priest serving as a lieutenant in the Navy Chaplain Corps. The sheet says he was badly burned at the Battle of Lunga Point, set ashore at Tulagi to die, and saved by three pints of blood the Red Cross had collected. A second story quotes Rabbi Ferdinand M. Isserman of Temple Israel in St. Louis, serving as a Red Cross club director, on a plasma transfusion he watched in a North African operating tent. He imagines the donor as "perhaps Christian or Jewish, perhaps rich or poor."

How to read it

The archive tags testimonial and transfer: named patients, a priest, a rabbi and two surgeons general vouch for plasma, and the sheet's aim is more donors. The archive files the purpose as fundraising. Its issuer, the Red Cross, is a non-governmental body, though the quotations it leads with come from the Navy's and the Army's surgeons general.

The figures in the masthead are the two surgeons general's claims, quoted. The sheet does not show how they were counted, and neither does the archive. The battle details in the McQuaid story are likewise given "according to official reports," and the sheet gives no further source.

What the sheet asked for was blood, freely given. A donor chose to give or not. The persuasion is human interest, and the rabbi's account says outright that the donor could be Christian or Jewish, rich or poor. The slur in the excerpt sits in a sentence of battle summary, in a story otherwise about a burned chaplain's recovery.

The U.S. Army's 1943 poster The Jap Way: Cold-Blooded Murder puts the same slur in a headline, and the anti-Japanese propaganda hub gathers more. The 1942 Public Health Service sheet Become a Nurse is a government medical appeal of the same years, and a 1946 Navy poster states its own medical figure in its title: Penicillin for Gonorrhea Works 95 Times Out of 100.