Blood for U.S. Soldiers.

Blood for U.S. Soldiers. Allied casualties in Normandy are 30 per cent less than expected, according to Major Heneral H.W. Kenner, chief medical officer of Allied Supreme Headquarters, who announced August 5, 1944, that 97 out of every 100 wounded men live. Blood transfusions are credited with saving thousands of lives, with blood plasma carried in each soldier's kit and whole blood being administered at field hospitals. U.S. service men and women stationed in Great Britain have set up a blood donors'center at a U.S. Army hospital to donate blood to the wounded in France. Under a speedy process of handling, blood flows into the veins of an injured soldier in France within a few hours after it was taken from the arm of a buddy in England. This series of 12 pictures shows how blood is taken from the center in Britain, packed in ice and transported in a refrigerated truck to an air base, where a specially fitted transport plane fliles the precious cargo over the English Channel for dlivery to a blood bank set up at a landing strip on the Cherbourg Peninsula. Photo No. 3. Private Robert L. Matthewwss of Troy, Ohio, lifts an ice packed can containing units of whole blood from a truck onto a specially fitted cargo plane of the Ninth U.S. Air Force waiting to transport the precious fluid across the Channel to a blood bank for the wounded in France. Both the truck and plane are equipped with refrigeration to preserve the blood. The blood can be transmitted to a wounded soldier on the front line within two hours after the loaded plane takes off.