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On June 3, 1939, Donegal-born James C. Magee was appointed U.S. Army Surgeon General by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On May 31, 1940, Magee appointed Professor Walter B. Cannon of Harvard University as Chairman of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on Shock and Transfusion. In 1938 Brigadier Lionel Whitby was appointed Director of an autonomous U.K. Army Blood Transfusion Service (ABTS). Whitby thereupon appointed Professor John Henry Biggart, Professor of Pathology, Queen’s University, his Northern Ireland Head of Blood Transfusion and Blood Banking. Winston S. Churchill was aware that Biggart’s service would be responsible for the needs of the Allied Forces and later for the United States Forces in Northern Ireland. Professor J.H. Biggart was known to Churchill from their 1926 post-prandial encounter in Belfast. The United States in 1941 determined that they were not able or prepared to fly U.S.-donated blood to Europe or Africa. The shortage of whole blood for United States forces required Whitby’s ABTS to supply all the blood for the Mediterranean Theatre and in Europe from the St. Lô breakout from Normandy until after the capture of Brussels on September 3, 1944 and then again in December 1944 for the Battle of the Bulge. Winston S. Churchill took Whitby to Quebec in September 1944 to meet with President Roosevelt and the combined U.S. Chiefs of Staff. Churchill used the supply of British blood to meet the needs of American Forces to prevent the U.S. threats to bankrupt the British Empire. President Roosevelt, already involved in his fourth campaign for the U.S. Presidency, accepted most of the British proposals for further credits. By Okinawa in the spring of 1945, under ABTS tutelage, all the Allies were adept in long-range transport and storage of large, 100,000 pint quantities of whole blood. Subsequently, Whitby and John Henry Biggart were knighted; U.S. Army Surgeon General Magee was sacked.