95 Fun Facts About Red Cross

Which future animation pioneer drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross in France at the end of World War I?

Walt Disney served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in France, then returned to Kansas City in 1919, where a commercial art studio job introduced him to Ub Iwerks, his future collaborator.

The 1859 battle whose wounded inspired the Red Cross was fought near which Italian town?

Solferino, in Lombardy, saw losses so heavy that they helped bring about the armistice that ended the war.

Which crime novelist volunteered as a nurse at a Red Cross hospital in her hometown of Torquay during World War I?

Agatha Christie began her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916 during that war work; published in 1920, it introduced Hercule Poirot.

Which national Red Cross society ran the 1945 'White Buses' rescue of concentration-camp prisoners?

The Swedish Red Cross, under its vice-president Count Folke Bernadotte, negotiated with Himmler to bring some 15,000 prisoners out of German camps in white-painted buses in March and April 1945.

Two of the ICRC's five founders in 1863 shared which profession?

Doctors Louis Appia and Théodore Maunoir were the surgeons among the five, whose campaign produced the first Geneva Convention, obliging armies to treat wounded enemies too.

Which Swiss general sat on the five-man committee that founded the Red Cross?

Guillaume-Henri Dufour had put down the separatist Sonderbund in 1847 with notable restraint, and later presided over the congress that drew up the first Geneva Convention.

Using the red cross emblem to trick and kill an enemy is which war crime?

Perfidy with the red cross is banned because such misuse can weaken the emblem's protection and put genuine aid workers in danger.

Which French pacifist shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with the Red Cross co-founder?

Frédéric Passy wrote a plea for peace in the newspaper Le Temps during the 1867 Luxembourg crisis, and that year he founded a peace league.

World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day falls on 8 May because that date marks what?

Henry Dunant's birthday, 8 May 1828, marks the day; the businessman went bankrupt in 1867, left his home city and spent decades in poverty.

In which Swiss village did Dunant spend his final years and die in 1910?

Heiden's hospital took in the destitute founder in 1892, and a journalist who met him there in 1895 revived his fame and brought him new honours.

Besides the Red Cross, which other organisation did Dunant help found, starting its Geneva chapter in 1852?

The YMCA's Geneva chapter was started with Dunant's help in 1852, and three years later he took part in the Paris meeting that founded the YMCA's world alliance.

Which American novelist was badly wounded in Italy in 1918 while serving as an American Red Cross ambulance driver?

Ernest Hemingway fell for Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky while recovering in Milan; she declined to marry him, and the war gave him material for A Farewell to Arms.

Which state first used the Red Crescent in the 1870s?

The Ottoman Empire's insistence got the red crescent accepted beside the cross, and it is now the emblem of the national societies in most Muslim countries.

Which country used the Red Lion and Sun emblem from 1924 to 1980?

Iran, under the shahs, had the red lion and sun recognised in 1929; the Islamic Republic switched to the red crescent in 1980 while reserving the right to revive the old emblem.

What is the name of the fourth protection emblem, adopted by a vote in 2005?

The Red Crystal came with Protocol III in 2005, letting national societies that use neither a cross nor a crescent take part in the movement.

Israel's national society, admitted to the movement in 2006, is called what?

Magen David Adom was kept out of the movement for decades because it would not drop its red Star of David emblem, and it joined alongside the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

Which group got a Geneva Convention of its own for the first time in 1949?

Civilians got the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted in response to World War II's atrocities; it was the first Geneva Convention not written for combatants.

Which Nazi ghetto was dressed up to fool Red Cross visitors in 1944?

Theresienstadt was made to look less crowded for the visit, as the Nazis deported thousands of its residents to Auschwitz beforehand.

Which royal toured an Angolan minefield on a 1997 Red Cross trip?

Princess Diana spoke in favour of banning anti-personnel mines on the trip, and the Ottawa Treaty banning them was signed that December.

Besides name, rank and serial number, what must a questioned prisoner of war give?

Date of birth completes the list, and a prisoner who wilfully withholds these details may lose privileges of rank or status.

Which American nurse, known as the 'Angel of the Battlefield', founded the American Red Cross in 1881?

Clara Barton brought supplies and nursing care to soldiers on Civil War battlefields, and she later lobbied for years until the US joined the Geneva Convention.

Under which president did the US finally join the Geneva Convention, after years of lobbying by the American Red Cross founder?

Chester Arthur was president when the Senate ratified the treaty, and Congress later gave the American Red Cross a federal charter.

The 1900 hurricane in which Texas city was the American Red Cross founder's last field operation?

Galveston's 1900 storm drew the 78-year-old founder into the field for the last time, and four years later critics inside the society forced her to resign.

What kind of disaster in Michigan in 1881 prompted the American Red Cross's first relief effort?

Forest fires in Michigan's Thumb region gave the new society its first relief work, fitting the founder's pitch that it could help in peacetime disasters, not only wars.

Which future president led 1927 Mississippi flood relief alongside the Red Cross?

Herbert Hoover supervised the relief as commerce secretary, and the flood fed the Great Migration of Black Southerners to northern cities.

Who was the first medical director of the American Red Cross blood programme in 1941?

Charles Drew had run the Blood for Britain project, and he criticised the military's rule that the Red Cross first exclude, then segregate, blood from Black donors.

The British Red Cross was formed in 1870 at the outbreak of which war?

The Franco-Prussian War prompted a public meeting in London on 4 August 1870 that founded the society, which then aided both warring armies.

The ICRC's first field mission, in 1864, went to a war between Prussia and which country?

Denmark's war saw ICRC delegates work on each side of the front line, beginning the ICRC's role as a neutral go-between for warring parties.

Which French pacifist writer volunteered at the ICRC's prisoner-of-war agency and won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Romain Rolland protested against the war in his 1915 pamphlet 'Above the Battle'.

Which Norwegian explorer, the ICRC's partner in repatriating WWI prisoners, devised a refugee passport?

Fridtjof Nansen, as high commissioner for repatriating prisoners, sent more than 400,000 of them home, and his 'Nansen passport' gave stateless refugees papers.

Which war produced the American Red Cross poster 'The Greatest Mother in the World'?

The First World War produced Alonzo Earl Foringer's 1918 poster of a giant nurse cradling a wounded soldier on a stretcher, which became the society's best-known image.

Who created the American Red Cross War Council on 10 May 1917?

Woodrow Wilson set up the War Council to raise money and direct the society's work once the United States entered the war.

Which blood type is usually cited as the 'universal donor' for red-cell transfusions?

O negative red cells lack the A, B and Rh D antigens, so emergency teams can give them before a patient's blood type is known.

Which medal, created in 1912, is the highest international award for nurses?

The Florence Nightingale Medal was reserved for women until a 1991 rule change let men receive it too.

In 1870, the future American Red Cross founder helped which German royal with wartime relief work?

The Grand Duchess of Baden worked with her as she organised war relief, an experience that inspired her to bring the Red Cross to America.

Which 1889 disaster, killing over 2,200, was an early American Red Cross relief effort?

The Johnstown Flood became the society's first major disaster relief effort, and its founder stayed on the scene for more than five months.

Which US company has registered the red cross symbol for its medicinal products?

Johnson & Johnson had used the red cross since 1887, so a 1910 law letting users from before 1905 keep the emblem protected its trademark.

Which monarch granted the British Red Cross its first royal charter in 1908?

Edward VII granted the charter a year before the society began forming Voluntary Aid Detachments to support military medical services in wartime.

In 1914 the British Red Cross formed the Joint War Committee with which body?

The Order of St John pooled volunteers with the society in Voluntary Aid Detachments, and the pair joined forces again when war came in 1939.

Which ICRC president of 1928–1944 had earlier sat on the Permanent Court of International Justice?

Max Huber, a Zurich lawyer, was also the arbitrator in the 1928 Island of Palmas case, which gave the island to the Netherlands rather than the United States.

What was the ICRC's original Latin motto?

Inter Arma Caritas, 'amid war, charity', is still the ICRC's motto, while the federation of national societies chose Per Humanitatem ad Pacem instead.

Which street artist gave a hospital 'Game Changer', a painting of a boy playing with a red-cross nurse doll?

Banksy left the painting at a Southampton hospital in 2020, and it was auctioned in 2021 to raise money for NHS charities.

In 1990 the ICRC became the first private organisation granted what by the UN General Assembly?

Observer status was granted to the ICRC by UN General Assembly resolution 45/6 on 16 October 1990, the first time a private organisation received it; the IFRC followed in 1994.

Who became the first woman to head the ICRC when she took office in October 2022?

Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, a Swiss diplomat who had headed the UN Development Programme's Europe and Central Asia bureau, succeeded Peter Maurer on 1 October 2022; the first woman member, Renée-Marguerite Cramer, was co-opted in 1918.

In 1859 Dunant went to Italy to petition which emperor about his Algerian business?

Napoleon III was directing the French armies in Italy, and on the way to his headquarters Dunant came upon a battle's wounded and organised care.

The red cross on a white ground was created by reversing the colours of which country's national flag?

Switzerland's white cross on red was flipped to make the emblem, which is why American ski patrols and hospitals that show a white cross on red are, in effect, flying the Swiss flag.

Swiss ICRC delegate Marcel Junod was the first foreign physician to reach which ruined Japanese city in September 1945?

Hiroshima has had a monument to Junod in its Peace Park since 1979. The photographs he sent home were among the first pictures of the bombed city to reach Europe.

Which fried snack did American Red Cross 'Clubmobile' crews make fresh for US troops during World War II?

Doughnuts came from a machine built into each Clubmobile, a converted bus or truck staffed by three American women who also handed out coffee, chewing gum and magazines.

Which scientist headed the Red Cross Radiology Service in France and fitted out mobile X-ray vans from 1914?

Marie Curie directed the installation of 20 mobile radiological vehicles in the opening year of the fighting, helped at the start by her 17-year-old daughter Irène.

Which future aviator trained as a Red Cross nurse's aide and worked at a Toronto military hospital in 1918?

Amelia Earhart was visiting her sister when the sight of wounded soldiers moved her to stay. Her hospital duties included preparing special diets and handing out medication.

Which future fast-food tycoon lied about his age to become an American Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I?

Ray Kroc never reached the front, because the fighting ended soon after he enlisted. Decades later he turned the McDonald brothers' burger stand into a worldwide chain.

Which medical charity was founded in 1971 by French physicians who had volunteered with the Red Cross in Biafra?

Médecins Sans Frontières was set up after the Biafran famine by French medics and journalists, among them Bernard Kouchner, who later became France's foreign minister.

In the FAST check for a stroke taught in first-aid classes, what does the letter T stand for?

Time is the reminder to call emergency services at once and to note when the symptoms began; the first three letters cover the face, the arms and speech.

The international first-aid sign shows a white cross on which colour, because the red cross is legally reserved?

Green is the ground of the internationally accepted first-aid symbol. The red cross on white belongs to military medical services and the Red Cross movement, so kits and signs need a generic alternative.

Which Fundamental Principle of the Red Cross forbids taking sides in hostilities or joining political controversies?

Neutrality exists, in the movement's own wording, so that it can keep the confidence of all sides; disputes of a religious or ideological nature are off limits too.

In the RICE first-aid routine for sprains and strains, what does the letter C stand for?

Compression means wrapping the injury to limit swelling, between ice and elevation. The sports physician who introduced the mnemonic in 1978 has since withdrawn his support for it.

What does the letter D stand for in AED, the portable device that can restart a failing heart?

Defibrillator is the word, and the automated external kind reads the heart rhythm by itself, so a bystander with little or no training can use one.

Which first-aid move does the American Red Cross pair with abdominal thrusts for a conscious, choking adult?

Back blows are firm slaps with the heel of the hand between the shoulder blades. If coughing fails, rescuers alternate five of them with five thrusts, a routine known as 'five and five'.

Before nursing Civil War soldiers, the American Red Cross's founder spent over a decade in which profession?

Teacher was her first career, and in 1852 she opened New Jersey's first free school at Bordentown. She left after the board replaced her as its head with a man.

Which Allied commander praised the American Red Cross's wartime clubs and coffee in a June 1945 speech on Capitol Hill?

Dwight Eisenhower told lawmakers that the Red Cross had often seemed the friendly hand of the nation, reaching across the sea to sustain its fighting men.

At which Civil War battle did the American Red Cross's founder find surgeons dressing wounds with corn husks?

Antietam was one of several 1862 battles where she handed out stores, cleaned field hospitals and fed wounded men within reach of the guns.

In which 1898 conflict did the founder of the US Red Cross, aged 76, work in hospitals in Cuba?

Spanish–American War relief began the organisation's long service beside the US military, and its founder went out to the island's hospitals herself at 76.

Which British nurse, shot by a German firing squad in 1915, ran a Brussels clinic taken over by the Red Cross?

Edith Cavell treated wounded men from both sides and helped some 200 Allied soldiers slip out of occupied Belgium, for which a German court martial condemned her.

Which future senator from North Carolina was president of the American Red Cross from 1991 to 1999?

Elizabeth Dole was the first woman to lead the organisation since its founder, and she left to seek the Republican presidential nomination for 2000.

In which city is the American Red Cross headquarters, built as a memorial to the women of the Civil War?

Washington, D.C. got the building between 1915 and 1917. Women's groups from the North and from the old Confederacy each paid for its memorial windows.

Red Cross Month, begun by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, is marked in which month each year?

March became Red Cross Month when the president called on Americans to meet the growing humanitarian needs of the war, and the national appeal turned into a yearly tradition.

Until 1950, the American Red Cross kept donated blood separated according to which characteristic of the donor?

Race decided where a donation went, a policy with no scientific basis. The most prominent Black scientist in blood banking called it an insult to donors as eager as anyone to help the war effort.

Which penny charity stamps did the American Red Cross's Delaware chapter first sell in 1907 to fight tuberculosis?

Christmas Seals were Emily Bissell's way of raising $300 to keep her cousin's sanatorium open, an idea borrowed from a scheme that had worked in Europe in 1904.

Which country's Red Cross gave up running the national blood supply in 1998 after a tainted-blood scandal?

Canada handed blood collection to a new agency, Canadian Blood Services, once serious flaws in the Red Cross's collection process had been uncovered.

Which personal disaster in 1867 led to the Red Cross's founder being expelled from the committee he had started?

Bankruptcy followed the collapse of the Geneva bank Crédit Genevois, and a court later condemned him for deceptive practices. He dropped from public view until a journalist rediscovered him in 1895.

Which Geneva lawyer led the ICRC as president for a record 46 years and was a bitter rival of its founder?

Gustave Moynier, the pragmatist of the pair, led the move to expel his idealist rival from the committee. The two men died about two months apart in 1910, never reconciled.

Which Italian phrase did local women coin in 1859 while helping the Red Cross's founder nurse every army's wounded?

Tutti fratelli means 'all are brothers', and the women of Castiglione delle Stiviere said it as they tended men without regard to which side they had fought on.

In which city was the League of Red Cross Societies founded in May 1919 by five Allied nations' societies?

Paris hosted the meeting of the British, French, Italian, Japanese and US societies, pushed along by a banker who chaired the US war council. The league's staff moved to Geneva in 1939.

People with type AB blood are universal donors of which blood component, the reverse of the red-cell rule?

Plasma from type AB donors carries neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies, so it suits a patient of any group, while AB patients themselves can only be given AB plasma.

World Blood Donor Day, held every 14 June, honours which Austrian physician who discovered the ABO blood groups?

Karl Landsteiner was born on that day in 1868 and won a Nobel Prize in 1930. He first labelled the groups A, B and C, and C only later became O.

At which Confederate prison camp did the American Red Cross's founder help identify 13,000 dead in 1865?

Andersonville's dead could be named because a young Union prisoner, Dorence Atwater, had kept the camp's death register and carried a copy of the list out through the lines.

Before the Civil War, the American Red Cross's founder was a clerk at which federal agency in the capital?

The Patent Office made her one of the first women to hold a federal clerkship, at a salary equal to a man's.

Which English novelist and qualified medic, too old to enlist in 1914, drove British Red Cross ambulances in France?

Somerset Maugham corrected the proofs of his novel Of Human Bondage near Dunkirk during a lull in his ambulance duties.

Which author of A Room with a View served in Alexandria as a British Red Cross searcher for missing servicemen?

E. M. Forster was a conscientious objector, and the post of Chief Searcher let him serve in Egypt without bearing arms.

Which Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse turned her wartime hospital service into the 1933 memoir Testament of Youth?

Vera Brittain broke off her Oxford degree in 1915 to nurse, and the book traces how those years set her on the road to pacifism.

Which Fundamental Principle says a country can have only one Red Cross or Red Crescent society?

Unity also requires that single society to be open to all and to carry on its humanitarian work throughout its territory.

The Second Geneva Convention of 1949 adapts the protections of the First to fighting in which setting?

At sea, wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of armed forces receive the protections that the First Convention gave to soldiers on land.

The Red Cross ship SS Vega brought food parcels in December 1944 to which starving British territory?

The Channel Islands waited through months of negotiation before the ship was let in with parcels, salt, soap and medical supplies. It made five more trips, the last after liberation.

Which Muslim-majority country uses the red cross rather than the crescent as the emblem of its national society?

Indonesia's society was created on President Sukarno's order exactly one month after independence in 1945, and it is named Palang Merah Indonesia, the Indonesian Red Cross.

The Japanese Red Cross grew out of the Hakuaisha, founded in 1877 to treat the wounded of which samurai uprising?

Satsuma Rebellion casualties on both sides were treated by the Hakuaisha, or Philanthropic Society, which Count Sano Tsunetami created as the fighting began.

What is the first-aid name for the side-lying posture used for an unconscious casualty who is breathing?

Recovery position keeps the airway clear: gravity stops the tongue from blocking the throat and lets fluid drain out of the mouth.

The ICRC ran the International Tracing Service, a vast archive on Nazi persecution, until 2012 in which German town?

Bad Arolsen was picked because it lay centrally among the Allied occupation zones and had come through the war with its buildings intact.

Which Swiss jurist, a chief drafter of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, proposed the Red Cross's Fundamental Principles?

Jean Pictet set the ideas out in a short book in 1955, and ten years later a conference in Vienna adopted them unanimously.

Which Maryland town holds the last home of the American Red Cross's founder, an early headquarters of the organisation?

Glen Echo's house became the first national historic site in the United States dedicated to the accomplishments of a woman.

Which nurse founded the American Red Cross Nursing Service and died on a mission in France in 1919?

Jane Delano was first buried in the Loire Valley; the Army later carried her remains home for reburial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Which philanthropist led the faction that ousted the American Red Cross's founder from its presidency in 1904?

Mabel Boardman then ran the organisation for years without taking the title of chairman, a step she believed would cost it credibility with the public.

ICRC delegate Friedrich Born protected thousands of Jews in 1944 by hiring them as staff in which occupied capital?

Budapest's Jews were being deported when Born recruited up to 3,000 of them as workers for his delegation and declared several buildings to be under ICRC protection.

Which former National Institutes of Health director was forced out as American Red Cross president after September 11?

Bernadine Healy clashed with a board that had hired her as a change agent, amid criticism that most of the $564 million given after the attacks was being set aside for long-term use.

The American Red Cross raised nearly $500 million after which country's 2010 earthquake, then faced press criticism?

Haiti's quake struck close to the capital, Port-au-Prince. Reports by NPR and ProPublica later found that promises to rebuild neighbourhoods there were never met.

In CPR, the emergency technique taught in Red Cross first-aid classes, what does the letter P stand for?

Pulmonary refers to the lungs: cardiopulmonary resuscitation pairs chest pushes that keep blood moving with rescue breaths that supply air.