This is how the featured V-Mail dated February 1, 1945 reads at the very end, as my 101st Airborne father would write from a hospital recovering from his wounds received during the Battle of the Bulge.

Few things mattered more to the soldiers serving abroad than getting letters from home. Dad was no different. The mail was indispensable. It motivated them and kept them going. Some might say that the war couldn’t have been won without the mail. In 1942, the military began encouraging Americans to use V-mail, a simple ingenious space-saving system devised by the British-who called their version the airgraph.

Letters were addressed and written on a special one-sided form, sent to Washington where they were opened and read by army censors who blacked out anything they thought might give useful information to the enemy. The letters were then photographed onto reel of 16-millimeter microfilm. The reels-each containing some 18,000 letters-were then flown overseas to receiving stations. There, each letter was printed onto a sheet of 4 1/4-by 5-inch photographic paper, slipped into an envelope, and bagged for delivery to the front.

“The best morale exists when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower

A single mail sack could hold 150,000 one-page letters that would otherwise have required thirty-seven sacks and weighed 2,575 pounds. Between June 15, 1942 (when the first V-mail station began operation in North Africa), and the end of the war, anxious families sent more than 556 million pieces of V-mail to their sons overseas-and received some 510 million in return.

Comes A Soldier’s Whisper remembering history, one day at a time…

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Text Source: THE WAR ~ Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns