V MAIL Part II

Children are finding V Mail while cleaning out attics and old trunks of their parents. Perhaps one of your family members were in the service and you have already found them.



Look at the example of the letter, see the black marks in the letter? These are areas that are censored. That means that every letter that was written to servicemen and letters servicemen sent home were censored. Yes, those are censor marks. If the letters should fall into enemy hands, the V Mail would not give the location away.





Reduction in the size and weight of the letters translated into more space for crucial military supplies on cargo planes; one advertisement explained that 1,700 V-Mail letters could fit in a cigarette packet, while reducing the weight of the letters in paper form by 98%. Transport of the letters by plane minimized the chances that the enemy would intercept the letters, although writers were reminded to delete any information that might prove useful to the enemy in case some V-Mail was captured.




Americans on the home-front were encouraged by the government and private businesses to use V-Mail. Letters from home were compared to "a five minute furlough," and advertisements that instructed how, when, and what to write in a V-Mail reached a peak in 1944. Letters were to be cheerful, short, and frequent.





V-Mail made it possible for servicemen halfway across the world to hear news from home on a weekly basis.



We know that Cliff wrote to his family on a regular basis. We know that Cliff would tell his sister, Ella, how many missions he had flown. I understood that he would send gum wrappers; that wasn't it at all, he coded how many packages of gum he ate and that told her how many missions he had flown.

Recently, Ralph, the youngest of the Rye children, came to Minnesota to visit his sister, Ella. Ralph talked with his neice about Victory mail and how thin the paper was. Yes, Ralph did remember those letters.