Email We Know, But V-Mail . . .?

The StLGS monthly meeting for May is this coming Saturday, the 12th. "The Homefront: V-Mail to Email" is the topic, and it should be of interest to all, as its focus will be World War II. St. Louis County Historian, Danny Gonzales, who was to have been our speaker, has moved back to his home state of Indiana, and the talk will instead be presented by Mike Venso, the curator of museums for the county.

Mike will take a look at all the ways in which World War II impacted American society. The title of his talk stems from a unique method of communication used during that war to save cargo space on ships. As genealogists, we certainly know how heavy piles of paper can get, and the cargo space on ships needed to be reserved as much as possible for war-related materials and not personal correspondence. Yet, staying in touch with family was very important for morale of the troops so writing was encouraged.

V-Mail was an abbreviation for Victory Mail and it was modeled on a system started in England. The idea was that you would write your letter on a special V-Mail letter sheet, one that contained both space to write and an envelope (see the photo). Once a V-Mail letter was mailed, it was funneled to a special station where the contents were microfilmed and reduced to a much smaller size. "The rolls of film were sent to prescribed destinations for developing at a receiving station near the addressee."* The letter-sheets were then reproduced on paper again, but still in smaller size, and sent on to the people to whom they were addressed. Not surprisingly, this system was also called "Photomail," but some called it "Tiny Mail" or "Funny Mail" because of the miniaturized size of the final copy.

The launch of the new system was on 15 June 1942; the first of the overseas V-Mail stations run by the U.S. Army opened in April 1943 in Casablanca. Between June of 1942 and April 1945, more than 556 million pieces of V-Mail were mailed from the U.S. to military post offices and more than 510 million pieces were received from military personnel abroad.*

To learn more about V-Mail, you might like to read the articles on the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum website at https://postalmuseum.si.edu/victorymail/


*Smithsonian National Postal Museum https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibits/past/the-art-of-cards-and-letters/mail-call/v-mail.html