Featured V-mail - writing home in WWII

Going through the family papers, I came across a bunch of these. This is a photograph of a letter written home by an uncle who served overseas in the U.S. army in WWII. It’s small… smaller than a postcard. The image measures 4 ¾” by 3 ¾”. This is V-mail, and it’s the way mail from U.S. soldiers overseas was processed.


The “V”, of course, stood for victory. There was a standard form used to write the letter:




Soldiers in the States could apparently just mail the form:




But the procedure overseas was different. The soldier would use the same form, but after writing the letter, it was censored and then photographed. The film was sent back to the States where it was processed into that small format and mailed.


So small. I don’t see how you could read one without a magnifying glass. I didn’t even try until after they were scanned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail

 

Wow! That is tiny indeed! Poor Grams and Gramps would have to have a young-un read it to them!

 

Thanks for sharing MOS

 

Fascinating -- I would love to know some of the means that people used to read those tiny things.

Also was interested to learn from the Wikipedia article that Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's book _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ apparently cut V-graphs into strips to use as bookmarks! (I've seen the movie but never read the book... I can imagine her doing that.)

 

Very cool find. We have a few that my FIL's older brother wrote home from Germany on them. Very interesting to read. One was mailed the day the 2nd atom bomb was dropped and his youngest brother was already in the Pacific.

Most probably already know this but one primary reason was space to get mail overseas, one mail bag of V-Mail would be equal to appx 10 bags of standard mail (or something along those lines) regardless it allowed a lot more mail to be sent in smaller space.