V-mail

With Valentine's day coming up, I thought it would be interesting to talk about another type of V-mail...Victory mail. V-mail was an interesting manner of correspondence utilized during WWII. Regular letters took up much need cargo room, room that was needed to take military supplies and food to the troops. V-mail oh so cleverly used microfilm to replicate a letter in tiny form which was then blown up and printed back to original size when it reached its destination. This use of micro film was able to reduce load of 37 mail bags to carry 150,000 one paged letter to one single mail stack. Amazing.

The person writing the letter would use a special form for V-mail that they purchased from a five and ten store. This form restricted the writing space, had areas for the recipient's address and was a combo stationery/envelope with gummed edges. When the letter was done, the writer would mail it to V-mail offices where the reproduction process began. The letter was reduced to about a quarter of its size and was sent to receiving stations near the recipient and then enlarged again for easy reading. V-mail was so small in its microfilm state that one v-mail advertisement boasted that 1,700 v-mails could fit into one cigarette pack!

Sending V-mail was not only seen as a patriotic act (allowing more supplies to get to the boys) but also cut the time it took for a soldier to receive a letter. A normal letter would travel by boat, taking six weeks to get to its destination. V-mail, being compact and light, traveled by air and got to the lucky letter receiver in only twelve days, shaving nearly a month off letter travel time.

V-mail was advertised in 1944 as a way for a soldier to hear news from home on a weekly basis and was suggested that they be "cheerful, short, and frequent." Hmm, wouldn't it be interesting to send someone a mock v-mail? Maybe photocopy a letter 25% of its size onto an acetate for them to shine a flashlight through and read by projecting it onto a wall? I wonder if that would work.

Over & Out,
Kathy

Info taken from these fine sites:
National Postal Museum, V-mail (Images taken from this article)
Duke University Libraries, Brief History of WWII Advertising Campaigns: V-mail.
(Also, Pendemonium has some vintage inks that were used for V-mail printing.)

Comments

[kelly]

I love this post! This is absolutely fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing.

[Sarah]

Do you think there would be any restrictions about reproducing this form and posting it as a pdf? I made a version for myself, and would love to share it.

[Kathy]

Sarah,

So cool that you did that and that you'd like to share!

I did a quick check to see if there is any copyright on the V-mail design and I couldn't find anything saying so. Considering that and the fact that you aren't selling it, I think it would be totally fine to distribute a .pdf of it.

If you want us to host the .pdf (with credit to you, of course), email it to us and will upload it on the LWA site. If you end up hosting it yourself, please, let us know how we can download it, for surely we would love to!