The Story of V-Mail

Photographed Letters on Wings: How Microfilmed V-Mail Helped Win World War II

By Tom Weiner (with Bill Streeter)

Levellers Press, 194 pages.

Until quite recently I had never heard of V-mail. No, I don't mean Email, though V-mail is, in many ways, its predecessor. V-mail was a World War II (1941-45) exigency that shrank the mail.

The "V" in its name stands for "victory," and as author Tom Weiner shows, technology helped boost morale and economize cargo space. Perhaps you can't imagine how downsizing the mail aided the Allied cause in the battle against fascism. That's probably because you're so used to sending Emails that you seldom think about the weight of physical letters. It's just paper, right? In World War II, more than 330 million letters were exchanged between military personnel overseas and their families in the United States. Weiner notes that it took 37 stuffed mailbags weighing a combined 2,575 pounds for every 150,000 letters. Those bags also took up a lot of space. But when those letters were microfilmed, the reels took up just two bags and weighed 45 pounds. It is easy enough to imagine how microfilm eventually spawned new technologies for transmitting information that led to E-mail. More immediately, though, according to the Office of War Information, between 1942-44, V-mail saved five million pounds of airplane cargo space that was used to move everything from rifles and K-rations to blood plasma and surgical dressings.

V-mail had technological limitations, though. Senders had to fill out photographically sensitive forms with room for just 450 words. These were then mailed to centers where they were microfilmed onto reels containing hundreds of other letters. They were then flown to field laboratories overseas that printed them, sliced them into individual dispatches, and printed as "half letters" that measured just 4 ¼ inches by 5 ¼ inches. Some notes sent back home were censored for revealing troop locations too closely, but the system was remarkably efficient; very few letters were lost.

Objectively, Weiner's book is something of a mishmash. It is strongest when focused on V-mail itself. He learned of V-mail from the late Bill Streeter (1930-2017), a Western Massachusetts Renaissance man whose cousin, Henry Ward Streeter, was killed in Germany on April 17, 1945, just weeks before Germany's surrender on May 8. Bill Streeter's preface tells some of Henry's story and is mixed with well-traveled slogans from the period. Likewise, Weiner's introduction is largely a remembrance of his deceased friend. The book is relatively short, but only about 60 percent of it deals directly with V-mail.

The body of the book opens with a chapter on the history of microfilm. It contains fascinating tidbits, though it often feels disconnected from the foundations of V-mail. Chapter two is devoted to airgraphs–used mostly in the Franco-Prussian War and World War I–and it too could be better focused. Chapters three through six are the heart of the book. Weiner rightly gives credit to Kodak and its Recordak technology for making V-mail work. We also learn of how V-mail connected senders and receivers, the campaign to convert them to use V-mail, the military personnel who processed it, and how mail was distributed to those stationed across the globe. Chapter six also details how advertisers promoted and used V-mail. The same chapter gives a nod to the artwork that added to V-mail's allure, even though it reduced the space available for writing.

Weiner's final chapter, "The Voices of V-Mail", was a better idea than reality. Weiner had a limited number of V-mails available to him and we don't learn much from the mundane excerpts. The rare gems are those that really get us into the minds of the writers: family members seeking details of how their loved ones died, observations of Italy from occupying troops, and the shock of learning about President Roosevelt's death.  

There is a lot of repetition in the book, as well as digressive asides and internal references to sources that should have been reduced to footnotes. I heard Weiner speak of his book before I read it. He is so passionate about the subject that I was surprised I didn't learn more from the book. Tonally, Weiner's ardor comes across better in person than on the page. It is unfair to hold a "civilian," if I may, to the standards demanded of a professional historian. Still, I longed for the hand of a developmental editor who could have helped Weiner sharpen his prose, focus, and narrative arc. Weiner's book contains fascinating details about an underappreciated phenomenon. The reader, though, is left to connect the dots and address the lacunae.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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