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‘Morale Squadron’ kept wartime mail on the move
By Elinor Florence
Imagine not seeing your son or husband for years – maybe forever! That’s why the mail delivery in the Second World War was absolutely critical, both for the boys over there and the folks back home. And never more so than during the Christmas season.
This wartime Star Weekly magazine cover shows the excitement of a young Canadian flyer receiving good news from the home front.
When it came to long separations, the countries that suffered the most were Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand. The British servicemen went home on leave, and so did the Germans and other Europeans. The Americans weren’t able to travel home either, but they didn’t start going overseas until early 1942, after the U.S. entered the war.
On the other hand, some Canadians left home in 1939 and didn’t see their families again until 1945. That’s six Christmases far away from home! Since the only contact with their families was through letters, no wonder the mail was so vital. This above photo captures the loneliness of a Royal Air Force anti-aircraft gunner reading his mail in India.
Mail was a lifeline between the home front and “over there.”
My grandfather was the postmaster at Battleford, Saskatchewan. A veteran of World War One, nobody understood better the importance of mail. When a letter arrived from one of the boys overseas, he delivered it on the way home from work, not willing to let his family wait even one extra day for that precious letter.
My 91-year-old mother June recalls writing letters until her hand cramped, six or seven every week, some of them to boys she scarcely knew, in an attempt to keep their spirits up. People also sent hundreds of parcels overseas, containing hand-knitted socks and scarves, soap, dried fruit and candy.
To make matters worse, people on the home front couldn’t look up their son’s location on a map, because they weren’t allowed to know where he was or what he was doing. So all the mail went through a central depot and was readdressed by postal workers on the other side.
Here’s a happy U.S. Marine in the South Pacific who just received his Christmas parcel from home, addressed to the Postmaster in San Francisco.
And wartime letter-writers also had the uncomfortable knowledge that someone was reading all their letters, just to make sure they weren’t letting something slip.
Names of fellow servicemen, travel plans, mention of military actions –all were blacked out, or sometimes even cut out with scissors, by the censors.
This photo shows a Postal and Telegraph Censorship Department worker checking the content of a letter.
Transporting all that mail back and forth across the oceans was a huge job.
At the outset of war, the Canadian Postal Corps had 50 personnel. By the end, there were 5,000 people operating 170 field post offices at bases across Canada, plus exotic locales such as Cairo, Bombay and Karachi. They could deliver a letter or a parcel to the most distant or remote theatre of war.
The Base Post Office in Ottawa was the heart of the vast, far-flung operation. Every piece of mail addressed to a man or woman overseas, in either the army or the air force, or stationed at a base in Canada, went through this depot, while navy mail went to Halifax.
The volumes grew exponentially, like the war effort itself. In 1939, Ottawa was moving 15 bags of mail a day. The following year the daily average had grown to 255 bags.
By 1943, the staff was processing 3,000 bags per day and working some incredible hours.
All the work was manual, and it was tedious, back-breaking labour. In November 1943, to help alleviate the Christmas rush, high school students served as volunteers.
At first, most overseas mail was sent by convoy and took up to three weeks to reach Britain.
Canadians were NOT happy about the delay. So in November 1941, the post office introduced the airgraph, a free one-page form.
After these were mailed from any point in Canada, they went to the Toronto Post Office and were turned over to the Canadian Kodak Company, photographed and placed on microfilm. Each reel of microfilm could hold some 1,600 airgraphs and weighed about four ounces, package included. Sent as ordinary letters, these messages would weigh 25 pounds and fill half a mailbag.
These reels were sent to overseas post offices, first in England and later in Algiers, Cairo, Naples, Bombay and elsewhere. The messages were transferred from film to paper and then distributed to the troops.
I have an airgraph that was sent to my grandmother Vera Light. It’s so tiny I can’t read the handwriting with my naked eye.
The American latched onto the idea of photographing and shrinking their mail as well, and they called it Victory Mail, or V-Mail for short. Here’s a propaganda poster created for that purpose.
But the mail from Canada was still taking too long to reach its destination, so in late 1943, the government created the 168 Squadron RCAF, commonly known as the “Mailcan Squadron,” to move letters and parcels by air.
The first flight occurred on Dec. 17, 1943, and during its 30 months in existence, pilots made 636 transatlantic flights in Liberators and B-17 Fortresses loaded with mail.
And what happened on the other side? All the mail for Canadians was flown to Scotland, and came down to London by train. There it was delivered to the Canadian Overseas Postal Depot, and then sent out to the various stations.
Among those who sorted the mail in London were 40 women in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Alice Revel of Woodstock, Ontario was one of them. She recalls working day and night to get the mail sorted, and being “almost overwhelmed” at Christmas. The same team worked together for two years, and the girls became very close.
Andy Comstock from Sanditon, Saskatchewan, was interviewed at her home in Nanton, Alberta in 1996 about her work as an RCAF postal worker in London base. She said one of the more painful duties was to check all the names every morning against Daily Routine Orders – to see which men were listed as missing or dead. If requested, their mail was either returned to sender or given to the Red Cross for redistribution.
The postal workers, who called themselves informally “The Morale Squadron,” did everything in their power to get the mail to the boys on time.
Joe Tobin, who served with the Canadian Postal Corps in Italy, was interviewed by The Memory Project: “The thought was that the most important thing that a person would get was the mail. It was above food, above everything. The dedication of everybody was just absolutely fantastic.”
By the end of the war, the Canadian Postal Corps had handled 190 million letters, 18 million ordinary parcels, nine million tobacco parcels (a special package ordered through tobacco companies for the men overseas), and eight million pounds of newspapers.
And that might be just one reason that we won the war!
Letters between my heroine Rose Jolliffe in England and her mother Anne back on the home front back in Saskatchewan feature prominently in my wartime novel, . To achieve the right tone and language, I read hundreds of wartime letters. You can read some reviews or order my book online here.
You can also visit me in person – today, December 5 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at Lotus Books in Cranbrook. I’ll join nine other local authors there for a Kootenay Authors Book Fair. Here are the details. POSTer
– Career journalist Elinor Florence, who now lives in Invermere, has written for daily newspapers and magazines including Reader’s Digest. She writes a regular blog called Wartime Wednesdays, in which she tells true stories of Canadians during World War Two. You may read more about Elinor on her website at www.elinorflorence.com
(Lead image: Photo credit: Imperial War Museum).