Airgraphs and V-Mail: Reducing the Cost and Weight of Mail

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The airgraph was invented in the 1930s by the Eastman Kodak Company along with Imperial Airways (now British Airways) and Pan-American Airways as a way to reduce the weight and bulk of mail carried by air. In 1940, the British Minister of Transport suggested that airgraphs be used for mail traveling between the Middle East Force and the United Kingdom. This eventually led to a service being launched between England and Egypt in 1941 when 70,000 airgraphs were sent, reaching their destination in three weeks.

Airgraphs became necessary when the Italians closed the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea to Allied forces in World War II. Seaborne traffic had to go around the Cape of Good Hope, posing a 12,000-mile detour and delays of three to six months for mail destined for British soldiers stationed in the Far and Middle East.

To send a letter by airgraph, a soldier would get a standard, preprinted form from the post office or five-and-dime store. The form had space for a letter of 100 to 300 words, the address of the recipient and sender, and an area for the censor’s approval stamp. After the message was written, the form was folded and sealed. It then made its way to a processing center where it was fed through a machine that photographed it on 16-mm film. A continuous roll of film could hold up to 1,700 messages weighing, with its container, weighed 154 grams (or 5.5 ounces). A mail bag holding the same number of regular letters would have weighed 22.5 kilograms (or 50 pounds). When the airgraph reached its destination, it was sent to a local Kodak processing plant that printed photographs of the letters to be sent in a three-inch by four-inch envelope. In theatres of war, the Army Postal Service coordinated airgraph operation, which extended eventually to Canada, East Africa, Burma, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, and Italy.
Postage for an airgraph cost three pence. Although the airgraph proved to be immediately popular, its use was limited because of its size and lack of privacy, so when sufficient aircraft capacity became available, its use declined in favour of the air letter.

The U.S. military based it’s “victory mail” or V-mail, begun in 1942, on the airgraph system. Fast, free, and difficult for the enemy to intercept, V-Mail took as little as twelve days or less by airplane to reach its destination. Using standard mail by ship, it had taken up to a month for mail delivery. Mail delivery by air had the added benefit of minimizing the likelihood of enemy interception, although censors still ensured that any potentially useful or damaging information was deleted from all messages. One final benefit was that letters could never be “lost in the mail.” Because of the serial numbers on the forms and originals held on file, any message that was lost in transit could be reproduced and sent to the addressee.

Though soldiers griped about only being able to write short letters and on one side of the form, they were encouraged to use V-Mail to save shipping costs and expedite mail delivery. My father, Herb Gilmore, who served in the Central Pacific, had this to say about V-Mail:

Did you read about the V mail? One of the guys down here wrote a V letter, and the censors sent his letter back with a note stating that it is against the rules to use vulgar language and to please use better taste. The guy who wrote it is a little crazy, and he did use harsh words. The censors take pictures of the V mail, which seems to be much faster and speedier than regular mail, as fast as three days. But it has its disadvantages, and that is you can’t write very much and only on one side of the paper. 

A soldier who really wanted to express himself, such as my father, most likely chose letters over V-Mail. But if you wanted to send a short message to update your folks, a V-Mail would do just fine and arrive more quickly.