This little
bit of regalia should bring you ol’ Salts back to the days of Snail Mail and
how important it was to get those letters properly addressed and to the right
people and visa-versa! This is from an old article pulled up out of the All Hands Magazine somewhere back during the last Big War (WWII)!! Hope you enjoy…
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Remind your
friends and family that when sending mail to your ship it will always be
received in the ports of New York or San Francisco, the FPOs there naturally
get the information first and then forward it immediately to Washington for
distribution to other Navy Post Offices.
When the destination of a unit is temporarily undetermined, its mail in
the FPO goes into a pouch in the “hold section” and is not dispatched until the
unit’s next address is received.
For the sake
of security, a so-called locator system is used in dispatching Navy mail. Each ship and activity has a locator number
(changed frequently) to which its mail is addressed after it is put in the
pouches.
One of the
most difficult FPO jobs is the handling of “prints.” Naval personnel are subject to constant
shifts throughout the world, and all too often newspaper and magazine
publishers have only the initial Navy address of their subscribers in
service. Publishers are notified, by
postage due notice from the FPO, when “print” addresses are incorrect. Postal Affairs continues, meanwhile, to
advise naval personnel to keep publishers informed of their changes of address
and to request discontinuance of publications they do not want.
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When ships reach American ports, they find their mail waiting for
them. The FPO, informed in advance of the anticipated ship arrivals,
loads the mail for each ship on trucks and sends it to the docks. If the
ship is not yet in port, the mail is not taken back to the FPO. The mail
truck waits. Sometimes, the mail is loaded on small craft at the docks and sent
out to the waiting ships.
At the New
York FPO, 1944’s unprecedented Christmas mail load caused a severe case of
growing pains which was cured only by moving the parcel post section to Navy
Pier 51 on the Hudson River. The pier
has two decks and a rood (but little in the way of bulkheads), is about three
city blocks in length, and offers to all hands the opportunity of duty in the
open spaces. Winter had come to New York
and temperatures on the pier were frequently sub-freezing.
Parcel post crews
at San Francisco and New York each operate a “scavenger department” where
damaged or improperly wrapped packages from home are rewrapped.
The biggest
trouble with Navy parcel post is that so much of it is wrapped in packages that
simply won’t stand the gaff, and also that parents and wives and friends insist
on sending perishable foodstuffs to naval personnel overseas. The food deteriorates with handling and
changes in the weather.
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V-mail is
the most practical mail service the Navy offers. It receives the highest priority and reduces
the mail transportation problem.
Basically,
the V-mail principle is very simple.
Instead of sending the letter itself, which is bulky and (when weighed
in the millions) heavy, the Navy simply photographs the letter onto a tiny film
and then gives the addressee a photographic print of the letter.
