Saving on WWII logistics with V-Mail
It's been said that logistics is what wins wars, and I think the US demonstrated this better than anyone during World War II. Efficiency was created in just about every aspect of the supply line.
For a great example, look no further than V-mail. Enabling the families of troops to send them letters is great for morale, but even letters get heavy with enough of them. So why send the letter itself? Electronic communication wasn't up to the task in that volume quite yet, but another technology was: Microfilm!
When you sent a letter across the Atlantic, the actual letter would stay stateside. It gets censored, then photographed. That photo is transferred to microfilm. Many letters fit onto a single roll of film, and that's what goes overseas.
When it reaches the military post office, the film is reprinted to shrunken-down letter size, about 4x5 inches. Still good enough to read, but saves on paper. Finally, those get distributed to the troops.
Okay, the British were really the first to do this concept, but America deployed it in a huge way. You could trace it all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, where letters were snuck out of Paris with pigeons and microfilm. That developed into the British 'airgraph' which was a commercial endeavor to reduce the weight of mail.
It certainly did save space on the supply chain: 150,000 one-page letters, weighing 2,575 pounds, reduce down to just 45 pounds, enough to fit in a single mail bag. With the smaller size, letters could be moved more quickly by plane.
As a bonus, it was much more difficult to conduct espionage via V-mail. The traditional tools of invisible ink and microprinting simply didn't show up on the film printout.
There were some catches: Censorship couldn't be done by cutting out the offending bit of paper as usual. And the "Scarlet scourge" struck the microfilm machinery, where people kissed their letter with lipstick, which went on to gum up the process.
While you only had a smallish box to write your letter in, you could write whatever would get by the censor. Some took advantage of the format to create poetry, art, and even comics.















