Life was thoroughly unpleasant for many troops who found themselves fighting in Italy at the end of 1943. As well as the bitter winter weather, the challenging mountainous landscape, the threat of disease, and the unexpected stiff German resistance, many were homesick having served overseas for years on end. Receiving a letter from home was the highlight for many of those servicemen’s days.
It had been long understood that there was a link between mail and maintaining morale. The War Office Morale Report for Q2 1943 recognised the importance of an efficient postal service:
“The regular and speedy receipt of mail is the most important single factor in maintaining the spirit of our troops abroad.”1
Soldiers who had fought through the desert were understandably hoping that now they were fighting in built up areas on the mainland of Europe that the postal service from Britain would improve. After all, they were geographically closer to home, so surely it would take less time to send and receive letters from Britain? Added to this, the troops were told that the premium ‘ten-penny mail’ that had been offered for urgent mail had been discontinued because it would be a waste of money as the mail was at capacity. The Eighth Army News (Italian edition) picked up on this growing frustration in its article Why is my mail so slow? published in November 1943.2
The reporter, Fred Redman interviewed Lieutenant-Colonel W. Scott of the Royal Engineers, Assistant Director of Army Postal Service to get some answers. In true Eighth Army News fashion, he starts the article by offering a seemingly simple solution: dedicated mail planes to and from Britain. Whilst all letters needed to go through the censor, the article describes the different options the troops had available:
Air mail: Air mail letters were put on passenger planes and flew via North Africa back to Britain and avoided over-flying enemy territory. Passenger planes were subject to the weather and risked being lost due to enemy action, so it often meant that there were unscheduled delays or the letter could even be lost. For understandable capacity reasons, air mail had been rationed to one per month for each serviceman but this rationing was relaxed from 1944.
Surface or sea mail: ships were sailing directly from Italy to Britain by November 1943, but it usually involved a 4 week trip and the ship had to wait for a suitable convoy before departing port, so it could take longer. This was also the route for parcels, which had increased significantly in volume since the troops had access to shops in Italy. This option became even more popular with Christmas approaching.
Airgraph: this technical innovation from Kodak in the 1930s allowed 1600 letters to be photographed and reduced in size to fit onto a 5.5 ounce reel, transported, and then enlarged again at the destination. It was adopted in 1941 and by 1943, around 2 million airgraphs were being handled each week in Britain. These took a day or two longer than airmail but had the added benefit of being duplicated and could therefore be resent if a consignment was lost enroute. During the winter of 1943, the airgraph equipment was still in Algiers, so the letters still needed to be flown from Italy to North Africa before being processed and sent via plane. For more information on how airgraphs work, see the video from the IWM collection in the footnotes.3
Telegrams: Telegrams still had to be flown from Italy to Cairo to be sent back to Britain. Once in Cairo, the telegrams were passed to Marconi for transmission. This could take 2-4 days.
Ultimately though the efficiency of the postal service still had some way to go at the end of 1943 in Italy, as Scott says in the article, “the best services will fall down” without a diligent postal orderly in your unit.
I’m not sure how much comfort British servicemen had after reading this article in the Eighth Army News, but at least they were more aware of some of the difficulties experienced by the RE Postal Service. The mail service from Italy to Britain during the course of 1944 as the Allies pushed further north and the postal infrastructure and administration was better established on mainland Europe. Things improved to such an extent that by September 1944, the Allied Forces Headquarters Morale Committee confidently reported that ‘the speed or rather slowness of mail has ceased to be a major item of complaint’.4
Speedy mail delivery was one thing, but contents was also very important to morale. Receiving bad news from home (especially a Dear John letter from a loved one) was a constant threat to the willingness to fight, not only for the unfortunate recipient but also to everyone else in his unit. One officer summed up the paradox nicely: “the two main factors affecting morale of the soldier overseas are the mail and the female.”5 Writing in 1949 in his report on the morale of the British Army during the Second World War, Sparrow reflected:
“No disease was more infectious than the anxiety and depression arising from bad news or the absence of reassuring news”.6
Other welfare measures were put in place by the British Army to try to help servicemen facing marital challenges at home, but that’s for another article.