Neither Rain, Snow nor 42 Years : About Those WWII Letters

Albert Archbold’s mail Friday was not just special delivery. It was extraordinary.

Forty-two years after he wrote them, he had back in his hands four yellowed letters he thought he had mailed to his wife, mother and mother-in-law while he was bouncing about the Mediterranean on a troop transport ship in the midst of World War II.

“Oh, I can really see myself sitting there on my bunk, trying to write this and trying to ride the roller coaster,” the Huntington Beach retiree said, holding the fragile May 19, 1944, note to his mother.

The four letters--two of them on special “V-mail” stationery posted free for servicemen, the other two sent air mail with red 6-cent stamps--were among the more than 200 pieces of undelivered mail found last month among some old socks in an Army duffel bag in a Raleigh, N.C., attic. The bag of letters from servicemen aboard the transport ship, the Caleb Strong, had been entrusted to a now-deceased Raleigh man who, for an unknown reason, neglected to mail them. The bag, containing letters from 93 servicemen to 117 addresses in 34 states, instead was tucked away in the attic of the man’s aunt and discovered by an exterminator, according to the U.S. Postal Service.

Archbold said the service tracked him down and asked whether he wanted his four letters posted on to their intended recipients, or sent back to him. Archbold opted to reclaim his mail. His mother died in 1955, and his marriage ended about 25 years ago, he said.

Letter to His Mother

Sitting in the recreation hall of his condominium complex Friday, Archbold, 69, declined to read aloud the letters to his former wife--”it wouldn’t be appropriate,” he said--but he scanned the letter to his mother, who lived in Tucson in 1944.

“I’m talking about the fact that my boy was just starting to walk. I talked about the family,” he told reporters. In his letter to his former mother-in-law, he said, he mentioned that he had just written to her daughter, who was living with her parents in Los Angeles during the war. “I told her to take care of my wife and son for me,” he said.

The letters, he said, brought back memories.

He had been married just three years at the time, he recalled. His son, Randy, was just 1 year old at the time of the letter. (After the war, he and his wife, Willy, had three more children, two daughters, now aged 40 and 27, and another son, now 34 years old.)

He had spent three years in the infantry before he transferred to the Air Force, where he trained to be a pilot but turned out to be too nervous in combat, he said. Instead, he became an armor gunner. When he wrote the letters, he said, he was aboard the Caleb Strong with about 500 men in a convoy of ships through the Mediterranean to Oran, Algeria, where they were to pick up their planes and fly to Foggia, Italy.

‘Apprehensive’

“I was apprehensive,” he said of the rough transit through enemy-filled waters.

Until he was contacted by the Postal Service, Archbold said he didn’t know that those letters had never been received. “I wrote a number of letters, three or four times a week, so I didn’t realize they never got them. Or if I did, I forgot about it through the years,” he added.

A quiet man, Archbold said he planned to read the letters more thoroughly in private and eventually give them to his children.

“They’re memories from the past. These are letters to people they knew,” he said, referring to his children’s grandmothers. “I’m sure they’ll be very interested.”

The letters to Archbold’s mother and mother-in-law were written on V-Mail stationery, a single, lightweight piece of paper that formed its own envelope. The two letters to Archbold’s former wife were too long for the V-Mail stationery and were meant to be sent by air mail. In the lower left-hand corner of those two envelopes were censors’ ink-stamps, indicating that the letters contained no sensitive information.

Opened and Photographed

Hector Godinez, divisional manager for the Postal Service in Santa Ana, said the original copies of letters sent by V-Mail--short for “Victory Mail”--were never intended to be delivered. Under the military’s V-Mail service, the letters were opened by machines and photographed, with about 1,600 letters fitting on a single roll of film. The film, not the letters, was sent by ship or plane, reducing volume and weight during transport. The letters were later printed from the film at a military V-Mail facility near the destination and forwarded to the addressees.

By filming the mail, 100,000 letters that would weigh about 1,000 pounds and fill 15 mail sacks instead would be converted to film weighing about 30 pounds and filling less than one sack, according to postal officials.

Godinez said the mail found in the North Carolina attic never made it to the V-Mail filming facility, and the stamps on the other letters were never canceled. This was not a case of slow delivery by the Postal Service, he said, because the agency never got the mail until it was discovered in the attic.

“It’s sheer speculation,” he said, “but maybe the mail was given to a person on the ship, who apparently neglected to put it into the Army postal flow.” Later, when the man discovered his oversight, “maybe he was afraid” to turn it over to the authorities, Godinez theorized.

14 Have Been Located

The Postal Service has been able to locate 14 of the Caleb Strong letter writers or their relatives and is continuing to look for the remaining authors, or their families, if the veterans have died. Postal authorities have asked that veterans or their relatives who think one of the letters could belong to them to write to V-Mail, Communications Department, U.S. Mail Postal Service, 475, L’Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, D.C. 20260-3100.

Godinez personally delivered the 42-year-old letters to Archbold Friday. Archbold’s second wife, Catherine, said she and her husband had no hard feelings about the delay.

“I think they (postal authorities) did a wonderful job,” she said. “I think they deserve congratulations. They get enough complaints.”