The Pittsburgh Press (March 25, 1943)
Editorial: Send more V-mail!
The government is urging more widespread and frequent use of V-mail for communicating with men overseas in the Armed Forces, and the campaign should serve as a reminder to all of us that nothing is more important to a soldier or sailor far from home than letters.
Mail for the men still in this country is vital enough, but distance and hazardous passage make it doubly valuable to the men overseas. Life in Africa, as Ernie Pyle has testified, and in the Solomons, and Iceland, and a hundred other outposts, is down to barest essentials. Just being alive is itself a luxury.
We can’t, individually, send missing comforts to relatives and friends abroad, but we can write to them, with a guarantee of swift delivery of our letters by V-mail.
V-mail has a priority over all other types of mail. Most of it goes by plane. V-mail has gone to Australia in as short a time as seven days, to Hawaii in three days.
If a roll of V-mail film is lost, the letter is not lost, because another roll can be reproduced and forwarded.
V-mail weighs 1/65th as much as ordinary mail – 1,600 letters can be converted into a roll of V-mail film which takes up only a little more space than a pack of cigarettes. That’s why delivery is faster and surer.
And V-mail is private. The photographing machines operate at tremendous speed and only the censor reads the letter. And he reads all mail.
Use V-mail for soldiers and sailors abroad. And use it often. Those men need letters!