In token of the high value which he placed upon mail as a morale factor, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, U. S. Navy, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, frequently summed up the primary needs of his Fleet and his men as “FOOD, AMMUNITION, AND MAIL.” It was largely as a result of the constant support of his headquarters that the Navy Mail Service, off to a poor start at the beginning of the war, developed into the efficient and hard hitting organization which made it possible to deliver airmail, postmarked five days before at San Francisco, to Marines and ships engaged in combat at Iwo Jima. That mail was dropped by parachute to some of the land forces, and delivered by small boats to the Fleet units standing offshore—after having been brought in from Saipan by seaplane and destroyer—is indicative of the planning and the versatility which characterized the Navy’s fighting mailmen.
Like many of the other service branches of the Navy, the pre-war mail service was unorganized. Personnel were not specifically trained, and there were no mail ratings. Yeomen were responsible along with their other assignments for seeing that somehow mail for ships at sea was taken out by observation planes attached to battleships and carriers. The single engined planes had small capacity, and frequently the pilot had to choose between mail, newspapers, and other articles which his shipmates were anxious to have. Aboard ship, rated men detailed as Navy Mail Clerks assorted and distributed the mail, sold stamps, and performed the other miscellaneous duties of a small post office. In comparison with the streamlined and large postal establishment made necessary by the war, it was a haphazard affair.
Like everything else in the two-ocean Navy, the Navy Mail Service in the years following Pearl Harbor was big league stuff. A Fleet Post Office at San Francisco— equipped with modern mechanized equipment, and manned by more than 2,500 sailors and WAVES, all graduates of Navy postal schools, and most of them petty officers entitled to sport the new Mailman “crow”—was the focal point to which all mail for Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard personnel in the Pacific was directed. Into the large, bustling building on Brannan Street, and into the huge parcel post annex in Oakland, flowed the millions of pieces of mail which the Navy’s parents, wives, and sweethearts carefully marked each week “c/o Fleet Post Office, San Francisco.” At Pearl Harbor, Commander Earl D. Chance, U. S. Naval Reserve, a veteran post office inspector, and later Lieutenant-Commander Andrew E. Newton, U. S. Naval Reserve, his relief as Pacific Fleet Postal Officer, sweated out at ComServPac headquarters the problems of extending the postal service, building new facilities, and finding the required trained manpower as the Navy surged into the Solomons, the Marshalls and Gilberts, the Marianas, the Philippines, the Ryukyus, and finally into the Empire and China. As each new operation was planned by the staffs of Admiral Halsey and Admiral Spruance with CinCPac, a part of the plan was “the postal phase,” and detailed arrangements were made to insure the delivery of mail to personnel of the task force units while en route and while at the target.
In almost every operation, LST’s were designated for service as mobile Fleet Post Offices, with the tank deck turned over to the mailmen. Here all the mail for ships and other units participating in the operation would be received and sorted, it having been brought up from the last base by seaplane or landplane, depending on the nature of available air facilities, or, where air facilities were non-existent, by destroyer, carrier, or tanker. Here, too, were available large stocks of stamps, money order and registry facilities, and everything else that a post office normally provides and that might be required by the mail clerks who would come to mail call each day in ships’ boats. Even before the invading forces had landed on the beachhead, it was not unusual for the participating units to receive mail from home. When Admiral Halsey and the Third Fleet steamed into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender, close behind the San Diego and the Missouri were the LST’s 567 and 648, serving as Mobile Fleet Post Offices for the task force.
At the great fleet anchorage at Ulithi where there was so little land that LCVP’s and LCM’s took the place of jeeps, for more than a year the Fleet Post Office serving the larger part of the Fleet was aboard an LST. It was standard operating procedure for six Commando planes of Marine Transport Air Group (TAG, or the Victory Line, as they tagged themselves) to be airborne at Guam each morning for Mackenzie Atoll, as Ulithi was referred to on some maps, by nine o’clock with a normal load of 20,000 pounds of airmail along with blood, personnel, and freight. Since the danger of air attack from nearby Jap-held Yap was great, the same planes would return the same day with stateside bound airmail from the fleet. Coming in at Ulithi’s 3,200-foot airstrip (the largest part of the atoll’s land mass), the mail would be taken to the LST to be sweated by 250 mailmen into shape for mail call.
Much of the mail sent to Ulithi for delivery was intended for ships which were at sea engaged in operations against the enemy, and which were not due to return to the anchorage for replenishment for some time. There is nothing better calculated as a tonic for the man engaged in a strike off the enemy coast, whether he be an admiral or a seaman second class, than a letter from home. Fleet oilers left Ulithi regularly to rendezvous with Fleet units engaged in task force operations. Along with the fuel oil, they carried airmail letters, food packages, newspapers—all to be hauled over the lines and delivered as the combat ships were refueled. As the war pushed westward towards the mainland of Asia, and as additional anchorages were established at Samar and elsewhere, these same techniques continued to be applied. But nothing better illustrates the decline of our activity in the Pacific than the state of Ulithi after the atoll command was decommissioned and the base rolled up. Instead of the 2,0C0 vessels of all categories which might have been encountered there, once every ten days a lonely PC came down from Guam with mail, food, and movies for the 30 sailors and Coast Guardsmen manning the weather station and Loran installation, and, together with the 350 islanders, comprising the atoll’s population.
Navy mail differs from stateside mail and Army mail in that its addresses are mobile and fluid rather than fixed. 119 Wendell Terrace, Syracuse, can be counted on to stay put short of an atomic explosion. Once a Tenth Army is established on Okinawa, it is pretty likely to remain there until it is time to go home. But neither the U. S. S. Enterprise, nor any other naval vessel out of the mothball fleet, can be expected to stay in one place very long. Since all Navy and Marine mail is just addressed in care of the ship or other unit to which the man is attached, an effective mail service presupposes an intimate and exact knowledge of where all Naval vessels and mobile units are at all times, and where they are expected to be—information which, in time of war, carries the highest classification of security. Consequently the Fleet Post Offices at Pearl Harbor, Guam, in the Philippines and Okinawa, and at other major bases received daily the most current operational information for guidance in the routing of mail. Frequently, on certain islands only the postal units had access to such information, and so the additional function of guiding travellers to their destination was assumed. Unlike the Army, most naval personnel travel on individual orders which direct them to proceed not to a particular geographical location, but to such port as a specified ship or unit may be in. It is the individual’s responsibility to find that port. In living up to that responsibility, and in locating those ports, many found that the Travellers’ Aid Societies of the Pacific were located in the post- offices.
The pivotal point in the Navy Mail Service for the Pacific was the Air Mail Center at Guam. Here, at Naval Air Base Agana, was the crossroads of the Pacific. Daily the four-engined Skymasters of the Naval Air Transport Service would wing in and out with payloads of mail, personnel, freight, and blood. Normal schedules called for four planes each day in each direction between Guam and Pearl Harbor, twenty hours apart. Daily flights between Guam and Tokyo, with stops at Iwo Jima, numbered as many as ten a day in each direction at the peak of the traffic load. Manila, Shanghai, and Okinawa were reached daily from Guam via the NATS transports. Between D-Day at Okinawa and the day that the Ryukyus were declared secured, 900,000 pounds of airmail were flown in from Guam. “Local flights” to Saipan, Tinian, Pelelieu, Ulithi, Kwajalein, and Manus were operated by TAG’S Marine pilots, including Lieutenant Tyrone Power of the movies, who shared the spotlight at the Red Cross counter in the Agana terminal with Admiral Mitscher and Ernie Pyle.
Because of the unpredictable manner in which Navy ships moved about the Pacific, it was virtually impossible for the Fleet Post Offices at San Francisco and Pearl Harbor to determine where they might be beyond the fact that they were operating in the forward area. To insure that sailor mail would in be the hands of the addressees at the earliest possible moment, all mail for units operating beyond Kwajalein and the Marshalls was sent to the Air Mail Center at Guam for onward routing. Here the latest operational information was applied, and in a matter of a few hours the mail was again on its way. The enormity of the task is illustrated by the sample statistic that in the four Quonset huts on this airfield as much as 3,500,000 pounds of air mail were handled in a single month. Air mail averages fifty letters to the pound, and that spells big business.
A major factor in the efficient handling of mail is having available adequate means of transportation, a circumstance brought home to Americans on the mainland during a railroad strike. Frequently, adverse weather conditions or the urgent need for plane space for other high priority traffic would shove the mails off the planes for a day or so, and interrupt mail service. This happened, for example, when millions of dollars of invasion currency were flown across the Pacific in connection with the occupation of Japan. Similar interference with the mails occurred when, after the typhoon at Okinawa, it was necessary to ship there by air much needed materials for reconstruction. Whenever mail was shunted to the background for a day or so, heavy backlogs would accumulate. Admiral Nimitz was the first to insist that they be dissipated. Receiving each day from Pearl Harbor and Guam the daily “mail on hand” figures, he noted one morning that there was on hand 83,000 pounds of air mail for the forward areas at the Fleet Post Office in Pearl Harbor. He personally intervened and directed that enough additional planes be pressed into service to eliminate the entire backlog.
This interest in the mail was shared by other flag officers. At Guam, Vice Admiral George D. Murray, U. S. Navy, Commander Marianas, issued instructions that no air mail might be shipped by surface transport without his personal approval in each instance. It was only necessary to send air mail to sea twice from Guam—once to Okinawa when the destructive typhoon made it impossible for planes to be handled at Yon- tan and Yonabaru airfields there, and in the latter part of 1945 when demobilization had proceeded so rapidly that crews were not available to maintain and fly the NATS transports.
To regulate the transportation of mail and other loads, a strict priority system with Class I, II, III, and IV priorities was established, administered by NAPO, as the Naval Air Priority Officer was known. Class I was restricted to highly classified officer messenger mail, passengers with urgent missions, and the whole human blood which in itself made one of the great sagas of the Pacific. Taken from residents of West Coast communities, and flown to Guam in portable refrigerators, this whole blood was there checked and distributed under the watchful eyes of Lieutenant Commander Herbert R. Brown, U. S. Naval Reserve, of the Navy Medical Corps. “Doc” Brown would be advised of the estimated requirements of blood for each operation, and would put it aboard planes for ultimate use on hospital ships in enemy waters, in Philippine jungles, or wherever else it might be needed. Frequently the blood would go from body to body in ten days, 9,000 miles distant from its donor.
Official and registered mail traveled with a Class II priority; personal air mail with a Class III; and parcel post on a “no priority” and “space available” basis. By keeping parcel post on hand for several days until there was a lull in air travel, space aboard a plane might be found for it, saving many days in delivery. Utilizing this available space, in a single month as much as 300,000 pounds of parcel post was flown out of Guam by NATS and TAG aircraft. It was not only a great help to bases such as Iwo Jima where a cargo ship might put in only once every two weeks, but it also made possible the delivery of Christmas packages and other parcels to ships which might never have seen them at all had it been necessary to rely entirely on surface shipments.
Because of the vast reaches of the Pacific, and the slow movements of convoyed cargo ships, it was necessary for the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco to project ship movements forward two months in order to determine where to send surface mail. Packages arriving at Oakland for the North Carolina on September 1 would be sent to the port where it was indicated that she would be likely to be on November 1. After the surface mail was once stowed aboard ship, a number of things frequently occurred. Operational requirements may have made it necessary for the North Carolina to be diverted to some other part of the Pacific, or, sustaining battle damage, she may have had to be returned to a rear base for repairs. Even more likely, after the cargo ship had progressed as far as Eniwetok, a critical need for articles that she was carrying may have required her diversion to Manus, Samar, or some base other than the one for which her mail had been destined. In any event, since mail is customarily loaded into the holds below deck, it would be virtually impossible to remove the mail pouches for the North Carolina until the cargo ship was being actually unloaded. The net result would be that the ship would be at one port and her mail at another—without the fault of the Navy Mail Service, whose complement and allowance did not include an infallible crystal ball. Ofttimes, if this same frustrated parcel post were sent on its way again by ship, unforeseen developments would again prevent its catching up with its addressees. Effective delivery could only be assured by routing it by air mail at the same parcel post rates which had originally been paid in the states. Whenever possible, this was done.
In the recent discussions of merger of the armed services, which resulted in the creation of the National Defense Establishment, the separate mail services maintained by the Army and Navy have inevitably been cited as an example of duplication which could be eliminated by unification. Welding of the Army and Navy mail sendees would never have been able to eliminate much duplication so long as there was an absence of unification of the transport services, with each of the armed forces given equality of access to such transport services. So long as both services maintained separate air transport systems, using different airfields throughout the Pacific, nothing would have been accomplished by a merger of the postal services. The directive of Secretary of Defense Forrestal combining the Naval Air Transport Service and the Air Transport Command into a single Military Transport Service, however, opens the way to many subsidiary and resultant phases of unification, such as a single mail service. On the other hand, the benefits of joint operation can always be obtained without difficulty where individual commanding officers in all services are willing to co-operate with each other. Thus, when the Army Island Commander at Iwo Jima found that the naval base there was receiving air mail daily, while the Army was having mail call only two or three times a week, he requested that mail for his Army personnel be routed through the Navy. The necessary arrangements were made, and, without requirement of law, the advantages of unification were achieved locally.
The personnel of the Navy Mail Service reflected the adaptability of the average young American. All post office employees entering the armed forces were, of course, channelled into the mail services. The needs of the civilian postal establishment and of the Army Postal Service made it abundantly clear from the first, however, that the Navy could not rely upon securing adequate numbers of trained personnel, but must set up its own training programs. Many of the men in the Navy Mail Service had had previous postal experience limited to stamping a letter, dropping it in a chute, and hoping for the best. At postal schools in Norfolk, Sampson, and San Diego thousands of sailors and WAVES were trained to be mailmen. Since Navy Mail Clerks deal with large sums of money (the Naval Supply depot at Guam always had a total of three million dollars in stamps and cash on hand) and with highly classified operational information, it was essential that the men selected for postal duties have the best available educational qualifications as well as a clean disciplinary record. All Navy Mail Clerks were required to be bonded, and had to have their designations approved by the Judge Advocate General of the Navy and by the Post Office Department. A single conviction at a deck court or at a summary court martial was sufficient to disqualify a man.
After training at postal school, and before going to duty overseas, these men went through intensive advanced base training courses. Ultimately going ashore at Pacific beachheads shortly after D-Day, they dug foxholes and established post offices while the enemy planes were overhead and the fighting was going on around them. When ships like the Hull and the Monahan were lost in the Ulithi typhoon, and when the Indianapolis was torpedoed en route to Leyte, their mailmen were with them and were subject to the same dangers as their shipmates of other ratings.
At first most postal officers were veteran post office inspectors and postmasters from all over the country. But as the Fleet spread through the Pacific, these were not enough, and they had to be augmented by lawyers, architects, insurance men, and those other general duty reservists who manned everything from gun tubs and navigation bridges on battleships and landing craft to post offices.
The fundamental that all of these men were taught was that mail is sacred, that other people’s mail is inviolate and not for prying hands or curious eyes. Considering the tremendous volume of mail handled in the Pacific, the small number of depredations was remarkable It is an interesting fact that the most serious ones occurred after V-J Day, and that the most flagrant of all was committed by a man unconnected with the Navy Mail Service.
In September of 1945 word reached Guam that registered mail sack jackets and airmail pouches which had been loaded aboard NATS planes there had been found to be rifled upon arrival at Samar, Okinawa, and Honolulu, with the pouches cut open and empty packages strewn about the forward belly compartments of the planes. Reflecting as it did upon the integrity of the Navy Mail Service, this information would have been sufficiently alarming had it related only to a single occurrence. These depredations continued, however, on a daily basis for an extended period, and took on an even more disturbing proportion when it was found that classified material had been tampered with. Commander Robert Reid, U. S. Naval Reserve, a veteran post office inspector formerly in charge of the inspection service at Boston and then making an inspection of postal facilities in the Pacific for the Chief of Naval Operations, and Lieutenant-Commander Newton, the Fleet Postal Officer, came to Guam to assist local authorities in the solution of the crime and the apprehension of the criminals.
The huge volume of traffic at Agana Air Field and the large number of people who normally had access to aircraft in the performance of their duties made it almost impossible to apprehend the offenders in the actual commission of the thefts, particularly since these were occurring on planes leaving for all destinations, and it was difficult to localize the mail robberies.
It was only the application of the analytical techniques of the postal inspection service, with the assimilation of many details and the preparation of many charts, that finally brought the offender to book. A careful analysis soon showed that a single NATS loading crew had loaded every plane on which a depredation had occurred. This was the only common denominator of all the thefts. It was significant that there was no tampering with the mails when this crew was off duty. It was also noted that the thefts had commenced the day on which two seamen had reported for duty from Kwajalein with this loading crew. Some days later one of these men was transferred, but the thefts continued. The finger of suspicion pointed clearly. Obtaining direct evidence was another matter.
A mailman not known on the airfield was introduced into the loading crew. On his first day there the suspect offered to sell him a wrist watch, and offered him a choice of several. Soon the undercover man was able to report that during loading the suspect was usually alone in the forward belly compartment. This was the compartment in which most of the rifled mail pouches had been found.
Soon thereafter the passengers on planes loaded by this crew had strange experiences. After taking off in the early hours of the morning, the planes would taxi down the Agana runway, but, instead of becoming airborne, would turn into the boondocks at the far end of the strip. A group of officers with flashlights would run out from jeeps parked there, and, with the assistance of Commander Reid in the interior of the plane, would unload the thousands of pounds of mail from the plane, examine it, and reload it. All of this mail had been carefully checked before originally being placed aboard to make sure that none of the pouches had been tampered with. Finding the slit pouches before the plane left the field confirmed the suspicions that they had been rifled by members of the loading crew.
When nine rifled pouches were found in a single plane, it was felt that there was sufficient evidence to make a search of the suspect’s seabag and footlocker, and, if stolen articles were found in them to make an arrest. About six in the morning, shortly after the crew had secured, a visit was paid to the suspect’s Quonset, he was awakened, and his seabag and footlocker examined. They contained enough articles to qualify as a portable jewelry store. In his possession he had 20 watches, 12 rings, 10 fountain pens and pencils, as well as gold bracelets, cameras, and many other articles. Included were a Silver Star and a Purple Heart decoration, both in their original cases and accompanied by their citations. The Silver Star had been awarded to an enlisted Marine for courageous deeds in the Iwo campaign; the Purple Heart to a sailor. There was also found a letter from the suspect to his wife in which he purported to have been awarded the Purple Heart, and forwarded it to her for safekeeping along with a stolen war bond from which he had obliterated the name and address of the payee. The medals had been taken in the mistaken belief that they were watches, which were in great demand. Because of their resemblance to watch boxes, thirteen eyeglass cases were also taken by him. Subsequently he pleaded guilty at a general court martial and was sentenced to five years imprisonment.
Depredations and thefts were far less in number than those regularly experienced by civilian communities of comparable size. Particularly gratifying was the fact that few such thefts were committed by persons connected with the mail service. It should be emphasized that in most cases where letters and packages were not received by the recipients, it was due to the use of an incorrect address and not to thievery.
Fleet Records Offices were established at San Francisco, Pearl Harbor, and Guam, at each of which a card index file of the correct addresses of all Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard personnel in the Pacific was kept current with carbon copies of all orders that were issued for personnel attached to bases and ships in the Pacific. Here hundreds of men were occupied on a full-time basis trying to mate up missent mail and the persons for whom it was intended. The extent to which energy was expended in delivering mail is demonstrated by the aftermath of a crash, on September 12, 1945, of a NATS plane en route from Samar to Guam. Although the plane carried no passengers, it had aboard 34 pouches of Officer Messenger Mail weighing 1,941 pounds, and 247 pouches and 5 outside pieces of air mail weighing 7,893 pounds. After the plane crashed in the hills just beyond Admiral Nimitz’s advance headquarters, an explosion and fire followed in which all of the crew lost their lives and most of the mail was burned.
The remnants of the mail—scorched half pages and fragments of money orders—filled eight air mail pouches. A crew of men spent more than ten days attempting to ascertain the identity of senders and addressees. As a result of their work more than 4,000 letters were individually reinclosed and readdressed, $301 in cash was forwarded to 27 persons, and over 100 money orders were either returned to the sender or forwarded to the payee.
Above the main post office in New York appears the legend “Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail shall stay these couriers in the making of their appointed rounds.” Were this to be expanded so as to include typhoons, enemy air raids, mud, and lack of equipment, it might qualify as a motto for the Navy Mail Service.
The Fleet Post Office in San Francisco has been decommissioned, and its functions have been transferred to the civilian postmaster at San Francisco. Many naval postal installations built during the war still function, however, throughout the Pacific. Through reserve mail units which are being activated, a corps of skilled postal technicians is in a state of readiness to form the nucleus of another naval postal network.