Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

over, Boo McGilvra and my nephew and I drove back to Buttb, the
northern route, stopping at different places where he ha4 some
connection worked, or had a ranch or had some experience. H told
a lot of stories that were very interesting. Well, what o you
want now?
(Pulling over a box, he began to open and explained) These
are letters I'd written to my mother during the war and many of
them are V Mail. Do you know what V Mail is? All the armed
services overseas developed this method of reducing the bulk of
the letters being sent home, and yet get them home quickly by
air-mail by microfilming the letters that the soldierg and
sailars wrote. We provided a form which was an eight and & half
by eleven sheet, on which you could write your letter home. And
they would then, overseas, take this letter and microfilm it, and
then fly it back home, and when it got back to the United States,
the film was printed, and the letters, the size of about four by
three were mailed to the addressee.
That way they saved a lot of bulk, cause there really wasn't
a lot of space available on the aircraft going from Europe to the
United States. There wasn't the kind of aircraft service that we
have today. The space was valuable. So all the letters written
overseas got microfilmed and sent back in tiny rolls of fi m and
then reproduced. And that's what V Mail was. I'm surprise f more
people don't remember V Mail. It was a good thing.
Q. Were other people as careful as you?
A. You're talking now about censorship. We were told that we
could not say certain things. We couldn't reveal, for instance,
what ship we were on or where we were going or where we were or
talk about any of the engagements we had or the armaments we had
and, this was a difficult thing to do because it meant that, . .
when you wrote home to your family, about all that you could say
was that you were well, and that was all. You couldn't say where
you were going or when you were coming back home or what yo* were
doing. So the V Mail that was provided on the ship was ad guate
f for that. The letters aboard ship that were written by the crew
were all censored by somebody on board ahip. The office s all
took turns being censors, and I censored for a while and it was
an unpleasant task to have to read the private letters gf the
crew and have to cut out certain portions of it in case thqy had
said something they shouldn't have. It wasn't a job that apybody
liked, and I had my share of it, I guess.
Well, what else do you want? Shall 1 tell you about. , . in
going through some of those letters that I'd written to my @other
during the war, and. . .she had saved them for me. It brought to
mind an experience that I had in 1946, I guess it was.
In 1946 when I was stationed down in Key West whe e the
Anti-submarine Warfare Development Detachment of the At antic
fleet was at the Naval Operating Base at Key West where w were
doing experimental work on T5 Torpedoes along with echo oint,
the very fragile part of echo ranging with sonar equipment Many
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