The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia - Smithsonian ...

n u m b e r 5 5 • 8 5Figure 4. This postcard was likely condemned by postal censors because it revealed the physical location of the soldierwho sent it from Sydney, Australia to his family in the United States. Courtesy National Archives, College Park, Md.Puzzles and CodesThe most common violation of censorship regulationswas “intentional revealing of geographic location” (Figure4). In June 1944, Pacific theater censors reported morethan a thousand cases. At that time, no other category ofcensorship violation topped one hundred. 12 Rules preventingsoldiers from disclosing their location were the mostresented of all censorship regulations. Enforcing these restrictionswas the postal censor’s most difficult task, formany service personnel believed the prohibition to beboth unfair and unnecessary. 13 Indeed even before headingoverseas, many soldiers made preparations to flout thisrestriction by, for example, developing simple codes thatwould allow loved ones to follow troop movements (Figure5). The word “apple” might represent Oro Bay in NewGuinea, “banana” Port Moresby and so on. One problemwith this strategy was that code keys were easy to misplace.For example, the wife of an Army Air Corps warrantofficer lost the key to a code representing the monthsof the year and the numbers 1–30, presumably anticipatingthe date when her husband would complete his tourof duty and return home on furlough. Censors discoveredthis scheme when the serviceman tried to send a copy ofthe key back to his wife with the information that “boomerang,”or the month of July, would be significant. 14Censors were trained to identify simple codes—suchas spelling out the name of a place with the first letterof each sentence in a paragraph. Though a more complexcode might escape the censor’s notice, it might alsofail to communicate the sender’s message to the intendedrecipient. For example, one infantry officer’s effort tocommunicate through code seems to have produced domesticanxiety. In response to his wife’s reply, the officerassured her that the “Zelma” mentioned in a previous letter“wasn’t anyone. Just a name I used.” He urged hiswife to “get that letter out again and remember what wesaid we would do before I left. Study it close dear for ittook a good many hours to write it.” Another servicemanattempted to communicate his location through fictitiouspoker earnings and losses; this effort also backfired.The censor did not catch the coded message but neitherdid the soldier’s wife, who worried about her husband’sgambling. His follow- up letter attempted to clear up the