V-Mail - How the Allies compressed mail without WinRar

One of the mail stores being processed in World War II England.

V-Mail was a way found to significantly reduce the weight of correspondence in World War II.

A letter (ask your parents) alone does not weigh much, but when the mail starts to accumulate, you end up with bags and more bags of cards, which is very heavy and occupies a considerable volume.

This volume in wartime needed to be used to carry more important cargo, such as weapons, vehicles, spare parts and beer.

The second problem is that even through official censors, correspondence between the US and Europe was full of spy messages. Many used a technique called "microdot", where an image, usually of several pages of text, is reduced to a point of one millimeter, which is pasted on some part of the letter, unnoticed by most censors.

Yes, during World War II all correspondence, even personal letters were inspected. England alone had 10,000 people opening up reading and censoring letters. The goal was to prevent information from falling into the enemy’s hands, such as reports of bombing effects and scarcity of products and raw materials.

A microdot, but not the cheap one.

In addition to micropoints other techniques such as invisible ink were also used, but V-Mail was immune to all of them, but even so the main problem was still weight. Priority mail was sent by plane, and space was precious. How to optimize the amount of messages sent without going through all the effort necessary to invent the Internet in 1939?

The solution, originally called Airgraph, was created by a joint effort between Panam, Imperial Airways, and Kodak, and although complicated from today’s point of view, it was brilliantly simple:

Instead of collecting a bunch of letters, and putting the bags in the press of the guy from the Hydraulic Press Channel, forms were created where the person wrote his letter, handwritten, totally personal.

This standardized size form had the name and address of the recipient and sender, so the entire message was self-contained.

The letter was then forwarded to the censors, who read the text, removed the sensitive parts and moved on to the next phase: Each letter was then photographed on a 16mm film.

Equipment for photographing V-Mail forms

Instead of a sheet of paper, envelope, stamp, spit, etc., the letter was now a single frame on a roll of film. Up to 5000 of them could fit on a single reel.

1.1 tons of letters converted to film turned into 20 kg. The reduction in volume was also brutal, 37 bags of mail after microfilmed were reduced to a single bag.

The British used Airgraph to exchange messages with Canada, Africa, Burma, India, Australia and several other places. The Americans adopted the format for military mail, mainly messages between soldiers and their families. In a very patriotic way, he was named V-Mail, V of Victory, of course.

A reproduction of a V-Mail, most likely fake, created for demonstration purposes.

The messages already printed, revealed and ready for cutting.

The secondary benefit was that micropoints did not survive the photography process, and invisible paint was not transferred either. And since the photo printed with the letter was only 60% the size of the original form, there was still significant paper savings.

With the end of the war the service of V-Mail fell into disuse, in addition to being quite time consuming, there was still the problem of privacy, most people did not like to have their personal correspondence opened and inspected, and this was tolerated in rare cases, like "Hitler wants to kill everyone". Not on a day-to-day basis.