V-MAIL IN WORLD WAR IIV-mail, which was short for Victory Mail, was a mail process used during World War II by the United States as the primary method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad. To reduce the logistics of transferring an original letter across the military postal system, a V-mail letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination. V-mail ensured that thousands of tons of shipping space could be reserved for war materials instead. The 37 mail bags required to carry 150,000 one-page letters could be replaced by a single mail sack. The weight of that same amount of mail was reduced dramatically from 2,575 pounds to a mere 45. This saved considerable weight and bulk in a time in which both were hard to manage in a theatre of the war. In addition to postal censorship, V-mail also deterred espionage communications by negating the use of invisible inks, microdots and microprinting, all of which could not be photographed.
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