#29 – April 20, 1945

Below is an image of what a V-mail (Victory Mail) looked like. It was a hybrid process used during WWII in America as the primary and secure method to correspond with soldiers stationed abroad.

To reduce the cost of transferring an original letter through 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 correspondence was on small letter sheets (7 by 9 1/8 in.) that would go through mail censors before being photographed and transported as thumbnail-sized images in negative microfilm. Upon arrival to their destination, the negatives would be blown up to 60% of their original size (4 ¼ in. by 5 3/16 in.) and printed.

I know this V-mail is hard to read but if you right click on the image and download it to your desktop you can open it with your desktop picture viewer and zoom in.

This is actually a high-res digital file and will not distort or blur as you zoom in.

On view: V-mail, 1 page only. Page 2 is missing.

042045_2_mst
April 20, 1945, p. 2 (Page 1 is missing)

#30 – April 27, 1945

One of the interesting things in Solly’s letters is how he never calls another soldier by their name but rather identifies them by the city or state they come from, as with the Brooklyn Major (Medical Officer) he mentions in this letter and others.

I once asked my father if he made friends in the army and if he kept in contact with any of them and he told me he decided before he entered the service that he would not make any friends.  It was not smart, he said, to get connected to anyone.

In the Help Identify category of photos on this blog the two pictures from Dec 1942, which are not Solly’s, also identify the people in the image with their state abbreviation instead of their name.  Perhaps it was a common practice. (Still looking for help identifying the photos in Help Identify).

On view: 2 pages

042745_1_mst
April 27, 1945, p. 1
042745_2_mst
p. 2

#34 – May 16, 1945

On view: 4 pages, plus photo of “You are now Leaving Germany” (scroll to bottom)

051645_1_mst
May 16, 1945, p. 1
051645_2_mst
p. 2
051645_3_mst
p. 3
051645_4_mst
p. 4

You are now leaving Germany

Somewhere in early May, 1945,  and then again mid-May of the same year, Solly’s unit left Germany and entered Austria, then returned to Germany for cleanup operations, and then later in June re-entered Germany once again.

This is one of Solly’s photos.

NP-Germany_Engineers_01_mst
You are now leaving Germany! Photo by Solly