 I guess we'll start at 12.15, I'm Gigi Barnel, a board member. And I want to welcome you to today's history fight. Tom Weiner is no stranger to this room, because a year or two ago, he gave a presentation on this book called The Sur, which was turned into a play, and a performance of that was filmed. And it's now being shown very locally. He'll talk about that in a few minutes. Tom is a retired sixth grade teacher who taught at the Smith College campus school for 40 years. He's the father of four, a grandfather of four more. We need to get all of these little details in. Today, he's speaking about a different book, photograph letters on wings, how microfilm, the male, helped win World War II. And this tells the story of the one and a half billion letters sent to and from the front in England and America during World War II, tracing the history of microfilm from its invention concurrently with the camera itself in 1839. And it's used in the stage of Paris in 1870 to transmit documents and letters by a carrier pigeon. This book uses many photographs and illustrations to capture the inventions, the process, and the artwork used to advertise the use of B-mail, which enabled many more troops and supplies to be shipped by greatly decreasing the space need for the male. So further ado, thanks for all your time here. I forgot I wrote all that. That's a little bit of my. Yeah, this is your whole life. You reminded me of that, that's it. OK, so good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me back. Special thanks to George Norton, who was the conduit through especially his wonderful wife, Cindy, working my talk for probably 25 or 30 of those years on the test of music teacher, and every year we did a talent show together, which is a highlight of my campus career. So thanks for coming. Is there anyone in the audience who, before they saw the descriptor, had ever heard of B-mail? So far, that's been on my track record. And it is, as I'm especially the one who found out, I know now, amazing to me, that it's gone completely under the radar. What was it? Yeah, there you go. It's called B-mail, and actually I'm going to read a little bit about exactly that. When I would say B-mail, someone would say, and I'll tell you what they would say. You can imagine. V is in victory. V is in victory. So World War II has been presented through a variety of media in tremendous detail, from the battles and strategies to the lives of the soldiers and civilians who were so deeply affected around the globe. There have been books and films on a wide range of subjects over the 70-plus years since the war ended. It would seem extremely unlikely at this point, but there to be a subject that has not received sufficient treatment. And yet there is at least one. I'm referring to an essential aspect of the war that virtually no one, with whom I have spoken since I learned about it, is familiar, B-mail. When I would tell friends and acquaintances about the book that I was working on, I'd hear email? A book about email? Everybody knows about it. Why waste your time on a book about such a well-known part of our culture? No, I said email. What the heck is that? That the word sounds so much like our widespread email only adds to the misconceptions that surround the phenomenon. To complicate matters further, if you do a Google search, leaving out the hyphen, which you can't include in speech, what pops up first is a website that features this definition. A B-mail account is a second email account just for your voicemail messages. V-mail, with its hyphen placed appropriately, originally called victory-mail, and at first written with the Morse code for V as V dot dot dash, was the means by which over a billion letters to and from the United States, and at least half a billion to and from the United Kingdom, where it was known as air graph, were sent and received during the war years. Pioneered in England in the 30s, it was a system that employed microfilm and the machinery required to reproduce letters in miniature form so they could be shipped safely, securely, and inexpensively, to and from the US and British soldiers fighting throughout the world. When the microfilm letters, and you can see a picture of this 1,600 on a roll, so 1,600 letters would be on something that big, arrived at their destination, they had the equipment already put together no matter where it was within days, Iwo Jima, all the islands in the Pacific, the letters were enlarged and delivered to the recipient so they could be read. In this day and age, where communication is instantaneous, it is hard for us to imagine the importance that written correspondence had for those fighting and those at home during World War II. Knowing that one's letters were going to reach their destination faster and more efficiently as a result of air graph and V mail was a morale booster of major proportions on both sides of the ocean. I was at a museum, a maritime museum in Astoria, Oregon last September and they had a photograph of a ship that had been sunk and they had retrieved the mail and it was a complete water-bottom mess. No one was gonna ever read those letters. Not one letter of this more than a billion and a half was lost because they always had the original. Before it was filmed. So that was another advertisement. Your letter will never not reach its destination. It turns out there was a deeper motive for bringing attention to this virtually unknown and quite intriguing and compelling aspect of history and that's the part about Bill Spied. Man of many careers, from farmer to psychiatric aid at the state hospital to businessman, from bookbinder to teacher of bookbinding, from local historian of Comington to author, had a huge role to play in the effort to get the story of email told. So now I'd like to have you see some of the images that Bill provided for me and others that I got online of what this email actually looked like and what the process entailed along with some other human interest aspects. So if you could start the slideshow. I'm gonna sit down because I'll see it better and I can just give you the high sign on the next sign. Okay, so you heard about this one but this is a picture of the moment when in my 1870, well actually, let me present this the way I intended. Who knew that microfilm was invented concomitantly with standard film in 1839? Now you knew that because it was mentioned. That's okay. Who knew that microfilm documents and letters were attached to the tail feathers of pigeons to break the siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War? Microfilm was a marvelous invention with a fascinating history and the first chapter of the book is the history of microfilm. But thanks to Bill and the internet, I've got all these illustrations that go a long way towards telling the story so we'll go back to telling the story through these pictures. These are all in the book. So the French were so proud of the siege of Paris being broken by this ingenious scheme of attaching documents and letters too to the tail feathers of pigeons as microfilmed-sized documents that they built this incredible statue. The pigeons were flown out in hot air balloons and then flew back into the city. So the hot air balloons there and then if you can see on the corners of the statue are all the pigeons. There's four pigeons below. Irony has its role to play in this story during World War II. No, excuse me, World War I, the Germans, I'm sorry, World War II, when they occupied Paris, they took over the city, saw this statue, destroyed it, melted it down the metal in it and used it for bullets. Petition of the French people in the war. So unbelievable, weird. It's not there anymore. It was the same. It was something that did the statue in the beginning. Yes, it was done by the guy who did the statue in the beginning. Thanks, I'm going to say that. Yep, Bartoldi. Okay, next one. All right, so this was how it started. It started as a British endeavor. And in this book I described the process by which it came to be. There were some incredibly ingenious people. There's also some incredible stories about it in the 19th century. The microfilm being used for pornography. Not surprisingly. And by the time the 1930s rolled around, they figured out they could use it as a way to communicate with ships. And mostly, they've actually, almost all of it was air made. So this picture's a little inaccurate. It maybe started out that way, but the big idea was conserving space on planes. You could put, as you'll see, 1500 or 1600 letters on one roll of film. At least some pictures to show you the difference that made. This talked about the cost of it at that time in England. And this was the beginning of the advertisement. Okay. And who would get involved, but not the Queen Elizabeth, you are mostly familiar with, that's the Queen Mother. And she received the first email that, and she actually, in the next one, you'll see what she wrote in response. But that's looking at, I'm just calling it, it's air breath in England. And the same thing happened for Roosevelt. He was, that's the first email letter that was produced as a result of the inventions. Okay. Now what would happen would be, I actually do have a copy of the letter in the book, I didn't write it as a slide, that Queen Elizabeth wrote in response to this. They'd set up these stations incredibly quickly. This is a whole slideshow that they have on, the internet gave me this show. But that's a V-mail station. And they would set it up as quickly as they possibly could. You'll see some that are way more rustic than that. That's the V-mail detachment. All these people were in charge of getting the microfilm blown off and put it to the right places to get to live. And it was quite an undertaking. Next one. That's an original V-mail stationery. So that's what you had to write it on. All those things at the bottom, which you can't see very well, all the rules, size of penmanship, using the margin lines, you have to really stay within the margin. Originally no photographs could be attached and a lot of people wanted that to change because people were having babies that the fathers never saw. That's one example. Wanting to send a picture of how you looked in your uniform, whatever, I'll get into that in a minute. But this is what it looked like and this is what you had to fill out. It was very, very stylized and uniform. And you can see this is early in the days of it because they had the dot, dot, dot dash. And I had to show a picture of a soldier writing a V-mail letter. They really sold this big time. So this is all part of the advertising, showing someone this is why you do this so your loved one can hear from you. These are the sensors. Censorship was huge. They apparently had five sensors at the start of the war and 2,000 as the war unfolded because the mail volume was ridiculous. And this was true in England too. So here it says, sensors would black out questionable sections. Not surprising when the most common was troop location and if there was too much sensitive text and they would just confiscate the letter because at times with the loose lip sink ships, very, very fearful that this could become a problem. They even cut out sections if it was too much of a letter. They take a scissor and cut out part of the letter. That was revealing more than they wanted to share. Excellent. So this is part of the process. This is an operator adjusting the enlarging equipment. This is what they had to have delivered to all the places on the front where they had to blow the letters up. And Kodak was incredibly cooperative. At first, well, they sent out a lot of their operatives to be soldiers. So yes, it took over as it happened with Rosie, all the women. The women were doing all the work on the home front to get this to happen. Next one. And here are some women. This is the one where the film is transferred back to print and this was a huge process they had to cut because they would come out in one long stream of print. They had to cut the individual letters and they had cutting machines that were delivered to the front as well. And they were operated and she's probably on the home front doing it better. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, those are the three places you mailed your email. It was not in every trust office because that was the way they set up the machinery to take the pictures of it. Next one. That's, you could hold it in your hand, 1600 letters. This was why they did it. Next one. There you see it. So all that mail is in her hand. And then, next one. One box, 47 sacks. Imagine how many people could be, how many troops could be sent in these plans and medical supplies and all the things they needed for the war. Hence the title, How Microfilm Female Helped Win World War II. Next one. So this is each, the facsimile letter reaching the home front, email letters, foster communication, expression, and connection. And that was the big pitch by everybody from the Red Cross to in a few minutes, you'll see all the companies that bandwagon and sent out advertisement to do this. And then each print had to be folded so that the address portion was visible. That's why, any of you remember doing the old air mail letters back in the 50s? Air mail. Yeah, air mail. I had no idea you had to write it a certain way and fold it a certain way. Well, this was as crucial as that. And then put it into the envelopes. Lots of, it's pretty labor intensive. Especially if they didn't have all the machines. Some people didn't have the cutting machines and they were using scissors. So it mattered how much they were able to build it up. Okay. Remember I said some of them were primitive? This is one of the islands in the Pacific. They just set up a bunch of tents so that people could have a place to sleep. And then next one, building the station. Happened up immediately. And again, it's amazing to me no one knows about this because this is an amazing undertaking. There's an incredible amount of labor and will and ingenuity. By the way, that station you originally showed was on Guadalcanal. Yeah, Guadalcanal. And the next one. And that's what it looked like when they finally got it up and running. And each part would be a different part of the process. Next one. This was in a Quonset hut. They did the whole thing in a Quonset hut. I'm printing the letters. There was so many facets to this. Someone got the idea that they would use the V-mail to create a newsletter to send all over on the Pacific, the front that was the Pacific. So there's some great little tidbits in here. This is the fourth monthly issue of V-PAC News. We are wondering when we will receive the first edition of the Atlantic News because this is in the Pacific. Or are you fellas too busy over there trying to get your work up to our standards? So there was humor. We understand that Alan Cio is, again, boxing. Alan is beer hard to get up there. And then we would appreciate a few lines each month from ensign Cecilia Simon of our San Francisco station on what is going on there. We understand that eight waves, we love waves more, have been assigned to your station, Ms. Simon, and are wondering if it is not possible to have them transferred to our station. The food is good here. The climate is incomparable, and we have a wonderful movie. So this is the way in which they were making light of an incredibly difficult and very, very painful situation they were all living in. And that was the fourth edition of it. It kept going for them. It started in early 42 and ended in 45. This is a great story. This is a woman who was not sure whether her son was still alive was in the audience. Do you remember back in the day they had newsreels along with movies? And often during World War II, they showed battle scenes and stuff from the France. Well, she was sitting in the audience totally fretting that moment about her son and who shows up in one of the newsreels. They had a newsreel without email. And in the descriptor of all this, she has tremendous relief. She goes up to the projectionist, asks, could you show that again? She wanted to really make sure it was him, but that was her son. Next one. Something's quite a turn. This really seeped into the culture. So it was a female basketball team and it was quite competitive and played around the country. Next one. Okay, so here's the disclaimer. And Bill made a big point of saying to me, I want you to tell people it wasn't perfect. And I got to hear what he meant by not perfect and this expresses it. You're familiar with Sam Sapp, the cartoon character? You probably have to be at least 60 and several of you, a couple of you aren't. But this is what was the downside. I don't exactly know why this happened, but the paper they reproduced the letters on was pretty small. And in a couple of minutes, I'm gonna show you some of the email letters. So, when Sam Sapp received his letter from his family, he was desperate to read it and someone said to him, hey, it's way easier if you have a magnifying glass. Thank you. Oh dear, just the back covers it. And you had to be mindful if you used a magnifying glass where you were standing and where the magnifying glass was directed. So people made fun of this. It was humorous and you had to be aware of what was necessary. Next one. So here's, oh, okay, we gotta move along. So this is, these are examples of the letters. He got the book of letters, he paid for these for every year, 42, three, four, and five. And I went through them all. There were about 5,000 letters. And these are the ones, this is one to someone's wife. They just got married right before he left. He was missing her desperately. He put down all these things about what size clothing she needed to wear. He was so mindful of her as a person, as a physical entity, green eyes, red hair, vet freckles, next one. This is the advertisement. Kodak created, US government adopts the email. And they were trying to get people to use it. Dear mother and dad, it's a whole thing about your letter will get to me better if you use the email. Next one. They did finally let there be pictures. There were all kinds of rules about it. This is a mother who desperately wanted her husband to see their kids. And they found out a way to do it so that it wouldn't mess up the machines. And they were able to send photos. It was a big deal when they first created it. Next one. Self-explanatory, it's saying send the email. You show your faith in our troops. Next one. There's the classic. This is one of the first ones that went. A baby he had not seen. This is another one, you're included in my post war plans. To your girlfriend. Next one. This is the racism. Showing the depictions of the enemy. Because in every war, the enemy gets to human lives. And thankfully, we've done a lot of recovery from that. Yeah. Someone write into their mom. And they had to be really mindful about the 12, 13 days. There was a huge, of course, load of mail coming before holidays, Thanksgiving, but especially Christmas. And this was a Mother's Day one that I hope got there in time. That someone who was really artistic. Yep. Next. These are more examples of them. I can't go through them now. There's a beautiful, beautiful writing in a lot of these letters. Very good. Me. This is someone who's saying, how many letters are you going to send to me? So they were going to ask them to mark the days they would write letters. Because it was lifeblood. It was a moralistic lifeblood. And they made a kit. Schaefer made a kit. Remember Schaefer pens? They made a whole kit of how you could give your soldier that and guarantee they'll write more letters to you. And that's the pack of lead envelopes. This is another place that was saying, the next best thing to a leave is a letter. And that was to send more email. These advertisements are really great if you read them. They're just evocative and moving, trying to get people to show their love. That's another one. Keep your email flying and just getting rid of the word letters. Next one. And this one describes, and if I have more time, I'll show you the length of times when you're comparing to a ship. This one right here, 300 miles per hour, 10 miles per hour, which one would you want your letter on? Okay, next. Then someone begging their parents to send them an email letter instead of a regular letter. Okay. Now it's going to be the original cover of the book. Two dads talking about getting an email from their sons. No. The American way works. More letters. Yeah. Is that the last one? Okay. So I'm going to pass these around so you can see them. If you make sure they get back in the envelope, those two, and these two are not in envelopes, you get a field for it. Wow. And I'll stop there. Questions, comments. I'd love to hear from people. Yes. They started these archives when they were. He's in the microphone. Great question. That's what Steve Strymer and I are supposed to do next. Oh. They may exist somewhere, right? Yes. I don't even know the original place because Bill got them. I haven't gone back to the eBay source. I don't know where they all are. He had copies of them. So the government doesn't have them? I never found out. I tried to reach, I reached out to the US Postal Service and asked them if I could come down and give a presentation of the museum they have. And they said, we're back locked for two years of presentations. And that would have been a chance. And I still might be able to see if I can find that more. National Archives? Maybe Smithsonian, there's possibilities. Smithsonian produced all of the footage that actually, those pictures of the work of the process. I was just wondering, what was the route that they took to get them to and from the Pacific? I mean, I'm saying if they... You mean the airline plane? No. You talked about the microphones going to and from England to get to the front of Europe, I presume. How did they get to the Pacific? Just... Both airlines. Just straight out to Hawaii? Yeah. Remember the guy that poised out? Was it Leslie, something that was in Gone with the Wind? Yeah. He was a one... Leslie Howard. Leslie Howard. He became a spy for England during World War II. And his plane was shot down and they lost... That was the one aircraft plane where they lost everything from that. He was on that plane. But it was just regular routes that they would hopefully not pass through the zones where the enemy was waiting to shoot them down. And in fact, they had a training, a facility on Guadalcanal, what was the post-liberation of Guadalcanal, obviously. Yeah. Anything else? Go ahead. So if you were the family one, you'd just send this kind of letter. You'd go to the post office by these forms. Exactly. Do you know the toss money? Yeah, three cents, I think, to send the letter. I can't remember. Maybe you could buy a bunch and read cheaper. But it's all in the book and I don't have their own memoirs. But it was very inexpensive even for them. And then it would be sent to one of the three cities you said... Turned into a piece of microfilm and shipped across the country. What did they do with the original? They saved them all. And that's why I don't know what your question was. Where are these letters? Where are the microfilm copies at? I'm pretty sure they did eventually destroy them because you can imagine where you can keep the two billion letters. Yeah. And was there a financial gain for anybody? No, no one profited from this. It was all the government wanted this to be available. Kodak didn't profit, I think, and they may have taken losses because they had to provide it. The government must have had contracts with them to buy them. So I'm sure Kodak was not losing money big time when their businesses don't read that. Anything else? Now, there's a whole chapter and if I had more time, I excerpted sections from a lot of the letters and it's organized by thematically. It's the last chapter in the book that's called The Voices of Email. There's some incredibly moving ones. One of them, a sister writing to going up the chain of command all the way eventually to MacArthur saying, my brother's been declared lost but no one's ever told me where, no one's ever told me there's no remains, there's no nothing. Can you keep trying to find out something? Give us some satisfaction. And I go back and forth because MacArthur writes her back and I have all those letters. And that's in here with David. And then I did them by year and subject matter. So it might be a family member talking about his father's condition on a home front. If you worry about how you don't need to be, looks fine and don't do a top of work. Only fishes and carries home groceries. He takes beautiful long trips through the country, had a good time, free and is well-tanned. Our bathroom is now a keeper of bait line things and awful to look at. This is about his son had written, is dad gonna be okay? He heard like the cow kicked him. And she's saying, not only don't you have to worry but he's sort of reloading off the family now. Another one was Christmas missing his wife, sympathy for his fellows up at the front. I'm wishing I were with you. We have now an enlisted men's club in our own building. We have liquor from Italy, which definitely I do not care for. We ought to have some USO entertainers coming to our club to cheer us up. So I just took little sections that I thought were really evocative and indicative of what people's experience was on both the home front and in the battle front. Yeah. Am I getting close to you? That's great. I'm curious about how much censorship going over on the home front, how much censorship was involved in that email mechanism? They had sensors at both ends. So that's a good question. But there were more sensors at the other end because they had the knowledge and they weren't the ones who were at risk of giving stuff away. But there could be things that the people on the home front were either asking or potentially revealing from other means of communication they might have had. And these are the time when people, there was no phones. In fact, if I had more time than the conclusion, I write about the movie Three Kings. Do you like to see it? It's about the Iraq war. And there's a scene where one of the main characters is captured and he's put in a room with like 600 cell phones. And he calls his wife. This is a true story, based on a true story. He calls his wife up on the cell phone and tells her, I'm in danger. I'm in a prison. She completely is freaking out. So you have instantaneous communication there, which can be obviously wasn't really scary. Here it was at least 12 to 15 days people did these letters. They also sent records, recordings. They've been 78 records, which my son went on to collect the 15 years old. Not those ones, but generally 78s. And that was the only, that was it. So they didn't get to have phone conversations where the guy could have said, oh yeah, we're deep in this spot and we're adding more troops. You know, that didn't happen. But there were things they were worried about. My father was in the station, he stayed sight of this point, but yeah, he went to a booth where he recorded a little 78 disc. That happened exactly. He sent it over to his wife. People did that in Vietnam too. This is scenes from the Ken Burns video that showed him recording one of those. Okay. This is wonderful. What a great job of recovering history with him. And it's just.