How Does a Mother’s Letter Get from Mount Kisco to North Africa?

Since I started this project, I have been interested in how a letter from a mother in a small upstate New York village can find its way across the ocean and land on the lap of her son in a camp in North Africa or some other theater of war. It strikes me as miraculous.

I emailed the Military Postal History Society to find out and got a terrific reply from Dave Kent, editor of the Military Postal History Society Bulletin. Below is his reply.

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During World War II the Army and the Post Office Department realized that mail was very important to the morale of servicemen and devoted a great deal of effort to it. The Army developed its own internal postal system in 1940 and when sending troops overseas, created post offices for each major unit. Read more of this post