The Role of Airgraphs in World War II Family ...

History Australia

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Airgraphs and an Airman: The Role of Airgraphs in World War II Family Correspondence Susan Yell & Meredith Fletcher To cite this article: Susan Yell & Meredith Fletcher (2011) Airgraphs and an Airman: The Role of Airgraphs in World War II Family Correspondence, History Australia, 8:3, 117-138, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2011.11668391 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2011.11668391

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Airgraphs and an airman

Airgraphs and an airman The role of airgraphs in World War II family correspondence Susan Yell and Meredith Fletcher This article discusses Australia’s participation in a Second World War postal system, the airgraph service, which used microfilm and air transport to provide a speedy and lightweight ‘photo-letter’ for correspondence throughout the British Empire during wartime. Through analysing the correspondence of one Australian serviceman and his family, consisting of letters, cables and airgraphs, we consider the specific role of the airgraph in wartime correspondence and its contribution to maintaining morale and a sense of connection to home and family for those separated by war. This article has been peer-reviewed.

In October 1942 when Frank and Margery Yell went to the mailbox at their farm in central west New South Wales, they found a small envelope contain ing a letter reproduced on a greyish postcard-sized sheet of photographic paper. It was an airgraph from their son Bob who was completing his pilot training at an air force base in Canada. ‘This is a new idea’, he wrote of the airgraph, ‘and I hope you receive it alright and it is a success.’1 At his base, Bob had been issued with a form, measuring 21 by 28 cm. In the box at the top, he carefully printed his parents’ names and address in capital letters. There was little room to write more than a paragraph on the remainder of the form, but Bob had enough space to tell them his momentous news: he had just received his wings. Along with those of other RAAF personnel keen to try the new technology, Bob’s form was sent via Vancouver to 1

Airgraph, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 25 September 1942. The airgraphs and other correspondence that provide the basis for this article are held by the Yell family, Eugowra, NSW.

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History Australia | Volume 8 | Number 3 | 2011

San Francisco where it was microfilmed. The microfilm was then flown to Australia and sent to the Kodak laboratories in Melbourne where each negative was printed on to paper measuring less than half the size of the original form. Bob’s airgraph was folded and placed in an envelope with his parents’ address showing clearly through the envelope’s window and then mailed from the Melbourne GPO to Murga in New South Wales. Reading the airgraph, which arrived much faster than a conventional letter, Frank and Margery Yell could share the excitement Bob felt at becoming a pilot. The airgraph, which had arrived so quickly, was also a sober reminder that, with his pilot training completed, Bob was now much closer to active service.

Figure 1. Bob Yell’s first airgraph sent from Canada, 25 September 1942 (reproduced at actual size, 107 x 130 mm) Reproduced with permission of the Yell family.

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The aim of this article is to consider the role of the airgraph in family wartime correspondence. First we discuss the technology, the history of its adoption and the particular need the airgraph fulfilled during wartime as a speedy and lightweight form of communication. Second, we analyse its place in the correspondence between Australian airman Bob Yell and his family, to consider how the technology was adopted in private correspondence and to compare its use with that of the other modes of communication available at the time: letters and cables. We demonstrate how the distinctive form of the airgraph imposed particular conditions (both limitations and benefits) on correspondence, and how wartime letter-writers adapted their practices to the possibilities afforded by this innovative medium. Although millions of airgraphs were sent between members of the Australian forces and their families – and over 300 million were sent between Britain, its military forces and throughout the British Empire during the Second World War in an inter-dominion service – most of the discussion of the airgraph and its technology remains with philatelists, collectors and postal and forces museums. 2 However, as an introduction to their study of Australia’s role in the battle of El Alamein, Mark Johnston and Peter Stanley draw on a collection of 20 000 airgraphs sent from the Middle East in 1942, now held at the Australian War Memorial, to discover what the survivors of Alamein were writing to family and friends after their experiences. The authors consider this archive to be ‘perhaps the largest single collection of writings of ordinary Australians’.3 In contrast to the War Memorial’s vast collection of airgraphs, our analysis is of one family’s correspondence that includes a two-way exchange between serviceman Bob Yell and his family. This collection of letters, airgraphs and cables 2

3

David Collyer ‘Trans-Pacific airgraph services: 1942–1948’, The NSW Philatelist: Journal of the Philatelic Society of NSW 10 (1), 1988, 46–48; David Collyer ‘Airgraphs and Australia’, Gladesville, NSW: unpublished manuscript 1988; Roy May ‘Airgraph Services in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand’, 1970, J3088, 2002/05043148, National Archives of Australia, Canberra; Philippe Rouyer ‘Microfilm and intelligence’, The Micrographics Market Place, February 2001, 18–20; Malcolm Sanders, ‘Airgraphs’, 2005. Accessed 31 March 2009. Available from: http://www.kg6gb.org/airgraphs.htm; W M Senkus, ‘A is for Airgraph’, 2000. Accessed 2 April 2009. Available from: http:// alphabetilately.com/AIRGRAPH.html; Royal Engineers Museum, ‘Airgraph’, Second World War Army Postal Services (1939–1945)’, 2005. Accessed 31 March 2009. Available from: http://wwwremuseum.org.uk/specialsm/rem_spec_pcsww2.htm#airgraph; C Messner, ‘Former Object of the Month: V-Mail Service’, Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Accessed 20 January 2010. Available from: http//:www.postalmuseum. si.edu/museum/1d_V-Mail.html; E H Keeton Airgraph, Norfolk: Forces Postal History Society 1987. Mark Johnson and Peter Stanley Alamein: The Australian Story, South Melbourne: Oxford University Press 2002, 1.

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contributes to understanding the nature of private correspondence in wartime, and the means by which links were maintained between members of the Australian forces and their families separated by continents, hemispheres and war.

Letter writing in wartime The history of the airgraph sits within the wider context of the history of letter writing practices and in particular the role of private correspondence in wartime. Writing of French soldiers in World War I, Martyn Lyons comments on ‘their desperate need to write and receive letters’.4 Quite simply, the letter was a physical artefact which testified to the continued existence of the soldier, and the continued affection of those at home. Letters maintained the bonds of intimacy with family and helped soldiers (or sailors or airmen) to preserve a sense of identity which was not purely defined by their military role. As Martha Hanna has discussed, ‘letterwriting was the means by which soldiers maintained their civilian identity in the midst of war, and their lifeline to the reassuring familiarity of home’.5 Letters were a bridge between the two worlds, civil and military. Martyn Lyons suggests there are two ways of analysing correspondence. Historians can focus on the content of letters as a means of accessing the experiences of writers and their time, or they can consider letter-writing as a social practice, and examine the conventions, expectations and functions of postal communication and its role in social relations.6 In his analysis of French soldiers’ correspondence in World War I, Lyons writes: ‘My focus is on letters as letters, their frequency, their destinations, their form, their conventions and formulas, all the unwritten codes to which they are subject.’7 Similarly, our discussion of the airgraph focuses on the material conditions or ‘affordances’ which the airgraph placed on correspondence, and how these shaped the uses of the airgraph during World War Two. As Cecile Dauphin has argued, letter writing practices are shaped by an epistolary pact in which the correspondents agree on the ‘rules of engagement’ such as the length and frequency of letters, their degree of 4 5 6

7

Martyn Lyons ‘French soldiers and their correspondence: towards a history of writing practices in the First World War’, French History 17 (1), 2003, 88. Martha Hanna ‘A republic of letters: the epistolary tradition in France during World War 1’, The American Historical Review 108 (5), 2003, 1339. See also Cecile Dauphin ‘Letter writing manuals in the nineteenth century’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boreau and Cecile Dauphin (eds), Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, translated by Christopher Woodall, Cambridge: Polity Press 1997, 112–151. Lyons ‘French soldiers’, 81.

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privacy and the level of intimacy as signalled by forms of address and farewell.8 In assessing how the airgraph was used and the nature of its contents, we consider how the epistolary pact differed for the airgraph, compared with letters. The use of airgraphs by correspondents such as Bob Yell and his family also needs to be put in the context of the story of its development and adoption. Unlike the ordinary letter, the airgraph required both a higher degree of technical intervention and a greater coordination of policy for the transmission of these private messages. An understanding of the technical and policy aspects of the airgraph service is necessary to gain a complete understanding of its distinctive form and functionality.

Australia’s airgraph service The use of microfilm for sending postal messages during wartime first occurred in 1870 during the Franco Prussian War, when carrier pigeons flew short messages into Paris while it was under siege.9 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, after significant improvements in microfilming technology, Kodak realised the potential of combining microfilm with air travel to make international mail services faster and lighter, a concept that was unsuccessfully floated with the British government. But although it rejected using microfilmed letters – or airgraphs as they were called – during peacetime, the British government was keen to adopt them under wartime conditions. An airgraph service was introduced in 1941 to speed up correspondence between troops stationed in the Middle East and their families in Britain. Italy’s entry into the war had all but closed the Mediterranean to British ships, leaving no alternative but to send sea mail from Egypt and beyond to Britain via the Cape of Good Hope.10 Airmail services, always expensive, had become less viable during wartime because of the weight and bulk of the letters, but it was possible for planes to carry microfilm, as just one roll of film contained the negatives of 1700 airgraphs and weighed less than five ounces (142 g). An equivalent number of letters weighed fifty pounds (23 kg).11 British forces and civilians at home enthusiastically 8 9 10 11

Dauphin, cited in Martyn Lyons ‘Love letters and writing practices: on écritures intimes in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Family History 24 (2), April 1999, 235–236. See May ‘Airgraphs Services’ and Rouyer ‘Microfilm and Intelligence’. See Sanders ‘Airgraphs’ and Senkers ‘A is for Airgraph’. L B Fanning to J Minter, Legation USA, 8 August 1945, MP 404/1, 1945/9955,National Archives of Australia (NAA), Canberra. This was the estimate of L B Fanning, Director General of the PMG.

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adopted the airgraph and over 135 million airgraphs were sent from Britain during the next four years.12 The service was extended to other war zones and countries. It was introduced in the United States in 1942, where it was known as Victory Mail, or V-Mail.13 In the US, civilian use of V-Mail was explicitly promoted as an act of patriotism, where ‘Sending a few words to a loved one overseas was not only an emotional release but a patriotic duty’.14 Australia joined the scheme in mid-1943, one of the last Commonwealth countries to do so. Early in the war, Britain was particularly keen to involve other parts of the Empire in the scheme, and in August 1941 urged the Australian government to participate. At this time, Australia had an airmail letter card service to its troops in the Middle East and consequently the Australian government, supported by the Army and the Postmaster General’s Department (PMG), rejected the offer, although the Army could see the advantages of airgraphs if there were interruptions to existing airmail services via Singapore and India. The scattered nature of the Australian population and the long distances mail would have to travel to a central point for microfilming and printing were also reasons for rejecting the British government’s suggestion.15 New Zealand was keen to participate though, as were other countries in the Empire, and early in 1942, an airgraph service from India to Britain started. The British government continued to urge Australia’s participation as the situation deteriorated in the ‘Far East’ following the fall of Singapore. With air routes disrupted and aircraft capacity for mail even more limited, the Army and the PMG supported the introduction of an airgraph service. The Army’s decision was influenced by the need to improve communications with Australian forces serving in the Middle East. In May 1942, the Australian government decided to join the airgraph service. Implementing the service was a task for the PMG, a complex operation which took over a year. ‘Our efforts to establish Airgraph services have met with one stumbling block after another’, M B Harry, a senior PMG official, wrote to the director of army postal services in March 1943.

12 See British Postal Museum and Archive, ‘Airgraph Service’. Accessed 16 May 2008. Available from: http://postalheritage.org.uk/exhibitions/howthepostofficewenttowar/ airgraph. 13 J Litoff and D Smith ‘“Will he get my letter?”: popular portrayals of mail and morale during World War II’, Journal of Popular Culture 23 (4), Spring 1990, 21–43. 14 Victoria Dawson ‘V as in Victory Mail’, Smithsonian 35 (2), 2004, 38. 15 See series of cablegrams between the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Department, 254/1/800, NAA; Sun 5 November 1941.

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First we were unable to secure the necessary receiving equipment due to the plant intended for us being taken for other purposes, and now we are held up awaiting supplies of the necessary material, all of which have to be imported and therefore, of course, is most difficult to obtain when there is such a great demand on shipping space for other material urgently required.16

The equipment the PMG required was manufactured by Kodak in the United States and included a Recordak machine into which the airgraph forms were fed and photographed on to 16mm film, at the rate of 2000 an hour.17 Equipment from America that was first intended for Australian use was instead commandeered by the United States for its own airgraph service (V-mail) between Australia and America.18 Operating from the Kodak laboratories in Melbourne, V-mail started in July 1942 and was available for American forces in Australia and extended to Australian forces serving in Canada.

Figure 2. Recordak Machine, developed by Kodak in the 1930s The Recordak machine increased the speed and efficiency of photographing documents, paving the way for the airgraph scheme. © Royal Mail Group Ltd 2011, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive, 2011.

16 17 18

M B Harry to Colonel Underwood, 11 March 1943, MP404/1, 1945/11028, NAA. Illustrated London News, 10 May 1941. Prime Minister’s Department to Secretary of State for the Dominions, 27 July 1942, MP742/1, 254/1/800, NAA.

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‘Sensitised’ paper and film had to be obtained and, in a time of critical paper shortage, the PMG had to find a supply of paper with a whiteness suitable for microfilming to print the forms. Designing the forms on which letters were written, deciding censorship protocols, devising mailing systems for the airgraphs within Australia and educating the public and post office employees on the new concept of ‘photo letters’, as the Melbourne Herald called them, all took time.19 The forms developed in Australia were modelled on British airgraph forms. The address had to be printed in capital letters using black ink and the letter was confined to a box of 21 cm by 28 cm, more than double the size that the reader would eventually receive. Censorship protocols for airgraphs were the same as those for conventional letters, with all outgoing airgraphs checked by censors before microfilming and a percentage of incoming airgraphs subject to censorship. On the top left hand corner of the letter part of the form was a small box where senders who were naturalised British citizens of enemy origin had to insert an N and enemy aliens had to place an A, to alert the censors to the need for more careful scrutiny of these messages.20 All airgraphs were handed over the post office counter unfolded, which eliminated extra handling at the microfilming end and also produced a document without any creases for filming.

Figure 3. Postal worker inspecting airgraph prints © Royal Mail Group Ltd 2011, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive, 2011. 19 20

Herald, 22 April 1941, see also NAA MP404/1, 1944/115 and NAA 45/5495. Airgraph form, MP742, 116/1/622, NAA.

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The public nature of the airgraph was addressed in instructions the PMG sent to post office employees working at the counter. The system, they were instructed, depended on the sender writing the address and the letter ‘very clearly’. It was important to see that the airgraph was properly addressed and that the letter was written in the right space but, the PMG stressed, it was ‘not part of the officer’s duty to read the letter or to decide whether the letter is written sufficiently clearly’. Instead, the officer was permitted to ‘draw the attention of the sender to the need for the writing to be clear and distinct’.21 Before the airgraph service was made available to the general public to use, many had become familiar with two instances of incoming airgraphs. First were the airgraphs from Australian forces stationed in Canada coming via the United States V-mail service, which began arriving in September 1942. Bob Yell’s first airgraph to his family was one of 1800 that arrived from Canada in October and soon more than 10 000 airgraphs were arriving monthly. There was no reciprocal V-mail service for families to send airgraphs to Canada as the PMG had not yet supplied the forms to Australian post offices.22 The other instance was the ‘Christmas airgraph’ of 1942, a one-off for Australian and New Zealand soldiers serving in the Middle East and the UK. This included airgraphs from soldiers who had fought at El Alamein, whose contents were used evocatively by Johnston and Stanley to introduce their study. The service was also an operational test of the feasibility of an airgraph service to Australasia.23 Early in November, the Army had decided that all soldiers in the Middle East should have the opportunity to send a Christmas message home and issued free ‘Christmas airgraphs’.24 According to Army plans, airgraphs would be collected from field post offices towards the end of November, microfilmed in Cairo, and flown first to London and then on to San Francisco via Washington. After a ‘quick despatch’ from San Francisco to Australia, the airgraphs would be printed in Melbourne and delivered by Christmas. During December, seven ‘serials’ of microfilm from soldiers in the Middle East were flown from London to Washington. Four of them, serials 2, 3, 4 and 5 arrived on 22 December but the plane carrying serials 6 and 7 had crashed. Because of bad weather in Washington, the Christmas airgraphs could not be flown 21 22 23 24

Airgraph Services – Instructions for the Guidance of Official Postmasters, MP404/1, 1944/115, NAA. L B Fanning to Postmaster General, W P Ashby, 26 August 1942, MP742/1, 116/1/622, NAA. Collyer ‘Airgraphs and Australia’, 54. Minute Paper, Department of the Army, 9 November 1942, MP742/1, 254/1/401, NAA.

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directly to San Francisco but were sent by rail to Chicago and then flown to San Francisco where Australian and American officials were on standby. The airgraphs did not arrive in San Francisco until 31 December and were sent to Australia on the ‘first plane’ the next day, New Year’s Day. The fate of the missing serial 1 is not known.25 Although the trial service revealed the many complexities involved in getting airgraphs quickly to Australia, and the Christmas deadline was missed, it was deemed successful. The Australian public finally had access to the airgraph service in June 1943, when the first airgraphs from Britain arrived. In early July, Australia’s outward service began. The first Australian airgraph arrived in Ottawa on 15 July, ten days after it was sent; the first airgraph sent from Australia to London took 18 days to arrive; and the first Australian airgraph sent to the Middle East took three weeks to arrive in Cairo.26 Looking back over the operation of the airgraph service in Australia, the director general of the PMG, L B Fanning, estimated that once it was up and running, an average of 90 000 airgraphs were sent from Australia each week.27 Australians appreciated the speed of the airgraph for maintaining contact not just with forces serving overseas but also for communicating with family and friends, especially in Britain. The airgraph’s lack of privacy did emerge as an issue, especially as some Australians were aware that V-mail and Canadian airgraph forms were folded before being sent for microfilming. For example Mrs N Jackson of Broadmeadow, New South Wales, endorsed the Canadian system: she felt that handing ‘one’s personal correspondence open across the counter of a post office’ was ‘most embarrassing’.28 Perhaps she had reason for concern. Only a month after outward airgraph services had been established in Australia, Edgar Rouse, a director of Kodak, took up the privacy issue with the PMG, aware of the public’s ‘disinclination to hand in an unsealed form to the post office’. Kodak had a vested interest in encouraging the use of the airgraph service and Rouse had a privacy story to tell. ‘Only the other day’, he wrote, the wife of one of our executives had to wait at a suburban post office in Melbourne while the young lady behind the counter calmly read completely through two airgraph letters handed in by the previous person she had attended … There is no need for me to point out to you that there must be a natural reluctance to hand in an unsealed letter to a post office in a small country town.29 25 26 27 28 29

See series of cables and Army Messages, MP742/1, 254/1/401, NAA on the race to get the airgraphs to Australia by Christmas. See MP404/1, 1945/11028, NAA. L Fanning to J Minter, 8 August 1945, MP 404/1, 1945/9955, NAA. Smiths Weekly, 23 February 1944. E Rouse to M Harry, 20 August 1943, MP404/1, 1945/5495, NAA.

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The PMG was unmoved by the privacy issue. The paper shortage made it difficult to consider changing the forms. Of more concern for the PMG was the wastage of airgraph forms during a time of paper shortage. Postal employees observed customers collecting multiple forms from the post office but only returning to send one. A press release was issued asking the public to use airgraph forms carefully. Another problem for the PMG was maintaining a steady supply of forms throughout the country, a particular difficulty in Brisbane. In August 1943 the Brisbane GPO sent 750 airgraphs daily to Melbourne for microfilming but by January the following year, it was sending 1600 airgraphs a day and had practically run out of forms. The Brisbane GPO also supplied forms to field post offices in New Guinea: wastage could be excused there, staff reported, because the men had to carry the airgraphs ‘on their person’.30 Australia’s airgraph service lasted for two years but its days were numbered when wartime conditions changed and the air letter, using lighter paper and dispensing with an envelope, was introduced in September 1944. Air letters were popular for their increased privacy and extra space, and they were delivered faster, as filming and printing were no longer required at either end.31 In July 1945, the airgraph service was terminated between all countries following the decrease in airgraph traffic and the increased capacity of aircraft to carry overseas mail.32 Although the service had only operated for two years, the PMG’s director general was convinced of the valuable role airgraphs had played. ‘There is no doubt’, Fanning wrote, ‘that this splendid innovation met an urgent need under war conditions and afforded the means whereby it was possible to maintain speedy communication with our compatriots serving in different countries’.33 While Fanning gave no figures on how many airgraphs were received in that time, the number of airgraphs sent from Australia was well in excess of four million.34 By looking at the correspondence between one Australian airman, Robert (Bob) Yell, and his family, we gain some understanding of what the airgraph meant to wartime correspondents and how it met that ‘urgent need’ of maintaining ‘speedy communication’. 30 31 32 33 34

Telegram, Brisbane GPO to Director General, 7 January 1944, MP404/1, 1945/5495, NAA. Collyer ‘Airgraphs and Australia’, 30. PMG’s Department to Deputy Director, Posts and Telegraphs, 18 July 1945, MP1399/1, 10/22, NAA. L Fanning, 6 September 1945, 404/1, 10835, NAA. L Fanning to J Minter, 8 August 1945, MP 404/1, 1945/9955, NAA.

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A family’s wartime correspondence Bob Yell was born in 1919 and grew up on his family’s property in central west New South Wales. When the Second World War broke out he was 19 and working on the farm. He enlisted in the Air Force in August 1941 and underwent his early training in Sydney and Narromine. Under the Empire Air Training Scheme, Bob, along with many other Australian air force trainees, was sent to Canada where he trained on twinengined aircraft, gaining his ‘wings’ in September 1942. He then sailed to England, where he underwent a further eight months of training, learning to fly progressively larger bombers.35 After almost 18 months of training, Bob was promoted to pilot officer and posted to an operational unit with the RAF (No. 12 Squadron) based at Wickenby in Lincolnshire, flying Lancaster bombers. He flew his first operation on 24 July 1943 and with his crew went on to fly a total of 30 bombing missions to Italy and Germany over the next six months. 36 Bob was away from home and family for almost two and a half years, without the opportunity for any home leave once he left Australia. His only means of contact with his family was through correspondence. Those serving overseas could not expect to hear the voice of their loved ones for several years, and letters had to re-create that sense of intimate conversation and of hearing family voices during their wartime separation. Bob was very close to his parents, little sister and three brothers, and wrote on an almost weekly basis to his immediate family, as well as corresponding with other relatives and friends. Receiving letters from home was very important for the morale of members of the armed forces, as a number of writers have pointed out.37 This was acknowledged at the time by the Minister for Air who wrote in 1942: ‘Nothing contributes more to the maintenance of morale than an assurance of the closest possible link between personnel serving overseas and their relatives’.38 It was regarded as the patriotic duty of the civilian population to write to those serving their country at war.39 The emotional boost of receiving mail was repeatedly expressed by Bob Yell. Receiving a batch of letters transformed his day: 35 36 37 38 39

Susan Yell (ed) Over the Alps By Moonlight: The War Letters of Robert Spencer Yell, Churchill, Vic: OCLC, Monash University 2009, 4. R S Yell, RAAF logbook. For example see Litoff and Smith ‘“Will he get my letter?”’ and Jenny Hartley ‘Letters are everything these days: mothers and letters in the Second World War’, in R Earle (ed) Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945, Aldershot: Ashgate 1999, 183–195. Press release, Department of Air, 2 December 1942, A8681, 1942/1898, NAA. Hartley ‘Letters are everything these days’, 183.

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It has been another red-letter day to-day, I received your letter Mother, thanks so much, if you only knew how much they mean. But I guess you do! Quite a lot of the boys got letters including George, his first. He’s read it eight times in four hours. I’ve read mine about that many too!40 Now for some good news, I received another heap of letters about four days ago and believe me they were great for the ‘old morale’, as it seemed so long since I last had any from you all.41

Figure 4. Bob Yell (far right) with his parents Frank and Margery and brother Bruce, 1942, at the family home near Murga Reproduced with permission of the Yell family.

40 41

Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 21 February 1943. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 27 July 1942.

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However reading these much anticipated letters led to mixed feelings as it reminded these young men of how far from home they were. In another letter Bob wrote: It’s a funny thing, I just love getting your letters and jump for joy when they arrive. But usually I get a bit of a lump in the old throat when I read them. I thought I must be a bit soft, but most of the boys reckon they’re the same. We’re not so tough when it comes to thinking of home.42

The affective power of letters was both cheering and melancholic. For Bob, letters maintained a sense of contact with what was going on back home and kept the life he hoped to return to vividly before him. He asked after and was told news of the harvest, shearing, wheat and wool prices, the activities of his brothers Bruce, Bill and Doug, and little sister Margaret (known as Tiny), the dogs and horses, birthdays and other social events. For example, in a letter written in 1943 he wrote: How much wheat are you putting in this year and have you been getting plenty of rain? I s’pose that’s a silly question as by the time you answer this you’ll be stripping it! Have you cleared any more of the little flats up near Paddy’s house? Have you got any more new dogs and if so what are they like? And how are all the horses, gosh I miss them. Do you ever ride Chum and Pam, Bruce? I suppose you’ll be teaching me how to ride when I get home Tiny. I bet you can’t ride Pam yet! Ha, ha. I suppose you had Doug home for Easter, did Bill get home too?43

Through building up the detail of a shared world, and the use of personal questions, Bob’s letter simulated a conversation with his family around the dinner table, even teasing his little sister. In his letters to his family he also tried to share his new experiences away from home. Although Bob wrote only in very general terms of his air force service, he wrote at length of escapades with his mates while off-duty, of parties in the mess, of girls he had met, of dances and shows he had been to and of visits with family friends and relatives when on leave, even recounting conversations verbatim.44 It is worth noting here that this richness of detail was characteristic of his letters, but not his airgraphs; as we will discuss further below, the need for conciseness in an airgraph worked against such detailed accounts and also against the kind of rhetorical playfulness in the letter quoted above. 42 43 44

Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 24 August 1942. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 27 April 1943. Bob’s father Frank grew up in London, and Frank’s two sisters still lived there.

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Bob adopted the practice used by other experienced letter writers of numbering their letters so recipients could tell if one went missing or a later letter arrived ahead of an earlier one. 45 The letters and airgraphs formed an ongoing conversation in which the exchange of ‘turns’ at talking had to be read in chronological order to make sense. They also constituted narratives of parallel lives, and in the case of Bob’s letters, a personal record equivalent to a diary. By setting down his experiences in writing he was not only sharing them with his family as they occurred, but he also envisaged that they would serve as a reminder of his wartime experiences, one that he could look back over once he returned from the war: ‘I’m pleased you are keeping my letters Mum, they’ll bring back a lot of memories’, he wrote from Canada in 1942.46 The desire of service personnel to make a personal record of their wartime experiences, whether through letters, diaries, memoirs, poems, novels or (most recently) through the digital videos made by soldiers in Iraq, also reflects the sense that their war experiences had more than personal significance.47

Airgraphs and the epistolary pact Once airgraphs became available, they greatly enhanced the means for regular contact with home and family. The airgraph service from Canada to Australia began in September 1942, while Bob was training in Canada, and Bob sent his first airgraph on 25 September. However, it was not until July 1943, when Bob was in England and beginning to fly operations, that the outbound airgraph service from Australia began. Bob received his first airgraph from his family on 6 August 1943. In both world wars, soldiers bemoaned the lack of regular and frequent mail, which exacerbated the sense of isolation and separation from family.48 Before the airgraph service commenced, Bob Yell often had to wait two or three months for batches of mail from home to reach him in Canada or England. When he had received no mail for some weeks, the tone of Bob’s letters became noticeably more wistful: ‘I haven’t had any mail for about six weeks now but I’m hoping to get a good old pile before Xmas’, he wrote to his parents in December 1942.49 The airgraph ameliorated this 45 46 47

48 49

Hartley ‘Letters are everything these days’, 187. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 27 July 1942. Alistair Thomson ‘Anzac stories: using personal testimony in war history’, War & Society 25 (2), 2006. See Jessica Ritchie on the use of YouTube footage by present-day soldiers, in ‘Instant histories of war: online combat videos of the Iraq conflict, 2003–2010’, History Australia 8 (2), April 2010, 95–96. See Lyons ‘French soldiers and their correspondence’; Hanna ‘A republic of letters’. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 1 December 1942.

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problem by enabling not only faster mail but more frequent deliveries of mail. News arriving by this means was no longer so dated, and there was a corresponding sense that those back home were not quite so spatially distant. Bob acknowledged these advantages in a letter from Canada: I suppose by the time you get this letter all this news will be stale as I will be sending you cables and I’m also going to write short notes, which you should receive in two weeks by the ‘Airgraph Service’. So I hope it is a success.50

As Bob’s letter indicated, there were several methods of correspondence available to serving personnel – letters, airgraphs and cables (overseas telegrams) – and Bob made use of all three. Each had its particular benefits and limitations. The transmission time for each method differed: cables from Canada or the UK to Australia took one to two weeks, airgraphs two to three weeks, while letters were the slowest means of communication, taking between six weeks and three months to arrive at their destination. Cables were used for urgent news, to send timely greetings for special occasions such as birthdays or Christmas, or to communicate good news. Bob sent a cable when he received his wings, and again when he got his commission. Cables were limited by their brevity and expense and were often somewhat impersonal and formulaic. Bob referred to sending a cable when he first arrived in Canada: ‘I suppose you were pleased to get the cable I sent from Vancouver. You probably thought the wording was a bit funny but it was a standard for us all and we got reduced rates.’51 Although letters were a very slow method of communication, they had the advantage of privacy, and were usually written at more leisure and thus more length. The airgraph as a means of correspondence sat part way between the cable and the letter. On the one hand its transmission time was closer to that of a cable, but unlike the cable it enabled a personal handwritten message to be transmitted, and did not rely on formulaic phrases and incomplete sentences, thus allowing the ‘voice’ of the writer to be heard. However, the airgraph lacked the privacy of the letter, and also had limited space for the message. As a relatively affordable method, it could be used regularly, unlike the cable. Airgraphs were thus well suited to Bob’s situation once he began active service. While Bob used the airgraph service a couple of times while he was training in Canada, it was once he began flying operations in England that airgraphs increasingly replaced letters as his means of maintaining regular contact with his family. On active service there was less time to sit and write a long, leisurely letter, and sending an airgraph 50 51

Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 21 September 1942. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 21 May 1942.

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enabled Bob to fulfil the expectation that he write weekly. However Bob clearly felt that writing an airgraph might not quite fulfil the epistolary pact with his family. ‘I suppose you are all very disgusted with me only writing you these short letters’, he wrote in September 1943, ‘but I find it hard enough to fill these up at times. Still I am writing and I guess that’s the main thing, only hope you are receiving them.’52 As Martha Hanna put it, writing of World War I correspondence, ‘short letters were often cause for anger; no letters at all were cause for alarm’.53 The enforced brevity of the airgraph modified the epistolary pact regarding letter length; instead of a letter of several pages, Bob could write a one page epistle and sometimes expect to receive one of similar length from his family via the airgraph service. Jenny Hartley, writing on mothers’ letters in the Second World War, observes that letter length was closely related to the affective function of correspondence. When the son or daughter away at war reads the mother’s letter ‘he or she is at home, and the longer letter is better because it makes the sensation of feeling at home last longer’.54 Conversely, a short letter such as that in an airgraph reduces the feeling of sharing time with a family member. For family and friends of those in the forces, airgraphs were a useful supplement to letters but they did not replace them. In August 1943 Bob’s mother Margery sent an airgraph to acknowledge special news – a story that had been published about him in the Sydney Morning Herald.55 ‘We have just heard about your doings in the Herald – you certainly are doing a grand job’, she wrote.56 When other family members had written at length, or when there was not much news, an airgraph served to keep the regular flow of correspondence going. In an airgraph sent in November 1943, Margery began: ‘As Dad and Bruce have written you reams this week I thought this [airgraph] would be best for me.’57 Not all airgraphs were between members of the forces and their families – civilians also exchanged airgraphs, appreciating them as an inexpensive and quick means of sending short notes. Bob’s Aunt Lily, living in London, 52

53 54 55 56 57

Airgraph, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 8 September 1943. In a rather different context, Alistair Thomson tells of the effect on the correspondence practices of a young woman who began using audio-tapes in the 1960s to send news to family back home in England, but was worried that she was writing fewer and shorter letters. What was lost was ‘a more private and intimate form of correspondence’, as Alistair Thomson notes in Moving Stories, Sydney: UNSW Press 2011, 217–218. Hanna ‘A republic of letters’, 1354. Hartley ‘Letters are everything these days’, 186. ‘Bomber pilot kept busy: eight major trips in 24 days’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August 1943. Airgraph, Margery Yell to Bob Yell, 29 August, 1943. Airgraph, Margery Yell to Bob Yell, 3 November 1943.

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sent airgraphs to her brother and sister-in-law in Australia, sharing news of Bob and thus building the sense of a family which remained connected despite distance: I feel I must just send you another airgraph, as you will be wondering about us all. All is well. I had a sweet letter from Bob last week. He really is a splendid boy. When he is here with me, I often think what you would both give to be sitting in my place.58

Although initially a scheme introduced to solve a military problem of getting regular mail to the troops, the airgraph thus developed a secondary function of maintaining networks among family and friends across the Empire, which was also important for maintaining civilian morale. Like the postcard, the airgraph was best suited to brief snippets of news, as the following airgraph written in October 1943 from Bob Yell shows: Dear Mother, Dad and all59 I’m sending one of these now and will write you a long letter about my leave in a day or two. Well I’m just back from ten days leave. I spent the first two days down in Bristol with a mate of mine who is going overseas, but not home! Then I came back to London and stayed with Aunt. Uncle has also gone overseas. I spent the first two days getting fixed up with all my clothes etc. I have everything except my two uniforms and overcoat. I’m having them made. Took Aunt to see the ‘Merry Widow’ and enjoyed it very much. Also went to three other plays so had my share of theatre but I like them much better than pictures. I went out to dinner with the Ainsworths one night and had a very nice night with them. Also met Mr King one day and had lunch with him. But I’ll tell you all the details when I write. I’ve also got some snaps of the crew taken at O.T.U. So I’ll send them along too. Aunt was very pleased to receive your airgraph Dad. I also received about three letters from you Mother and one from Jean Barcus. But I’ll answer them when I write. Oh yes, when I arrived at Aunt’s the tin of sweets was waiting for us. We had some at Aunt’s but she wouldn’t keep any. Once the crew saw them well that was the end. Anyway Mother they are very nice and we are enjoying them very much. I suppose you are all very pleased about the war news – it certainly looks much brighter these days. Well space is scarce so I’ll have to finish up. Love to all and a big kiss for Tiny. Lots of love and give my regards to all. Love, Bob60 58 59 60

Airgraph, Lily Attridge to Frank and Margery Yell, 7 September 1943. This was Bob’s standard opening formula. Airgraph, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 28 October 1943.

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While still informal and ‘newsy’, many of the rhetorical devices used in Bob’s letters which worked to create intimacy through building up detail, asking personal questions and recounting conversations (as discussed above) were absent in his airgraphs. The airgraph modified the epistolary pact, so that more cursory and mundane ‘notes’ were written, still fulfilling the pact to write frequently, but reducing or postponing the requirement for longer and more intimate letters, through which family members could reproduce, at least partially, the experience of a comfortable chat around the dinner table. However, from another perspective the limited length of the airgraph was an advantage to the wartime letter-writer on active service, because there was much that could not be told. There were challenges in terms of what a serviceman could write of his life while away, and for those serving with the Air Force there was a peculiar contrast between the superficially ‘normal’ life they were able to lead when not training or flying, and the life of ‘ops’.61 While Bob provided some descriptions of his flying training in his letters, once operations began censorship regulations meant there was much he could not write about. It posed a dilemma: I really don’t know what I’m going to write about this time as I haven’t been doing very much of interest this week. We haven’t been flying but have been at lectures. I must say they have been very interesting but that doesn’t help matters, as I can’t write about them. If I could I could write all night.62

The lack of space in an airgraph provided a plausible excuse for not writing much; Bob often concluded an airgraph with the words ‘space is short so I’ll have to finish up’. Life on ‘ops’ not only entailed much that could not be written about for reasons of military secrecy, but a further factor was the desire not to worry or upset those back home. In November 1943, Bob flew an operation to Berlin in which the Lancaster’s electrical system failed, causing the breakdown of wireless transmission, bomb-release gear and engine instruments. The crew completed the mission and made it back to base, where Bob wrote in his logbook ‘shaky do on return’.63 However an airgraph written shortly afterwards mentioned none of these events; instead Bob wrote cheerily of letters and parcels received, and visiting his London aunts on his leave. Bob selected his news carefully, with the aim of providing reassurance to his family – letters and airgraphs sent home 61 62 63

The wartime experience of those in the Air Force differed in this respect from those in the Army or Navy, who served on enemy territory and therefore did not experience this daily contrast between home life and military engagement. Letter, Bob Yell to Frank and Margery Yell, 8 July 1943. R S Yell, RAAF logbook, entry 26 November 1942.

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were just as important to the morale effort as those received ‘at the front’. Bob’s decision to write a somewhat ‘sanitised’ version of his war experience accords with Martyn Lyons’ argument that ‘there were things one preferred not to write, in order to maintain the essentially comforting and consoling nature of letters from the front’.64 However, not all servicemen chose to self-censor in this way. Jenny Hartley quotes the letters of two World War II RAF pilots who wrote to their families drawing on air force slang to provide graphic accounts of their near-death experiences in combat.65 And Martha Hanna draws on the evidence of World War I French postal control records to argue that most French soldiers did try to convey something of the brutality of their wartime experiences.66 In effect, all members of the armed forces faced a similar dilemma: whether to write honestly of the dangers and realities of battle (guessed at and feared by their families), or to paint a more prosaic but comforting picture of the ordinary routine events and camaraderie which occupied much of their time. This examination of Bob’s and the Yell family’s use of airgraphs alongside letters and cables shows how the airgraph functioned within a modified form of the epistolary pact applied to letters. The airgraph was a supplement to rather than a replacement for the letter, but one that enabled the expectation of regular (in this case, weekly) contact to be maintained, and thus family relationships and morale to be supported. The material constraints of the airgraph – its brevity, its mechanical reproduction from a publicly submitted form and its consequent lack of privacy – meant that the epistolary pact was modified. In particular, airgraphs could be (and were) more concise and less intimate than letters. One advantage of this was that the wartime letter writer could feel less pressure to produce volumes of news, as much of the wartime experience could not be described without incurring censorship. Yet despite the reduction in intimacy and detailed sharing of experiences, the airgraph reduced the sense of distance between correspondents because of its one significant advantage – a great increase in the speed of transmission.

Conclusion The airgraph has now largely been forgotten, except by collectors and scholars of postal history. It came into being to serve a particular need, and when that need was no longer pressing, due to the introduction 64 65 66

Lyons ‘French soldiers and their correspondence’, 87. Hartley ‘Letters are everything these days’, 190. Hanna ‘The republic of letters’, 1341–1342.

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of the air letter and freeing up of air capacity, it became obsolete. The airgraph exemplified an ingenious use of technology to solve a specific problem: how to provide a relatively quick and efficient international postal service in wartime when aircraft capacity was limited. The global scale and the efficiency of the airgraph service depended on the adaptation of an existing technology for photographic reproduction and its integration with the postal bureaucracy and civilian and military air services. As a communications network which stretched across the Empire from the Middle East to Canada, India to Australia, New Zealand to the United Kingdom, the airgraph was the email of its time – or rather, a ‘sluggish precursor of today’s email’, as Victoria Dawson suggests. 67 While the airgraph service did not have a direct military purpose – other means of communication were generally used for official military communication between countries, such as the cable and, for secret documents, the microgram service68 – the airgraph was important to the war effort because of its contribution to morale and to maintaining the bonds with family and friends that motivated many service personnel. However, airgraphs imposed constraints on elements of the epistolary pact compared with letters. They supported the expectations of frequency but they also limited length and privacy. They encouraged brevity and conciseness, and this considerably affected the degree to which emotional intimacy could be expressed. But to this particular Australian family, the airgraph enabled them to stay in frequent touch with the son of whom they were so proud, and to know that he was receiving regular messages from them which cheered him while he performed his dangerous job. For their son, it provided a speedier link to the people and way of life he held dear, and for whom he had enlisted in 1941. It was through a telegram, the fastest means of communication, that Margery and Frank Yell learnt of Bob’s death in January, 1944. On what was to be his thirtieth and final operation, his plane was shot down near Burgdorf in Germany, with the loss of all seven crew members. At home, Bob’s letters, airgraphs and cables were collected together and stored in his writing compendium. The letters were carefully placed together in chronological order, while the airgraphs were tucked away in an envelope. This may have indicated their separate status as photographic reproductions or that they were of lesser value for memorialising Bob. The letters and airgraphs his family had written were returned and 67 68

Dawson ‘V as in Victory-Mail’, 38. See A1608/1, AC25/1/1 Part 2, NAA.

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placed there too. Lying in the black leather compendium, stamped with Bob’s initials, is a family’s wartime correspondence, showing how contact and morale were maintained through the combination of letters, cables and airgraphs.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Paul Atkinson, Janice Chesters, Alison Hart, Helen Yell and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and comments.

About the authors Susan Yell is a senior lecturer in Communications at Monash University, Gippsland Campus. She has published in the areas of communication literacies, email practices, discourse theory and media coverage of disasters. Her particular interest lies in the relationship between communication technologies and how we use them to make meaning in social contexts. Susan is currently researching historical shifts in emotion in news stories. Bob Yell was her uncle. Correspondence to Susan Yell: [email protected]

Meredith Fletcher is an environmental and community historian who worked at Monash University’s Gippsland Campus for twenty years. She is now writing a biography of writer, botanist, gardener and conservationist, Jean Galbraith. Meredith is temporarily based in Auckland where she is affiliated with the Health Campus of the Waitemata District Health Board and completing her Jean Galbraith biography. Correspondence to Meredith Fletcher: [email protected].

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