V - mail V - mail , short for Victory Mail , is a hybrid mail process used during the Second World War in America as the primary and secure 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 . The V - mail process is based on the earlier British Airgraph process . Operation and function . V - mail correspondence was on small letter sheet s , 17 . 8 cm by 23 . 2 cm ( 7 by 9 1 / 8 in . ) , that would go through mail censors before being photographed and transported as thumbnail - sized image in negative microfilm . Upon arrival to their destination , the negatives would be blown up to 60 % their original size 10 . 7 cm by 13 . 2 cm ( 4 ¼ in . by 5 3 / 16 in . ) and printed . According to the National Postal Museum , " V - mail ensured that thousands of tons of shipping space could be reserved for war materials . 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 combat zone . In addition to postal censorship , V - mail also deterred espionage communications by foiling the use of invisible ink , microdot s , and microprinting , none of which would be reproduced in a photocopy . British ' Airgraph ' . The airgraph was invented in the 1930s by the Eastman Kodak Company in conjunction with Imperial Airways ( now British Airways ) and Pan - American Airways as a means of reducing the weight and bulk of mail carried by air . The airgraph forms , upon which the letter was written , were photographed and then sent as negatives on rolls of microfilm . A General Post Office ( GPO ) poster of the time claimed that 1 , 600 letters on film weighed just 5oz , while 1 , 600 ordinary letters weighed 50 lbs . At their destination the negatives were printed on photographic paper and delivered as airgraph letters through the normal Royal Engineers ( Postal Section ) , also known as the Army Postal Services ( APS ) , or systems . In 1940 the British Minister of Transport , Lieutenant Colonel John Moore - Brabazon , 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara , put forward the idea that airgraphs be used to reduce both the bulk and weight of mail travelling between the Middle East Force ( MEF ) and the UK . The matter was referred to the APS and the GPO , who jointly investigated the possibility of using airgraphs . This eventually led to a service being instituted between England and Egypt in 1941 when 70 , 000 airgraphs were sent in the first batch and took three weeks to reach their destination . Kodak had offices in Cairo that were capable of processing airgraph negatives , but it was not until the appropriate equipment arrived from America that their Cairo office that the APS was able to provide a return service to the UK . In the theatres of war the whole airgraph operation was coordinated by the APS . Completed airgraph forms were collected by the A / FPOs and forwarded to the Kodak processing plants , which were co - located with the Base APOs . The use of the airgraph was not rationed and its postage was also set at three pence ( 3d ) . Although the airgraph proved to be immediately popular its use was limited because of its size ( approx ; 2ins × 3ins ) and lack of privacy , so when sufficient aircraft capacity became available its use declined in favour of the air letter . The airgraph service was later extended to : Canada ( 1941 ) , East Africa ( 1941 ) , Burma ( 1942 ) , India ( 1942 ) , South Africa ( 1942 ) , Australia ( 1943 ) , New Zealand ( 1943 ) Ceylon ( 1944 ) and Italy ( 1944 ) . Historical antecedents . The U . S . military ' s V - mail was based on British Airgraphs , which were based on Eastman Kodak ' s patent obtained from New York City banker George McCarthy . Prior to that , a similar system was deployed during the Franco - Prussian War which used carrier pigeon s to send primitive microfilm strips across German lines , developed from French optician René Dagron ' s first patent granted for microfilm in 1859 . Dagron ' s microfilm patent was additionally based on British scientist John Benjamin Dancer , who created microfilm in 1839 .