Among the Archives’ wealth of letters from the front, those from John Finn (NU '46) to his family stand out for their endearing nature. Finn’s letters are an easy read: peppered with folksy idioms, entertaining anecdotes, and shout-outs to loved ones back home, it’s easy to imagine them being read around the dinner table at his family's St. Albans, Vermont home. Finn’s morale never flags as he describes his experiences, from his time at the Military Police Replacement Training Center in Detroit ("I thought Norwich was tough. Holy Cow!") to his stationing in Southern England during the waning years of World War II. Even on a shoestring budget during his training, he is reluctant to ask his father for funds and even apologizes several times for some pricey phone calls. He writes as though waking up to wild pigs rooting around his encampment in Louisiana, fumbling with English currency in order to snag Christmas cards, and meeting USO starlets are all just an enjoyable novelty distracting him from returning home. Southern England’s pastoral scenery reminds him of Vermont, but he writes “I’ll still take St. Albans any day.”
Finn's letters were sent using a combination of Army Air Mail (example above) and V-Mail Services while abroad. Introduced in 1942 and inspired by the British “Airgraph,” V-Mail (or Victory Mail) was used by the United States during World War II to handle the volume of millions of letters sent and received by soldiers stationed abroad. To reduce space taken up by mail on cargo planes, soldiers’ individual letters were written on specialized forms, censored, and copied to microfilm. The microfilm was shipped home in place of the original letters and printed back to paper upon arrival at its destination. Like this example from Finn’s letters, the letters families received were about 5 x 4 inches.
The resilience found throughout Finn's letters was not an effortless feat: in one message, dated April 1945, he apologizes for not writing in a while and explains that “I’ve been lonesome as all heck for 30 Lincoln Ave. and you folks; so I figured I had better wait till I got over these blues – Haven’t yet.” He would have to wait another month before the end of the conflict in Europe and his return to St. Albans, where he lived and served as sheriff, and in the Vermont legislature as a house representative and state senator until his death in 2007.
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