October 8, 1943

Page One

Dear Marty,
Hurray! I got my first mail today- the letter you wrote Sept. 19th- 19 days enroute. There has been something a bit screwy about it because a bunch of letters written about that time arrived today- the first mail a lot of us here received. Some other people began getting V-mail and air mail almost as soon as we arrived. We think maybe some mail was either held up at the staging area, or came by boat. Apparently the thing works something like this: V-mail comes pretty regularly + always by air, but it has to be processed + all of that goes from here is censored, all of which takes two or three days. Evidently it isn’t flown over every day because sometimes the boys get several letters at once, but they must send a batch of films every 2 or 3 days at least. Air mail on the other hand may go right onto the plane, without any further censorship or any delay + so get here faster. Or if there is no plane space available, it may go by boat. Furthermore, they say, if there is lots of plane space ordinary mail may come by air. All this may be entirely wrong, but it sounds reasonable. And I can see that mail to Hawaii would probably be quite different. Will tell you more on another page.

Love B