If You Want to Know More About the 6888th Postal Battalion…
Allow me to introduce you to Lincoln Penny Films, which has produced documentaries on both the Six Triple Eight and the Hello Girls
The Six Triple Eight: No Mail, Low Morale is now screening here and there. If you want to see the schedule, check out the documentary’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/thesixtripleeightdocumentary/
Note: If you want to see the movie trailer for The Six Triple Eight (and believe me, you do), click on the post title to see it in the browser.
Petra Herrera Wanted To Be a General
I’ve continued to stumble across stories of women warriors in the year since I turned in the manuscript (1) for Women Warriors. Sometimes people walk up to me after a book event and ask “Have you heard about [fill in the blank]?“ (2) It’s humbling how often the answer is no. The other question people ask me right now is whether I’m going to write a second volume of Women Warriors. That’s humbling in a different way. But the answer is still no.(3)
The combined affect of all this is good for any of you Marginalia who like to read about women warriors: blog post topics as far as the mind can see!
Which brings me to Petra Herrara, who fought in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. (Here’s the short version of the war: Times were hard and corrupt president Porofirio Diaz had been in office for a long time under less than democratic terms. When he announced that he would “run” for his seventh term as president, people who were hungry and frustrated rose up to overthrow Diaz and make Mexican democracy a reality. The civil war last ten years and cost 1.5 million people their lives, including Herrera)
Mexico had a long tradition of women who traveled with its armies, known as soldaderas. Most of them were the functional equivalent of the “women on the ration” common in European armies from the early modern period through the late eighteenth centuries. While their primary function was to grind the corn that provided the army’s main food staple, they could and did pick up rifles and join their male comrades in battle.
Herrera did not want to grind corn, cook or do laundry. Instead she disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the forces of Pancho Villa, who was notorious for not wanting women in his army, for all the usual reasons. Fighting under the name “Pedro Herrera,”(4) she earned a reputation as talented soldier, known for her leadership, her marksmanship and her skill at blowing up bridges.
Once her reputation was established, she revealed herself as Petra, expecting that it would not affect her status in Pancho Villa’s army, given her successes. (There is a touching innocence, and arrogance, to her assumption that being good at the job would be enough.) Instead she was thrown out of the army.
Herrera didn’t give up. She put together an all-female militia that fought alongside Pancho Villa, whether he wanted them or not. (How do you get rid of a militia that’s fighting on your side?) They helped rebel forces take the city of Torréon, which was a major Federal base. With the fall of the city, Herrera asked to be reinstated in the military, with the rank of general. (Because she obviously didn’t learn anything from her previous experience.) Instead she was given the rank of colonel and her militia was disbanded.
With her militia disbanded, Herrera worked as a spy for general Venustiano Carranza. She died after being shot three times by a group of drunks while working undercover as a bartender.
(1) Which was not literally a manuscript, since that implies that it written by hand. What would you call it? A typescript isn’t quite right either, because we all work digitally these days. A bytescript, perhaps? No matter what we call it, editors do not know how lucky they are to NOT get a handwritten manuscript from me.
(2) Three people did this after I spoke at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library last week.
(3) If you want to know why, now is a good time to sign up for the newsletter. I plan on talking about the vexed question of the sequel in a coming newsletter. Here’s the sign-up link: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b
(4) Herrera was not the only woman to make this choice She wasn’t even the only woman to take the name Pedro as her cover.
The Women of the 6888th Move the Mail
In 1945, the U.S. Military was seriously behind in delivering the mail to Americans stationed in the European theater. There was a two-year backlog of letters and packages addressed to some seven million soldiers and aid workers. The thankless job of sorting through a warehouse full of undelivered mail was assigned to the 855 African-American women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, also known as the “Six Triple Eight,” under the command of Major Charity Adams.
Part of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the women of the 688th took the motto “No mail, low morale.” They arrived in Birmingham, England in February 1945, and set to work in unheated and poorly lit warehouses that were stuffed to the ceiling with undelivered packages and letters. (Including undelivered goodies that made the local rodent population very happy.) For three months, they worked three eight hour shifts each day, seven days a week, sending out 65,000 letters each shift.
The sheer volume of undelivered mail was a challenge. But it wasn’t the only challenge. Some of the mail was, shall we say, optimistically addressed: ”Junior. US Army” Even properly addressed mail was difficult to deliver. There were, for instance, 7,500 Robert Smiths stationed in the European theater and frontline soldiers were constantly on the move. In order to make their job easier, they created a system of information cards with serial numbers, one for each soldier—similar to a library card catalog back in the days when catalogs used actual cards.
T he 6888th was the only all African-American female unit sent overseas during World War II. Despite the fact that they were making a valuable contribution to the war effort, the battalion suffered the same racial discrimination in the Army as they did in civilian life. They slept in segregated barracks and ate in segregated mess halls. As Major Early recalled, “ We didn’t mix it up. We were segregated in two ways, because we were black and because we were women.” Although white WACS and African-American soldiers were welcomed to a local club for American enlisted personnel run by the American Red Cross, the women of the Six Triple Eight were not allowed to use its facilities. When the Red Cross offered them alternative segregated facilities, Major Early and her women boycotted them and ran their own. Some members of the battalion felt they were treated better by the local people than by their fellow American soldiers.
Once the backlog in Birmingham was cleared, Six Triple Eight was transferred first to Rouen, and later to Paris, to deal with more stashes of undelivered mail.
In February, 1946, with the war over, they returned to the United States and the unit was disbanded. But for twelve months, neither snow, nor sleet, nor broken windows, nor badly addressed envelopes kept them from moving the mail on its appointed rounds.