The Twenty-cent Prexie
Sheet stamp use
This cover was sent to New Zealand from a Navy ship attending the Bikini Atoll atom bomb test Able, the first of the Crossroads tests, on July 1, 1946.
At the time, airmail postage from the U.S. mainland to New Zealand was fifty cents per half ounce. The practice was to add or subtract rates when mailing was done from a point outside the mainland. (For instance, when the cost to mail a letter to Hawaii by air was twenty cents and to Australia was seventy cents, the rate from Hawaii to Australia was fifty cents.) This would imply that the airmail rate to Bikini Atoll was thirty cents, making the rate from there to New Zealand only twenty cents. Does anyone know whether this thirty cent rate existed?
