The Thirty-cent Prexie
After World Wat II - Re-establishing airmail
This business airmail was mailed in May of 1945 to Neuchatel, Switzerland. The earliest date for non-military airmail is recorded as 06/21/1945.
On this page, when I cite airmail going to a country before the initial date of resumed service please keep in mind that absent an arrival date we do not know how long it took in transit, so we cannot be certain that it traveled by air.
A cover that was mailed from an APO address in Hawaii to Switzerland in 1945. This was still during the period when normal airmail from Hawaii to Europe required airmail postage to the mainland plus to Europe, or forty-five cents, but as this letter was sent from an APO address it was treated as if mailed from the mainland. It was sent on March 20, 1945, about two months earlier than the cover above it. The fact that it was sent from an APO might have been enough to allow it to travel by air that early.
This letter jumped the gun on airmail to Czechoslovakia after the war, and was returned. The letter was mailed May 5, 1945, and the date for resumption of airmail was August 27 that year.
By November of 1945 there was no problem with airmail to Czechoslovakia.
This cover appears to be from a Czech soldier attached to a British army unit using an APO to mail a letter from France to the Czech Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland in June of 1945. The APO number is virtually unreadable, so origin in France is a best guess. APO's used the same postage rates as the U.S. mainland for airmail to foreign countries.
This appears to be business mail sent to Greece on June 14, 1945. While non-business airmail was scheduled to resume on March 6, business airmail was not supposed to start until August 17.
An airmail letter to Denmark sent October 23, 1945 was mailed well after the resumption date of June 21.
This airmail letter to the Netherlands was mailed May 17, 1945, more than a month ahead of the resumption date of June 21.
Airmail to an address in the U.S. Sector of Germany sent June 11, 1946. The resumption date for airmail to Germany was August 28, 1946. There is no date received to suggest how it traveled.
The rules of resumed mail to Germany after the war specified that business mail was not to be sent before January 2, 1947. This letter, sent airmail September 17, 1946 has all the earmarks of having been business mail. It was subject to civil and military censorship in Germany and returned to sender without further explanation.
This cover was sent to Germany September 8, 1946, well after the August 28 resumption date, but the intended recipient had returned to Poland. The address given appears to have been a camp for displaced citizens, where the trail went cold, so the letter was returned to sender with a sticker on the back saying in German and French, "Left, without leaving an address."
