For the record - since launching this enquiry I found that the March 1942 "Pamphlet for Information of all Units" reproduced in the History of the East African Postal Service (Rossiter, ed Proud, p 42-4) includes a table which specifies that there was "No Service" for Air Post Cards from East Africa Command to the UK.

Nick

Neil,

My thanks

Nick

From the Overseas Mails Branch Weekly Reports and my note of a Discussion Forum thread from 10+ years ago, a 3d airmail postcard service from the UK to forces in the Middle East and East Africa (and Malta) was introduced on 2 April 1941 and withdrawn on 7 December 1942.  Neither OMB nor the Forum discussion (which related to an outgoing item) mention whether there was a reciprocal service and I would like to confirm that there was - ie were service personnel entitled to send airmail postcards from British APOs in those theatres to the UK for 3d?

I have, for example, this item originating at Nakuru but accepted by APO 186 at Khartoum.

Thanks
Nick Guy

Thanks, Neil - that really helps.

Nick

While I'm at it!  Can a US Force Mail specialist comment on whether the US APS would have attempted colledt the postage due?

Hello Ross

I don't think there has been any suggestion of a direct route surface between East Africa and the British colonies in West Africa.  A small amount of material travelled West into the Belgian Congo but I doubt that would be used for onward mail, while the Nile route (north through the Sudan) was out of use even before the First World War.  I'm also confident that if the Civil PO was responsible for the routing of my item from E Africa it would have gone by road or sea to the Cape for onward transmission or if the East African Army Postal Service forwarded it.  The Cape-Kenya route was, after all, well established from the Abyssinian campaign. If that was the routing I was hoping collectors of US Forces Mail might be able to tell me enough for me to guess whether it would go from the Cape to the USA and back or direct to the Gold Coast.  If the latter was the case, I suppose the logic of treating it as underpaid was that even if a specific US APO was in British territory, the US Army postal Service was neither part of the British Empire nor a member of the African Postal Union, so the postcard was liable to the foreign rate.

The ATC had the twin missions of ferrying aircraft between the US and the North African, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern theatres and carrying freight and personnel between them.  The "Cannonball" route was certainly used for mail, and by 1944 there were daily departures.  US Forces Mail collectors might be able to shed some light on whether once it was in the hands of the US Army Postal Services they might have forwarded mail paid by surface by air, but at which point in the card's travels that would start goes back to the question of how the KUT PO/EAAPS would forward the postcard - ie back to the USA or direct to Accra or whatever, so another point they might be able to explain to me is whether the cover could have been passed to the US APO in Khartoum (The US APO in Nairobi moved to Egypt in January 1943).  Would what must have been a fairly remote outpost of the US Army Postal Service have had the expertise to accept international mail exchanges?

Thanks

Nick

I have a postcard from Tanganyika addressed to a US Army Post Office (attached) which I am writing up and I hope someone may be able to improve my understanding of its routing.  The card, postmarked at Moshi is addressed to an officer at HQ, CAFW, APO 625, US Army.  CAFW is the abbreviated title of the US Air Transport Command's Central African Wing which operated under that designation from 15 December 1943 to 31 July 1944 and had its headquarters at Accra where US APO 625 was located.  I am wondering whether the East African PO - or the East African Army Postal Service, since the cover seems to have been passed to APO 81 in Mombasa - would know where US Army POs were located, or would they need to send them to the USA to be redistributed?  Alternatively, were US Army POs treated as the USA wherever situate?  15c was the correct, Imperial, rate for a civilian postcard addressed to Accra whereas a card addressed to the USA incurred the foreign rate of 20c.

Thanks
Nick

I have some thoughts that may be useful - but it raises rather a large number of queries and I found my posting grew and grew! In fact it ended up so large that I have attached it as a Word document - I hope anyone interested will find it easier to manage in that form. Even so, there remain points on which I have not been able to offer anything useful.

Hello

As Mike says, this is from Heifetz - the copy is from the second edition but it is now in a  third - on which the corresponding page has a new ERD (18/9/45), 542 covers seen and from 61 countries.  Current ISBN is 0939429225 and it's listed for sale on the AAPS website.  (And, yes, it is an extremely useful resource if you're interested in 1940s air mail).

Nick

Hello Mike and Neil

Thank you for your help and for pointing me to some fascinating resources on the web (there is so much useful information that I still have difficulty locating).

Nick

Hello Mike

Thanks for that - that seems a valuable webpage.

Another point occurs to me - when specialists were deployed in East Africa would they always be posted to East African Units or were any specialist units deployed to East Africa as such - that is, there were, as I mentioned, EA Signals and S&T sections and I know there were East (and West) African batteries serving in the Abyssinia campaign.  These would undoubtedly have had a substantial British component, but the prevalent attitudes at that time meant that skilled personnel were in short supply and I am wondering if the specialists that had to be sent out to East Africa were always posted to the local units?

Hello all and thanks for your thoughts.  I apologize for not getting back to this earlier - I had a major family celebration and other things have slipped!  I have attached scans of the AMLC front and the message - the back when sealed is entirely blank. 

Regarding the date of introduction of AMLCs, since posting I have been informed by a fellow member of the East Africa Study Circle that the East African Army Postal Service announced the AMLC service on 21 July 1941, formular AMLCs were distributed to EA Forces later in the month and the commencement of the service officially announced in the Nairobi Press on 11 August 1941 for Kenya and Southern Ethiopia.  Between that and the postal notice, the range of dates seems to be accounted for, and I imagine as a postal service it legally had to be approved by the civilian authorities and the later dates of Army announcement reflect that it then had to be processed through the military bureaucracy.  Since no-one has commented on the point about the forces covered by the Postal Notices, I will have to stick with my guess that the earlier notice was sloppily worded - perhaps just lifted verbatim from a notice for an area like Egypt where (home) British Army troops were deployed.  If so, the later Notice which expanded the range of AMLCs from just the UK to the Dominions and Empire presumably also gave an opportunity to clarify the intention.

Regarding Signalman Clayton, as his mother was living in England it seems likely that he joined the forces in the UK and was posted - but he could have moved to Kenya before 1939 and joined up there, I suppose.  Moyse-Bartlett records that in 1938 the war establishment of a first line KAR battalion was set at 35 British Officers, 43 British Warrant Officers and NCOs and 562 African Ranks. There were S&T (Supply and Transport in this context, I imagine) and Signals Sections.  Some of the British were posted from the UK - I know that the Army Lists include officers of British Regiments seconded to the KAR.  On the other hand, the Kenya Regiment (at that time an all-European Territorial Regiment) members were called up and, according to Guy Campbell's [i]The Charging Buffalo[/i] sent off to the KAR (initially as officers and senior NCOs).  The Regiment served as a depot and training unit and Guy Campbell states that there was no "branch, arm or service which was not provided with officers, NCOs or men from the Regiment."  That seems to include the possibility of a Signalman being locally recruited.  If so, service records do not appear to have been held in London - at least, I cannot find locally recruited KAR Officers in the Army List (for example, I cannot find Lieutenant, later Captain Yorke Davis, who appears to have farmed in the Kinangop area and whose correspondence forms such a large part of the surviving material, in the Army List).

Ross's suggestion that the 25th is the Brigade makes more sense than anything I have been able to come up with, but would mean that Signalman Clayton was serving on some sort of detached duty as 25 Brigade had a major role in the Battle of Gondar (Gondar, in Northern Ethiopia, is some 1100 km from Harar, in the East of the country, by road) which lasted until 27 Nov, then, according to Moyse-Bartlett, completed the evacuation of prisoners and stores before concentrating at Gura (a major Italian base in Eritrea, North of Ethiopia) for embarkation - presumably from Massawa (though in the end they were dispatched to Kenya by road).

 

I am curious about an apparent discrepancy in the availability of these for service personnel in 1941.  Bill Colley, in the second edition of The Airmails of East Africa to 1952 (East Africa Study Circle: 2009, ISBN 09515865 7 2) reprints two Kenya Government Notices relating to the introduction of these.  The first, dated 13 June 1941, gives the rate of postage for them addressed by "members of His Majesty's Forces of the United Kingdom serving in the Colony to persons in the United Kingdom."  The second, dated 23 January 1942, gives them for "members of His Majesty's Forces serving in the Colony."

The main Army presence in Kenya in June 1941 was the King's African Rifles, the West African Brigades and the South Africans although it would soon only be the KAR. Did British personnel posted to them retain the status of being "Forces of the United Kingdom?"  As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) the Europeans serving in these units (who made up the officers and a proportion of the NCOs and specialists) were a mixture of locally recruited and personnel posted from the UK; it's difficult to imagine a Kenyan with relatives in the UK being denied the privilege of writing AMLCs to them when someone serving alongside him but posted from the UK was allowed it.  So were the KAR (and the West African Frontier Force) "His Majesty's Forces [b]of the United Kingdom[/b]?"  If not, perhaps the lawyers(?) drafting the Notice had failed to grasp the intention of the originators.

Following on from this, I have an AMLC postmarked 13 December at APO 75 (Harar), where the sender gives his return address as 2594475 Sig D Clayton, 46 W/T 2 Coy. 25 A Corps Sig, c/o APO EA Force and is writing to his mother in the UK.  I seem to recall from earlier forum posts that service numbers contain information about the status of their bearer; does this confirm what seems likely, that Sig Clayton was posted from Britain rather than locally recruited.  And is "25 A Corps" 25 African Corps?

Sorry - hadn't had a chance to go on the forum

Nick

Thanks to Mike for his effort on my behalf.

Native (Askari) mail from anywhere is "difficult" in my experience - and so is any sort of Pioneer Corps stuff!  I suppose that's half th fun.

Nick