British military censorship in WW2

[Michael Dobbs]

I have received the following enquiry a few days ago:

[color=maroon]I wonder if anyone can help me please. I am writing a non-fiction book based around a collection of letters written by a REME soldier to my aunt during WW2. In August 1944 his Unit moved to France, then Belgium, Holland, and finally Germany. The letters were stamped by the censor in different ways. Plain envelopes had the 'Passed by Censor' stamp and the signature of the censor; Army Privilege Envelopes (aka 'Green envelopes') had ''Passed by Censor [number]', without a signature; some plain envelopes just had 'Released by Base Censor' [un-numbered]. I am trying to understand the different levels of those censors - where were they based? Is there any record of which officers were assigned the role of censor?

Your help would be much appreciated and acknowledged.[/color]

Due to the amount of work I'm involved in with other philatelic and non-philatelic societies at the moment I'm struggleing to come up with a suitable worded response and I'm looking for some help in this respect please.

I know that censorship was carried out at unit level (or company, battery, etc for larger units) and so the censoring officer would either sign or initial the envelope and apply the censor cachet.  I also know that from time to time the base censor would nominate mail from specific units to be further censored at base level just to check that local censors are doing the job correctly.  I also know that green envelopes were exempt from unit censorship and were sent to the base censor for censorship before being put in the post for delivery to the addressee.

I don't know that reason why some envelopes are not signed but have the censor cachet applied - unless that it just an oversight by the censoring officer.

Help please.

Thanks, Mike

[Peter Harvey]

Hi Mike,

The green envelopes as described would not have a censoring officers signature, so long as a honour statement was signed by the sender, there was no need in such cases to open the items and the censor cachet was applied by the Unit as routine.

The plain covers sound correct.

Items would have been forwarded too the Base Censor for a number of reasons, but commonly it appears later in the war as the Unit censor cachet was not applied, or indeed if the item had been posted overseas (assuming UK service personnel) or was not in English language.

Unless you can read the censor signature, there would be no way of tracking the censor down, this would be an appointed officer or NCO.

Regards

[Michael Dobbs]

Peter

Many thanks for your response - it has helped me put together a response which I have nearly completed.

However, one query - I thought that unit censors could only be officers, but you mention NCO - is that correct?

Mike

[Jim Etherington]

I don't know if it is relevant to your current query, but I have a number of 'green envelopes' from the BEF in 1939-40 that have unit censor marks and others that have been resealed with Base censor labels applied and tied with a second censor mark.