WWI Soldiers Mail Postcard

Found this on ebay. I don't have any others or even collect soldiers mail, but found this one interesting so just thought I'd share.

Most of the other cancels like this one have killer bars. Not knowing much about it, my guess is it's machine cancelled and the bars missed the postcard.

Thought the message was funny, and it was postmarked on April fools day. Oh, and the sender wrote "censored" at the bottom, but no censor stamp.

Nice card showing a pic from a battle in the Franco-Prussian
war.

No need for censor I suppose since WWI was already over for almost
five months.

Maybe it's just penned censored if they couldn't find a censor handstamp at the time.

There's a partial strike from the killer bars in the middle. It passed through the machine that wasn't inked properly or some other issue to prevent a full cancel.

Thanks for the info Litho, my knowledge of wars is very limited. The image was originally painted by Édouard Detaille.

I completely missed that Battlestamps. Maybe something on top of the postcard or machine jammed, the killers are in front of the cancel.

The armistice that ended WW 1 was November 11, 1918. Your card is April 1, 1919 which was almost 5 months later so it is not a WW 1 card but rather a post WW 1 peacetime card. It took a while for the US forces in Europe to get back to the US after the war ended so you find many of these post-war cards and covers. The US Army had sent over 2 million men and women to Europe and there were only so many ships available and it took weeks for a ship to make the round trip from Europe to the US and back to Europe to pick up more men and women. It took many months to slowly bring them all back to the US which is why you see so much post war mail from them. As was mentioned, there was no need for censoring after the war.

I didn't know troops were being shipped home before the treaty was signed. Must have been obvious that it was over and just a formality?

The pen censor is the same handwriting, so probably just another bit of humor. You'd think "Little Boy" could have actually had a "swell time" celebrating in post war Paris, but apparently not. I can only imagine the conditions they were living under.

The sender put Wag before his name which I found is short for Wagoner. Probably driving and tending a team of mules.

I've had this for a while. I though it was interesting, though common as the stamp goes. No way to really tell when the typing was actually added on, but still kinda nice. Though you might like to see it, since the topic is generally about WW-I. Hope ya'll don't mind it being a bit off the original posted topic.

Very cool Al. My guess based on the tone would be some time around WWII or maybe during the cold war. I remember getting that far in and hitting a wrong key. Either start over, try to fix it, or say oh well, beliebe is close enough. That dates it before the electric typewriter when we could just back up and change to the eraser cartridge.

To really go off topic, let me add that we had a desk with a top you could lift up to reveal a typewriter bolted inside.

One thing I love about this forum is that the threads can meander a little with no admins YELLING about a bunch of rules.

Boy, do I remember those desks. Says something about how old I am--I'm sure you were just a pup?

Young enough to be fascinated by that desk, but just old enough to have used a manual carriage return.

Can't date it precisely, but the typed text is most likely post 1962. The ""Guns of August" is the title of Barbara Tuchman's best-selling book about the origins of WW I. If she did not coin the phrase, she at least popularized it.

Don

Don most likely has it right:



Basil

I have seen estimates that of the American soldiers who died in WW 1, about half of them died from the great flu epidemic. The 1918 influenza epidemic was so great that it is often cited as one of the major causes for the war ending that year. There was an urgency to return the American soldiers back home since keeping them concentrated in the Army was making the infection rate worse.