In February 1945, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — an all-Black, all-female unit of 855 women — arrived in Birmingham, England, to confront a problem threatening every American soldier's morale: approximately 17 million pieces of undelivered mail, piled up for two years.
Under Major Charity Adams Joyner — the highest-ranking Black woman officer in the U.S. Army — the battalion worked three shifts around the clock. They sorted packages, redirected letters, tracked down personnel records for men whose movements had been lost, and created an index system of 17 million entries. They completed in three months what was estimated to take six. Their motto: No Mail, Low Morale.
The warehouse was unheated in an English winter. The women worked in cold so intense they wore gloves while handling mail, sleeping on cots in temporary housing. After England, they were transported to Rouen, France, where they cleared a similar backlog in weeks, then moved to Paris for the same task. At peak operations, they processed 65,000 pieces of mail per day.
Despite their accomplishment, the 6888th received no media coverage during the war. Their story was virtually unknown until historians began researching it in the 2000s. Adams, who later earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology, refused to be interviewed for nearly fifty years after the war. She simply called it doing my job.