6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion

The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was part of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. The 6888th was the only battalion of black women from the U.S. to serve in Europe during World War II.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Before we
get started today, we want to talk about two trips,

(00:21):
not just the one trip that we've been talking about,
which is to Paris June second through ninth. And if
you're listening to this podcast on the day that it
comes out, uh, they're just a few days left to
sign up for that trip and only a few spaces left. UM.
As of right now when we are recording, there are
six seats left on the trip that is from June

(00:41):
second to nine, nineteen to Paris, France. It's gonna be
so much fun. I cannot wait. I am very excited
about it. I don't know if I sound that excited
and my voice, but my body is vibrating with excitement.
And then also we have another show that we would
like to tell people about. When Holly and I toured
last year UM with our with our live shows, we

(01:05):
had a few folks ask us if we could come
to a place that doesn't have the word coast in
the name, and we are also going to do that
on July nineteen, we will be in Indianapolis, Indiana as
part of the kickoff for the Midwestern Roots Conference. Yeah.
That's gonna be a really fun time. I haven't been

(01:25):
back to Indianapolis in a long time, so I'm looking
forward to it. Uh, And we're gonna have some some
fun time uh with listeners who want to come and
hang out. Yeah. So if you want to find out
more about the Paris trip, come to our website, which
is missed in history dot com. There is a link
up at the top of the page that says Paris
Trip exclamation point, and then the Midwestern Roots Show is

(01:48):
going to be under the link that says live Shows,
which is also where we will be keeping all the
information about any other shows that we're going to do
this year, which there will be more. We have others
that will be in now a little later as well. Alright, Tracy,
with that business out of the way, are you ready
to talk about a little bit of history? I sure am.
Today we have a listener request. It is from Aaron

(02:10):
who asked on Twitter about the six thousand, eight hundred
eighty eight Central Postal Directory Battalion, also known as the
six Triple eight, that was part of the Women's Army
Corps during World War Two, And at first I thought
we've told some stories that feel similar to this one.
We have talked about the Women's Air Force Service pilots
and the women accepted for volunteer service from the United States,

(02:32):
and we've talked about the first Russian Women's Battalion of
Death in the Soviet Night Witches, and these have had
some really common themes. They've been really focused on the
twentieth century during wartime and needing to recruit some women
so that more men could go into combat, and militaries
really reluctantly or begrudgingly allowing these women as new recruits.

(02:56):
Usually the women in question have faced a lot of
discriminate and just outright hostility from their male peers and
their commanding officers, along with lots of questions about their character,
both from the military and civilians alike. But even though
it shares a lot of those same themes, the six
Triple Eight story is also really different. It has a

(03:17):
lot of elements that we haven't really covered before. Although
there were black American nurses in Europe as well during
World War Two, the six Triple Eight was the only
battalion of black women from the US to serve in
Europe during the war, and their work really illustrates how
huge parts of wartime military service aren't directly connected to

(03:39):
combat at all. In this case, it was making sure
American personnel in Europe could get their mail. So today
we're really going to focus on the parts of the
story that we haven't talked as much about before. We're
going to talk about why the U. S. Army needed
an entire battalion to deal with a mail backlog, and
we're going to talk about how the six Triple eight
did it so. Deliver mail from the United States to

(04:01):
a soldier deployed in Europe during World War Two is
a long, multi step process that involved both the US
Postal Service and the Army postal system. So let's say
Mary wanted to send a care package to her brother Henry.
She would box it up and address it using his name,
serial number, and unit, along with the Army Post Office

(04:22):
or APO assigned to it, and she would send it
care of a US postmaster. Mail bound for Europe was
usually sent care of the postmaster in New York, New York,
since that was its embarkation point. The mail has continued
to work basically that way for a really long time. Yeah,
I have. I have sent packages to family um as

(04:42):
people know, I grew up in a military family and
friends as an adult, and similarly there is a very
very parallel situation going on. Still, Yeah, yeah, it's there's
usually still the military tends to know basically where people
are their families a lot of times don't, so it's
usually still the process of an a p O sending
it in care of a particular place in New York.

(05:05):
Mary's package would be sorted at a USPS concentration center,
and then that would be handed off to the Army
and it would travel to Europe by sea, because carrying
civilian packages by air was just way too expensive and
that cargo space was a lot more needed for the
war effort. Letters, on the other hand, could go by
air thanks to a thing called v mail that was introduced.

(05:28):
In v mail let people write letters on special paper
and then those would be transferred onto microfilm for transport
overseas by air, and then the letters would be printed
out again on the other side of the journey. So
once in Europe, Mary's theoretical package would move through the
Army postal system until reaching the a p O on
the address label, and then a mail clerk was responsible

(05:52):
for getting the mail from the APO to the soldier.
The APO was usually at the unit's headquarters, so if
Henry was on duty somewhere my ails away from headquarters,
Mary's package should still get to him. And within the
Army's postal system, each person had an address card that
was kept on file at the Directory Service, so if
a person moved, they were responsible for filling out and

(06:14):
submitting a change of address. Often, if a unit was
moving repeatedly, somebody within that unit was responsible for submitting
everyone's changes. When mail arrived in Europe from the US,
the postal division would try to deliver it as addressed,
but if the address was wrong for whatever reason, the
parcel went to the directory service, and the directory service

(06:35):
had an address card on file for each person, which
was supposed to be updated any time that person moved.
The Directory Service would use these cards to try to
track down the recipient. During the search, each person who
handled the piece of mail initialed it and dated it,
and if no one had been able to deliver it
after thirty days, it was returned to sender. So the

(06:56):
fact that any of this worked at all seems almost
miraculous to me. Even during peacetime, there was just a
lot that could go wrong in a system like this,
and during a war there was even more potential for
packages to become undeliverable, for for the address cards at
the directory service to be out of date. Plus the
scale of this entire operation was huge. In ninety one,

(07:18):
there were just a few thousand American service members in Europe,
but by ninety five there were an estimated seven million
Americans in the European theater of operations has included members
of the military along with civilian specialists, nurses, Red Cross volunteers,
elected officials, conducting tours and inspections. It just went on

(07:38):
and on. The Army was handling most of this male
To make things more complicated, when you have that many people,
a lot of them are going to have the same name.
Just as one example, more than seven thousand Americans in
the European theater were named Robert Smiths, having nothing to
do with the cure. And of those Robert Smiths, some

(07:58):
might be known to loved ones as Bob or Bobby
or Robbie or Bert or some other nickname. And their
mail might be addressed with that nickname instead of to Robert.
It also occurs to me that I am related to
a person whose name is actually Bobby, and if someone
tried to backwards engineer it to Robert, he would never
get his mail. That would be wrong. So loved ones

(08:20):
back home also weren't always meticulous about addressing their packages.
Are hypothetical. Mary was, but it really wasn't unheard of
for mail to be addressed along the lines of Junior
U S. Army. So it wasn't always just about figuring
out where this Robert Smith was stationed now after his
package came back to the Directory Services undeliverable, it was

(08:42):
also about figuring out which Robert Smith we were even
talking about, or figuring out who in the world this
Junior might be and where Junior's mail should go. The
Directory Services records included service members serial numbers to help
keep them all straight, but there could still be a
lot of duplicate names to have to go through. In
spite of all of these challenges, in the early years

(09:03):
of the United States involvement in the war, the mail
had continued to get through in Europe. Most of the time.
It might take a while, but people were still getting
their letters and packages from home eventually, but soon this
system was becoming overloaded. To try to reduce the volume
of mail, the Postmaster General ordered in nineteen forty three
that packages could only be sent to a p O

(09:25):
S in response to a soldiers specific request. Yeah that
it's not clear how much this was really enforced or
even enforceable, but sometimes people would send their package like
with the letter they had gotten saying please send me
some new underwear in there as sort of assurance that
this really was requested. Regardless though I mean that it

(09:48):
didn't do enough to cut down on the volume of
mail that needed to be handled. And then, in preparation
for the D Day invasion of June six, the number
of US troops and you're rips started growing dramatically, and
these troops and their mail were just moving around a
lot more in a region that was increasingly chaotic and dangerous.

(10:09):
By late ninety four, the situation was critical. The Battle
of the Bulge started on December sixteenth of that year
and lasted for more than a month, and just during
that battle, six airplane hangars full of mail were returned
from the European continent to England as undeliverable. These packages
weren't sent all the way back to North America. They

(10:31):
just waited in a warehouse, and because of the timing,
a lot of those returned packages were Christmas presents. All
those packages became part of a huge backlog of undelivered
mail just sitting in warehouses in England. Eventually there were
packages in this backlog that had been lingering for more
than two years. On top of the overall shortage in

(10:54):
labor for mail delivery, the military had been putting a
lot more focus on moving things like food and warm
here reel, which did seem more critical than personal mail.
But as this backlog of undelivered mail grew and grew,
it became clear that personal mail was also critical. Naturally,
people wanted to hear from their loved ones, people eagerly

(11:15):
or anxiously awaited news about the births of children, or
a loved one surgery, or all kinds of other events
in the lives of the people that they missed back home.
On top of that, most of the troops serving in
Europe had been drafted, and many of them were as
young as eighteen or nineteen years old. Some of them
had never left their home state or been separated from

(11:36):
their families for such a length of time, so a
lot of them had even more reason to be homesick
and just in need of contact with people from whom.
In other words, these people genuinely needed their mail. When
the mail slowed down or stopped, the troops morale suffered,
and that drop had the potential to reduce their overall effectiveness.

(11:57):
In late ninety four, the U. S. Army decided to
handle this backlog of mail by creating a special battalion
devoted specifically to addressing it. And we will get to
them after a sponsor break. As we said at the
top of the show. The six Triple eight was part

(12:19):
of the Women's Army Corps, and the Women's Army Corps
was initially created in nine two as the Women's Army
Auxiliary Corps. It was established quote for the purpose of
making available to the National defense the knowledge, skill and
special training of women of the nation. Its first director
was Ovida cult Hobby. The Auxiliary Corps was a non

(12:39):
combat voluntary core. It had its own training center with
its own officer candidate school, where officer candidates of different
races all trained together. Once they were through training. Though
the individual units were rachelly segregated, there were also individual
recruiters who refused to take applications from black women, either

(12:59):
because as of their own racism or because they mistakenly
believed that black women weren't allowed. As its name suggests,
the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps wasn't considered to be fully
part of the U. S. Army. At first, women only
worked state side. They were mainly doing clerical and food
service work, along with driving and operating radios and switchboards.

(13:20):
They also did some medical work, although the Army Nurse
Corps was a whole separate entity. Being an auxiliary unit
also meant that the women weren't eligible for overseas pay
or government issued life insurance, so when some of them
were sent to North Africa in late nineteen forty two,
it was without the corresponding increase in their pay and

(13:40):
without that insurance. That changed when the Women's Army Auxiliary
Corps became the Women's Army Corps or WHACK, which was
formerly part of the U. S. Army. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signed the legislation to make this change on July one.
The WHACK gained official military status, including being eligible for
insurance and overseas pay. The Women's Army Corps went on

(14:03):
to recruit women from every U. S state and from
American territories, including Puerto Rico. Later on, several niss A
women joined the WHACK as well, and you can learn
more about the complicated history of niss A service in
the U. S. Armed Forces during World War Two in
our episodes on Executive Order nineties sixty six and in
the one specifically on NISSA in World War Two. Starting

(14:26):
with that first deployment to North Africa in nineteen forty two,
the women sent overseas through the Auxiliary Corps or the
WAX had all been white, but the War Department had
also briefly issued a request to send black women overseas
in nineteen forty two as well. However, that request was
really contentious because part of it was that these women

(14:47):
would quote provide companionship for thousands of Negro troops. The
Auxiliary Corps leadership was appalled and angry at this suggestion,
which was on its own offensive. On top of that,
they had had to continually push back against perceptions that
there was something morally questionable about these women and their service,

(15:08):
suggesting that the military wanted to send black women overseas
as companions just reinforce those perceptions. Ovida, called Pobby, refused
to allow it, and the War Department walked back its
request and stated that black women would be sent overseas
only if their presence was deemed a necessity. That led
to an ongoing campaign by civil rights activists, black journalists,

(15:32):
and advocates like Mary McLoud Bothoon who argued that the
black women should have the same opportunity as the white
women to serve in the roles that they had been
trained for. Yeah, when we say that they had been
having to push back against perceptions that there was something
morally questionable, these included things like false news reports about
widespread pregnancies and std outbreaks among the whack which were

(15:56):
just so heavily stigmatized and made it seem like there
was something nefarious going on, and like this was something
that they had actively been fighting against, and this, this
whole request reinforced that whole idea. In though the War
Department finally decided that it was a necessity to send
a battalion of black women to Europe and that battalion

(16:17):
was going to address that whole backlog of mail. This
battalion was, of course, the six Triple eight. It was
to be a self contained battalion rather than being connected
to a male unit, so it would be responsible for
everything that was needed to do the job, including things
like their own food service, their own administration, and their
own recreation. Even though the higher ups knew what this

(16:38):
unit's job would be, the women being recruited for it
didn't At first. All they knew was that there was
a chance to go overseas to serve, and a lot
of women were eager to have that chance. At the
same time, the overall number of black women in the
whack was still relatively small, and not all of them
met the criteria to go to Europe, which included passing

(16:59):
strict physical and psychological examinations as well as undergoing additional
training at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. So it took a dedicated
recruiting effort to fill out the six Triple eate. It
ultimately had eight hundred twenty four enlisted personnel and thirty
one officers. In command was Major Charity Edna Adams, who
had been part of the women's Army Auxiliary Corps first

(17:20):
class of officers and was the first black woman to
be commissioned by the U S Army. Adams was a
huge part of the six Triple Eight, and she's a
good example of the kinds of skills and education that
were needed for black women to be considered as black officers.
Adams was from Columbia, South Carolina. She'd been valedictorian of
her high school class and had gone on to graduate

(17:40):
from Wilberforce University with majors in mathematics, physics, and Latin
along with a history miner and teacher certification. She had
gone back home to Columbia after graduation to work as
a teacher, and during the summer she took graduate courses
at Ohio State University. Adams joined the Women's Army Auxiliary
Corps in nine teen forty two after the Dean of

(18:01):
Women at Wilberforce recommended her and she got a letter
that invited her to join. When she was chosen to
command the six Triple Eight, she already had years of
experience as an officer working at the Wack Training Center
in Fort du Boines, Iowa. She joined the rest of
the battalion for training at Fort Oglethorpe, which included classroom training, drilling,

(18:21):
obstacle courses, evacuation drills, gas mask drills and the like.
But even as they were training, they still didn't know
what they were being sent to Europe to do. Adams
and her executive officer finally learned what their role would
be after going to England ahead of the rest of
the battalion in early nineteen The two of them flew

(18:43):
over the Atlantic and the first group of enlisted women
and officers followed by sea aboard the Le de France.
The Le de France departed from New York on February third,
nineteen forty five, and route to Glasgow, Scotland, evading German
U boats along the way, and then from there the
women traveled by train to Birmingham, England, where they arrived
on February. The day after their arrival, they held a

(19:06):
parade for Lieutenant General John C. H Lee, who was
the Deputy Commander of the European Theater of Operations. The
rest of the Six Triple Late arrived about fifty days
after this first group did. In Birmingham, the six Triple
Eates enlisted personnel were housed at King Edward's school and
officers were in a couple of houses. They managed their
own mess hall and recreational facilities and their own beauty salon.

(19:31):
But setting up a beauty shop with something of a challenge,
especially when it came to getting gas and electrical connections
in proximity to the salon chairs that Adams requisitions. In
her memoir, Adams wrote quote, it is perhaps wiser not
to detail the extent of our ingenuity. That beauty salon
might seem like a luxury, but was. It was really

(19:51):
a necessity, and not just because the women had to
meet military grooming standards. It was also to keep up
their own morale because, as it turned out, work through
this backlog of mail it was was a really difficult job.
And we will get to why after a sponsor break.

(20:14):
The six Triplate got to work in a warehouse in Birmingham,
England in February, and the temperatures there tended to be
in the thirties to forties fahrenheit, which is in the
single digits celsius. The warehouses they were working in we're
not well heated. So the women went to work every
day and as many layers as they could manage, but

(20:34):
they were still cold. This sounds utterly miserable to me. Yeah.
The warehouse also was not well lit. Under normal conditions,
it's lighting would have been supplemented during the day by
natural light from the windows, but those had to be
covered over because of air raids. Plus, the six trip
late worked three eight hour shifts a day, seven days
a week, so some of the women were in the

(20:56):
warehouse sorting mail in the middle of the night when
there is no daylight to help in anyway. We mentioned
earlier that the backlogged mail included a lot of Christmas
parcels and some items that had been lingering in the
mail system for years. Some of these packages contained perishable
foods which had spoiled, and even when what was inside
was not spoiled, mice and rats and other vermin had

(21:18):
really invested a lot of these packages as well, and
even in the best circumstances, overseas shipping can be hard
on packages. The six Triple eight was often piecing together
packages that had physically disintegrated after getting wet or otherwise
being damaged, or just simply being sent from North America
and then around Europe without a sturdy enough container. These

(21:41):
women got really good at figuring out which random items
came out of the same broken package, using clues like
fuzz from a sweater that had rubbed off on multiple items,
or comparing just how damp each item was. They would
reconstruct these packages as well as they could before figuring
out where the recipients were and then sending them on.

(22:02):
This backlog was expected to take the Six Triple Eight
six months to deal with, but they cleared about sixty
five thousand pieces of mail per shift, and they finished
what they were doing in half the expected time. This
included resolving all of those discrepancies that we talked about
at the top of the show and getting the mail
to the right people, as well as the much sadder

(22:24):
task of returning packages to the sender when the person
who was supposed to receive them had been killed. Beyond
just the task of sorting the mail, life in Birmingham
had some challenges for the Six Triple Eight. Locals probably
would have been curious about any U. S. Army activity
at the warehouse, but when it came to the sudden
presence of more than eight hundred black women, first, there

(22:46):
was a lot of gawking. The Six Triple eight was
also the largest unit in the area, so when there
was some kind of function that required an Army officer's presence,
Major Adams was usually the one to go. People were
often shocked when the office or who arrived at an
official function was a black woman. The six Triple Eate
also faced discrimination and some of the amenities that were

(23:07):
available to other members of the service. The American Red
Cross was running a club for enlisted personnel that had
allowed white women and men of any race, but then decided,
without really offering an explanation, that the Six Triple Eates
enlisted members would not be admitted there. The Red Cross
offered to establish a separate club just for the six

(23:28):
Triple Eate, but Major Adams refused, saying that she wouldn't
have her battalion moving into the segregated facility. A similar
incident followed with a Red Cross hotel in London for
wax that the Six Triple eight had been allowed to
use when they were there on official or personal business. Again,
without really giving much of an explanation, the Red Cross

(23:48):
decided that the six Triple eight would just be quote
happier somewhere else, and started setting up a separate facility.
Adams again refused, and when she let the six Triple
Eate know that they would need to find other accommodations
when they went to London. Overall they backed her up
on it. Yeah, she uh. When she was talking to
the Red Cross people about this, she was like, Okay,

(24:10):
we've been sharing this hotel. There have been no problems.
None of my people have complained. It seems like maybe
some other people have complained, and if they have, they
are maybe the people that should go to some separate facility. Anyway,
none of it was a good situation. There were also
some disagreements with higher ups. Even though the six Triple
eight was well ahead of schedule and they finished processing

(24:33):
this big backlog and half the expected time, they were
still criticized for being inefficient, something that was probably more
about racial bias than their actual performance. There's definitely not
another explanation that's readily there for that. No, you performed high,
above exceeding all expectations. So lazy, I know, I can't

(24:54):
mention another reason for it. Major Adams in particular, also
had to run in with a general who came for
an inspection. According to her memoir, Adams had been ordered
to maintain business as usual during that inspection, but when
the General inspected her troops, he reprimanded her for not
having all of them present. When she explained that some
were sleeping and others were working, and that she was

(25:15):
following orders by keeping them on their set schedule, he
said that he would bring a white first lieutenant to
take command. Major Adams's response, in the heat of the moment,
was over my dead body, sir. This was, of course,
not an acceptable thing for any officer to say to
their superior and so after the General left, Adams and

(25:36):
some of her officers had to put their heads together
to figure out how she might be able to defend
herself and what seemed like an inevitable court martial. The
strategy they decided on was to lean on some memos
that had advised officers that were affiliated with the U.
S Military not to use language that emphasized racial segregation

(25:57):
out of the risk of alienating their allies in Europe.
Adams was prepared to make the argument that what the
General said had done exactly that, but then the charges
against her were dropped on the grounds that it would
be too expensive to replace her because she was the
wax highest ranking black officer. I just want to point out,
she said Sir at the end, so by my estimation,

(26:18):
that was very polite, and in some retellings of this
she said, Sir at both ends, super polite, better than
I would have done. Once the Birmingham backlog was clear,
the six Triple Eight was moved to Rouen, France in
the Normandy region on June to do the same job there.
Of course, that was a month after v E Day,

(26:39):
so a lot of U S troops were headed back home.
A lot of supplies were as well. The Six Triple
Eates beds could not be found and they had to
cobble together bunk setups with boards and canvas cots. The
Six Triple Eate had a lot more visitors in Ruin
than they had had back in England. A lot of
troops headed back home were being routed through the area,

(27:00):
so the Six Triple Eight had a steady stream of
male relatives and boyfriends and fiance's passing through, plus some
servicemen who didn't know anybody there but wanted to socialize.
This ultimately led to several weddings, either between sweethearts from
back home who were reunited after the war here or
relationships that developed while both parties were in Europe. There

(27:22):
were some downsides to all of these reunions, though so
many male visitors were coming through that Adams finally banned
men from the facility every Monday, so the women of
the six Triple Eate had time to do things like
launder and air dry their delicates in relative privacy. Occasionally
things got out of hand with some of the men,
and the six Triple eight asked for its MPs to

(27:44):
be issued firearms. When that request was refused, they just
studied jiu jitsu instead. This wasn't the only way that
life for the six Triple eight was different in Ruhan
than it had been in Birmingham. For a while, they
had exceptionally good meals because a core er master assumed
that a unit that had so many women and in
it had to be a hospital, so they were being

(28:06):
sent the hospital rations, which were much nicer. Once that
error was discovered and they went back to their regular rations,
they started bartering damaged goods that came through, like cigarettes
and soap with the locals to increase their access to
fresher foods. They also increasingly worked with civilians and sometimes
prisoners of war. As members of the Six Triple Eight

(28:27):
became eligible to go home, they had more opportunities for
recreation in Rouen as well, including participating in sports and
athletic tournaments. They still didn't have equal access because of
their race, though. Several members of the Six Triple Eight
were selected for an Army All Star team, but their
invitations were rescinded when the organizers realized they were black.

(28:49):
The battalions basketball team was also denied boarding a train
for a basketball tournament, at which point Lieutenant General Lee
had the train held until his personal first class car
could be connected for them to use, and they held
another parade in Rulan. This one honored Joan of Arc
and passed through the square where she had been burned
at the stake. It was in Ruhal that the Six

(29:11):
Triple Eight had its biggest tragedy. Three women were in
a GEP accident on July. Private Mary Jay Barlow and
Private Mary H. Bankston were killed, and Sergeant Dolores M.
Brown died five days later as a result of her injuries.
Major Adams notified their families and women of the Six
Triple Eight who had mortuary experience prepared their bodies for burial.

(29:34):
They held two services, since two of the women had
been Protestant and the other was Catholic. All three were
buried at Normandy American Cemetery in Ruan. Once again, the
six Triple Eight dealt with another projected six month mail
backlog and half the estimated time, and then after that
the remaining women were sent to Paris to deal with
one last backlog. They arrived there in October of nineteen five.

(29:59):
This time they were housed in hotels where they had
housekeeping and meal service. By this point, about three hundred
members of the Six Triplate had gone home and two
hundred more were eligible to so Even though there were
far fewer Americans in Europe, for the people who were
still there, their workloads were actually higher. Another issue in
these last months of their assignment was theft of the

(30:20):
mail that they were trying to sort. Many of the
people living in the area where they were working had
faced all kinds of shortages during the war, and they
still didn't have basic necessities, so the remaining members of
the Six Triple Eight had to add tracking down Pilford
packages to their duties. In February of six with the
war over and the backlogs handled. The six Triple Eate

(30:42):
was disbanded and any members who were still in Europe
were sent home. Before departing for home, Adams also ran
into that general who had tried to court martial her
over telling him over my dead body back in Birmingham.
According to Adam's memoir, that actually crossed paths a couple
of times since then, and on his way to the
Act to the United States, he told her that she
had outsmarted him and that he was proud to know her,

(31:04):
and also that he wouldn't be telling her any of
this if he thought he would ever see her again.
Adams was the most senior female officer on the troop
transport ship that she took back to the US, which
meant that she was in command of all of the
women on board. A group of white nurses objected to this,
saying that they had their own white major, who they
argued should be in charge. Adams explained to them that

(31:27):
she would not be leaving the ship, but that if
it was so important to them to be under the
command of a white officer, they were welcome to disembark
and go home. Later. They elected not to do so
after the war, many of the Six Triple Eight used
the g I Bill to go to college or graduate school,
and this included Major Adams, who was promoted to lieutenant
colonel before leaving the service. That was the highest rank

(31:49):
that it was possible for her to attain in the
Women's Army Corps. She also got married on August, becoming
Charity Edna Adams. Early during their time in Your Up,
the Six Triple Eight had broken records for processing mail
in spite of the early criticisms of their alleged inefficiency.
In the end, they were highly praised for their work,

(32:11):
but they returned home with no recognition or fanfare. That
didn't really start to change until one when several members
went back to Birmingham, England to be recognized. A memorial
was held at Arlington National Cemetery in February of two
thousand nine, but by then the organizers were only able
to contact three surviving members to attend. In March of

(32:33):
the U. S. Army Women's Foundation inducted the Six Triple
Eight into its Hall of Fame, and in ten the U. S.
Senate passed Resolution four twelve quote expressing the sense of
the Senate regarding the six thousand eight Central Postal Directory
Battalion and celebrating Black History Month. It was introduced in
February and pass in October. On November of that year,

(32:56):
the six thousand eight Central Postal Directory Battalion Monument at
the Buffalo Soldier Monument Park at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was
dedicated Lieutenant Colonel Charity Adams. Early died on January two
thousand two at the age of eighties three. Before her death,
she wrote a memoir called One Woman's Army, and it

(33:17):
has a lot more detail about the Women's Army Auxiliary
Corps and the Women's Army Corps in general, and the
six Triple Eight specifically, and it is well worth checking out.
In this memoir, she wrote quote, I was very proud
of the six Triple Eight. My personal pride was because
I was the commanding officer of this terrific outfit. There
were many women in the corps who could have been

(33:38):
the CEO, but I was the fortunate one to hold
the position. My feeling of personal achievement was only a
minute part of my pride in the unit. The women
of the six Triple Eight had ventured into a service
area where they were not really wanted. They had assumed
jobs that had normally been assigned to men. They had
been and were performing in a valiant and praiseworthy manner.

(33:58):
They had survived racial prejudice and discrimination with dignity. I
really love them. Yeah, it's such a great story. Um,
do you have a little bit of listener mail to
finish off with? I do. It is from Aaron, and
as far as I know, it is from a different
Errand than the one who requested this topic today. And
Aaron says, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I love listening to

(34:21):
you guys. I just listened to your Alexandre Dumont episodes.
I hope your itinerary in France will bring you to
mal Manches Cemetery. It's one of my favorite memories in
Paris and there are many famous people buried there. You
can even see a Duma, son of the one buried
at the Pantheon. My other incredible experience was going for
a concert at sunset at San Chapelle. I would tell

(34:42):
anyone going to Paris, if you get the chance to
do this, don't miss it. So much of sightseeing is
among milling crowds, with so many distractions and cramped for time.
This is a fairly small concert for which they limit
the number of people, and you get to experience the
cathedral in such a magical way listening to the music
in those acoustic because with all that time to just
drink in the glow of the sun through stained glass. Anyway,

(35:04):
I know you guys probably have a full schedule and
lots of people weighing in on what to do, but
I think you would really enjoy those experiences, so I
thought i'd share. Thank you for all you do, Aaron.
Thank you Aaron for this email. I wanted to read
it not just because it's about Paris, but also because
we did not really talk much at all about Alexander
duma Feasts in those two episodes about the father and

(35:28):
Son Duma Hair. We may at some point return to
him to talk about him more, because he has his
own fascinating life story, including the fact that his his
father had like the French law on his side in
terms of who got custody of him when he was little. Like,
there's a whole lot to talk about there that we
may return to at some point in the future. So

(35:50):
it gives me a chance to kind of nod to
it today, So thank you Aaron for this note and
also for the beautiful picture that was attached to it.
Uh that has the picture of his two of Alexander
Duma feast tomb in the cemetery, which is very striking
and it is not very far from where we are
actually staying, so we could hope it over there, no problem.
Yeah yeah, uh, not not far at all. So if

(36:15):
you would like to write to us about this or
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Works dot com and then we're all over social media
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missed in History dot com, so you find a searchable
archive of all the episodes we have ever worked on
and to find show notes for the episodes Holly and

(36:37):
I have worked on together. That's also where you can
find information about that trip to Paris and our upcoming
show in Indianapolis. And so you can, in addition to
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(36:58):
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