When someone you love is far away and in danger, a house can go very quiet. In that silence, the sound of the letterbox can mean everything. For well over a century, through world wars, sieges and the conflicts of our own time, postal services have worked to keep that sound coming. They have carried letters to the trenches, parcels to prisoners, pensions to pensioners and news to anxious families, often at great risk to the people doing the carrying.
The First World War: the post must get through
When war broke out in 1914, the Post Office was Britain's biggest employer. As tens of thousands of postmen left to fight, thousands of temporary workers, many of them women, came in to keep the mail moving. For many, The Postal Museum notes, it was their first taste of jobs once reserved for men.
The volume of post between the home front and the forces abroad grew enormously. To cope, the Post Office built the Home Depot, a vast temporary wooden sorting office in Regent's Park, London. It eventually covered around five acres and was believed at the time to be the largest wooden building in the world. At its peak, according to The Postal Museum, it handled 12 million letters and a million parcels in a single week, and by 1918 some 2,500 staff, mostly women, worked there. Over the course of the war the Home Depot is recorded as despatching around two billion letters and 114 million parcels.
Speed was remarkable. Mail was sorted in London, taken by train to the south coast, carried across the Channel and moved forward through base and field post offices, with around 19,000 mailbags crossing the Channel every day. Most letters reached soldiers on the Western Front within about two days. In 1914 one officer, Gerald Burgoyne, wrote in his diary that letters were "reaching us as quickly as if there were no war. It's really rather wonderful."
On the ground, the Army's postal service was run by the Royal Engineers (Postal Section), formed in 1913 and largely staffed by men drawn from the Post Office itself. Letters were handed out with the evening meal, and the arrival of the post became one of the highlights of a soldier's day. The Army knew that letters kept spirits high, which is why so much effort went into the system. When a London newspaper printed a letter from a lonely soldier on the Western Front in 1915, he received some 3,000 letters from well-wishers within weeks, along with dozens of parcels.
Censorship was part of the bargain. A soldier's letters were usually read by an officer in his unit, though he could use a special green "honour envelope" and sign a declaration that it contained only private and family matters, in which case it might be checked further back instead. Handstamps used at field post offices carried numbers rather than place names, so as not to give away military positions. A soldier who wrote "On Active Service" on his letter could send it home free of charge.
For those with no time to write, there was the Field Service Post Card, Army Form A2042. It carried a list of printed statements such as "I am quite well" and "I have been admitted into hospital", and the sender simply crossed out those that did not apply before signing and dating it. The card warned that nothing else was to be written on it and that if anything was added, "the post card will be destroyed." Soldiers nicknamed them "whizz-bangs", after the shells that arrived with no warning. Simple as they were, these cards told families the one thing they most needed to know.
Letters could also bring the hardest news of all. The Postal Museum preserves a letter written in 1918 to the widow of Captain Home Peel, a Post Office employee killed near Longueval. It was written by a soldier from the opposing side who had found his body and felt it "a human duty" to let her know.
The Post Office Rifles: postal workers on the front line
Postal workers did not simply sort the mail; many went to war themselves. More than 75,000 Post Office men left their jobs to serve, and over 8,500 were killed. Around 12,000 served with the Post Office's own battalion, the Post Office Rifles, which had existed since 1868. The battalion fought at Festubert, the Somme, Passchendaele and elsewhere. Of the 12,000 who went to war, around 1,800 were killed and over 4,500 wounded.
The Rifles received 145 awards for gallantry, including one Victoria Cross, awarded to Sergeant Alfred Knight for his actions near Ypres on 20 September 1917. Knight later recalled that bullets dented his helmet and shot away part of a book in his pocket. The Postal Museum also records a Divisional General's verdict after one attack: he had thought them "a lot of stamp lickers", until he saw how they fought.
The Second World War: innovation and endurance
The Second World War brought new problems for the post, and new ways of solving them. With shipping space precious and air cargo limited, the Post Office worked with Kodak on the Airgraph service, which began in 1941. Letters were written on a special form, photographed onto rolls of microfilm, flown out and then printed back onto paper at their destination. A General Post Office poster of the time claimed that 1,600 letters on film weighed just 5 ounces, compared with 50 pounds for the same number of ordinary letters. The Postal Museum notes that the microfilming was done in London just as heavy bombing was devastating large parts of the City. The United States studied the British system and launched its own version, Victory Mail or V-Mail, on 15 June 1942.
At home, the postal service itself came under fire. On 18 June 1943 a single bomb struck Mount Pleasant in London, then one of the largest sorting offices in the world, destroying the parcel section and starting a fierce fire. Two members of staff, a porter and a temporary sorter, were killed and dozens more injured. Postal workers sheltered from raids in the tunnels of the Post Office Underground Railway beneath Mount Pleasant while working their night shifts, and the mail kept moving.
Wartime post was also a lifeline for those in captivity. Under the 1929 Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war was to be allowed to send a postcard to his family within a week of arriving in a camp, informing them of his capture and the state of his health. Prisoner of war mail travelled free of postage, often marked "Kriegsgefangenenpost" when addressed to prisoners in German hands, and passed through neutral countries with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Imperial War Museums record that 20 million Red Cross parcels were sent from the United Kingdom alone during the war, supplementing meagre camp rations and lifting morale.
The Six Triple Eight: clearing a mountain of mail
One of the most striking wartime postal stories unfolded in Birmingham. By early 1945, warehouses there held a vast backlog of undelivered mail for American servicemen and women, government staff and Red Cross workers in Europe, some of it years old. In February 1945 the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion arrived to tackle it, deploying to Birmingham on 12 February. Known as the "Six Triple Eight", it was an all-female, predominantly Black unit of the US Women's Army Corps of 855 women, 824 enlisted soldiers and 31 officers, commanded by Major Charity Adams.
Working in unheated, poorly lit buildings in three eight-hour shifts, seven days a week, the battalion processed an average of 65,000 pieces of mail per shift, or about 195,000 a day, according to figures from the US Army Center of Military History and Adams's own memoir. The Army had estimated the job would take six months. Based on Adams's account, the battalion cleared close to 17.5 million items in about three months in England, before moving on to France to tackle further backlogs in Rouen and Paris. Its motto summed up the whole history of wartime post: "No mail, low morale." In 2022 the battalion was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Sieges and isolation: when the post finds a way
Some of the most ingenious postal history comes from sieges, when normal routes were cut entirely. During the siege of Paris, from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871, the city's postal authorities turned to the air. According to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, 67 balloons left Paris during the siege, 55 of them authorised to carry mail, and together they carried more than 11,000 kilogrammes of post out of the city. Letters were often endorsed "Par ballon monté". Flights were unpredictable; one balloon came down in Norway.
Getting messages back into Paris was harder, so the balloons carried homing pigeons. Outside the city, letters were photographically reduced onto tiny films, and each pigeon could carry thousands of messages in a small tube. Back in Paris, the films were projected and postal clerks worked round the clock transcribing them for delivery. It was, in effect, microfilm mail seventy years before the Airgraph.
Three decades later, during the 217-day siege of Mafeking in the Boer War, the besieged town produced its own stamps, including surcharged issues and locally made 3d stamps bearing the portrait of the garrison commander, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell. These siege issues are among the most famous emergency stamps in philately.
In the twentieth century, the siege of Sarajevo showed both the vulnerability and resilience of a postal service. The city's historic main post office, built in 1911, was destroyed by fire on 2 May 1992, and with it bags containing the last outgoing mail of the city's residents. Yet on 27 October 1993, the first postage stamps of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina were produced in Sarajevo under siege. A souvenir sheet of that issue records that the stamps were printed under the conditions of war, without paper, colour, electricity or water, "only with the good will."
The Falklands conflict of 1982 offers a more recent British example. Mail for the Task Force was routed through Ascension Island, where the Royal Engineers Postal and Courier Service handled up to two tons of airmail a day and around 1,000 bags of parcels each week. Urgent supplies were parachuted to ships at sea by RAF Hercules aircraft, and an air "snatch" system was devised to collect mailbags from the islands, with aircraft running in at around 50 feet to hook a rope and haul the bag aboard.
The present day: Ukraine's postal workers on the front line
The same story is being written today in Ukraine, where the national postal operator Ukrposhta and the large private carrier Nova Poshta have continued to deliver throughout the full-scale war that began in February 2022.
For many people, the post is far more than letters. Ukrposhta delivers pensions and social payments in cash, particularly to elderly people in villages without banks. On 30 August 2022 Al Jazeera reported that where banks had closed, post offices were the only financial service provider and roughly three million Ukrainians relied on Ukrposhta to deliver their pensions, and in April 2026 the first tranche of a one-off support payment reached around 540,000 people through the postal network. Under the "Winter Support" programme, around 1.7 million people used Ukrposhta to receive payments in 2024, almost 1.2 million of them in villages. Where branches have been destroyed, mobile post offices in vans travel to communities instead, bringing pensions, medicines, food and parcels.
That work carries a heavy cost. In February 2026 Ukrposhta's chief executive, Ihor Smilianskyi, reported that since February 2022, 45 Ukrposhta employees had been killed, 418 vehicles lost, 47 offices destroyed and a further 589 facilities damaged. In March 2026 a driver of a mobile post office in the Sumy region, Viacheslav Urchyk, died of his injuries after the vehicle was struck. In August 2026 a sorting depot and base for mobile branches in Pavlohrad was destroyed, killing two female employees; the company immediately activated backup logistics and promised that pensions, medicines, parcels and letters would still be delivered on schedule. By late September 2026, Ukrposhta's press service reported 52 employees lost in total, 39 who had gone to serve in the armed forces and 13 civilian staff killed in strikes, with around 650 facilities damaged and more than 40 completely destroyed.
Nova Poshta has faced similar losses. In December 2025 the company reported that 249 of its employees had been killed since the start of the full-scale invasion, including 22 civilians at work and 227 staff who had been mobilised, and that more than 400 terminals, depots and branches had been damaged or destroyed. Some 138,000 parcels had been lost, and the company has compensated customers for destroyed shipments while rebuilding each site. Strikes on postal and logistics facilities continued through 2026, and trade publication CEP Research reported in July 2026 that postal and logistics workers on both sides of the front line had been killed in drone strikes on warehouses and depots.
Asked about the risks, one Ukrposhta regional chief, Maksym Sutkovyi, told reporters in October 2026: "To say that the team is not afraid would be a lie." Many keep going, he said, because they are devoted to their profession.
Stamps of a nation at war
Wartime has also produced some of the most talked-about stamps of recent years. On 12 April 2022 Ukrposhta issued a stamp, designed by the Crimean artist Borys Groh, depicting a soldier on a shoreline facing a warship, inspired by a widely reported radio exchange in the early days of the war. Its print run of one million sold out at record speed; people queued for hours, the online shop repeatedly crashed under demand, and the company limited purchases per person. Copies quickly appeared on resale sites at many times their face value. In May 2022 Ukrposhta followed up with a second issue in a much larger print run of five million, which it described as a record for a Ukrainian commemorative stamp. Whatever one's view of events, the episode showed how strongly people still connect with stamps as a way to mark history.
A global postal family
Behind the scenes, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the United Nations specialised agency for postal cooperation, works to keep mail flowing in crisis zones. In March 2022 its Director General noted that throughout the years the postal sector has delivered personal correspondence and essential goods to millions of prisoners of war, civilian internees and other vulnerable civilians in conflict, and that this "must be safeguarded."
The UPU's Emergency and Solidarity Fund, which relies entirely on voluntary contributions, exists to restore postal services in countries affected by disasters and armed conflict. The UPU appealed to its 192 member countries for donations to support Ukrposhta, opened a second channel through its Quality of Service Fund, and in May 2022 its Council of Administration passed a resolution, presented by the United Kingdom, supporting the continuation and reconstruction of postal services in Ukraine. That resolution also reminded members of their obligation to exempt letters, parcels and postal payments addressed to prisoners of war and civilian internees from postal charges. Neighbouring posts, including those of Latvia, Poland and Slovakia, helped keep international mail moving. In the UPU's own words, the post is "an essential lifeline during times of crisis, conflict and disaster."
The same principle applies elsewhere. At its 2025 Congress in Dubai, the UPU approved resolutions that included technical and financial assistance to rebuild postal infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. In Sudan, where armed conflict since 2023 has disrupted infrastructure and services across the country, the national postal operator Sudapost now lists its contact location as Port Sudan. In each case the aim is the same: that mail should continue to reach people, wherever they are.
BFPO: keeping today's forces in touch
For British service personnel, that job falls to the British Forces Post Office (BFPO), part of the Ministry of Defence rather than Royal Mail, though the two work closely together. Its roots run deep: the first British field post office operated during the Peninsular War in 1808, and a dedicated Army Post Office Corps was formed in 1882.
Today BFPO provides postal services to serving personnel, their families and entitled civilians worldwide, including on exercises and operations. Under the Enduring Families Free Mail Service, family and friends in the UK can send packets of up to 2kg free of charge to personnel on authorised operations and HM ships in support. BFPO also pioneered the "e-bluey", a hybrid mail system in which messages sent over the internet are printed and delivered as letters to troops in theatre, an idea that won a World Mail Award in 2001. Technology has changed, but the purpose is the one the Home Depot served in 1914: a word from home, delivered as quickly as possible.
Why wartime mail is collected today
For collectors, wartime post is one of the most moving and rewarding areas of postal history. A censored cover, a field post office handstamp, a Field Service Post Card or an Airgraph is not just an object; it is a first-hand record of a moment when communication really mattered.
Several factors drive interest and value. Postal markings are central: censor labels and handstamps, numbered field post office cancellations, "On Active Service" endorsements, Kriegsgefangenenpost markings on prisoner of war mail and "Par ballon monté" endorsements all help to place an item precisely in time and place. Routes and rarity matter too; a balloon letter that names the balloon that carried it, or a cover that travelled an unusual route, can be particularly desirable. Emergency and provisional issues, such as siege stamps, are a field of their own, though collectors should take care, because some siege overprints, including Mafeking's, were extensively forged. Provenance, condition and the human content of a letter can all add interest.
Auction results show how strongly the market responds to the best material. A 3d Baden-Powell pale blue on blue stamp from the siege of Mafeking sold for £35,000 on 12 March at Spink in London, leading its sale of the Harry Birkhead Boer War collection; Spink's catalogue noted that only ten examples of the stamp are known, three mint and seven used. In April 2022 a rediscovered Mafeking siege cover bearing the 3d Baden-Powell stamp sold for $11,000 against a $5,000 estimate at All Nations Stamp and Coin in Vancouver, drawing ten bidders from several countries. These are exceptional items, and most wartime covers sell for far more modest sums, but they show why a careful stamp valuation matters before anything is sold.
Has your collection got a story to tell?
Wartime letters, forces mail, censored covers and the stamps of conflict often turn up in family collections, sometimes tucked inside albums that have not been opened for decades. If you have inherited such material, or are thinking about selling a stamp collection, it is worth asking specialists to look at it properly.
Tony Lester Auctions has been finding homes for stamp collections since 1980. We are experienced stamp dealers and stamp buyers, members of the Philatelic Traders Society, and we handle stamps, covers and related items from all areas of the world and all periods, including postal history. You can read more about us.
We offer a free, no-obligation stamp collection valuation and usually give you two figures: an estimate of what your material might achieve in our stamp auctions, and an outright purchase offer, so you can choose the route that suits you. Valuations can usually be arranged within days, and for suitable collections we can travel to you. Whether you want a straightforward stamp appraisal or are ready to sell stamps, our guide to selling a stamp collection explains the process, and our frequently asked questions cover the most common queries.
We hold three online auctions a year through Easy Live Auction, each of roughly 700 to 900 lots with estimates from £10 upwards, covering all areas of the world with a strong Great Britain section. You can browse the current auction catalogue, see past auction realisations, find out how online bidding works, read our auction information or explore stamps for sale at auction. For more stories like this one, visit our philately news page.
If you would like to sell your stamp collection, or simply find out what it is worth, please contact us or call 01926 634809. The letters that once carried news across a world at war deserve to be looked after, and we would be pleased to help them find their next home.
