For the men who served aboard the USS North Carolina during World War II, few sounds carried more weight than the signal for mail call. Letters and packages from home were a lifeline—and getting them was anything but simple.
The Wait
Mail delivery from a support ship to BB55
Mail could go weeks without arriving, held up by the logistics of a ship constantly on the move across the Pacific. Officer Edward J. Gillespie captured the monotony of waiting in his journal: “One day is much like the others.” When mail finally came, the response was immediate. “When you heard the call you also heard a roar go up on the ship,” recalled Bob Palomaris, “and everyone would run to his division.” Seaman James Masie put it plainly: “I think the two most important calls were ‘chow’ and ‘mail’ calls.”
What Got Through — and What Didn’t
Every piece of outgoing mail was censored before it left the ship. Junior officers combed through enlisted men’s letters with razor blades, cutting out anything that might reveal the ship’s location, movements, or the names of officers and places. Senior officers handled each other’s mail. With roughly a dozen censors working through correspondence for 3,000 men, not every letter got a close read, but plenty did.
“My folks received lots of letters with holes in them,” wrote William R. Taylor. Censor Henry E. Little recalled cutting so much from one letter that he left a note explaining what had been removed.
To get around restrictions, sailors and their loved ones developed private codes. Herbert Sisco described the system he worked out: certain phrases signaled the ship’s location or that a battle had just been fought. Paul Wieser noted that men placed their mail in the box unsealed—an open invitation for the censor’s blade.
Packages from Home
When packages arrived, they were shared. That was simply the custom. Bob Palomaris remembered his mother’s Christmas cookies arriving in
Enlisted men sort mail in the ship’s post office.
1944; one box was so burnt they couldn’t eat them, likely the result of a torpedoed mail ship. The other box made it, and what was inside got passed around.
Walter Ashe’s experience stands out. While the North Carolina was still in Brooklyn Navy Yard, he’d responded to a notice from a women’s charitable organization offering to correspond with sailors who’d lost their parents. He forgot about it until, deep in the South Pacific, the mail clerk summoned him personally. Three bags of mail had arrived, more than for anyone else aboard. Wool scarves and wool socks poured out of packages in 100-degree heat, drawing plenty of laughs. The letters inside, though, were something else—many from daughters of the club members, sparking months of correspondence. “Some even met each other later,” Ashe wrote.
What It Meant
Enlisted men gather for mail call aboard the North Carolina. Letters from home could be weeks in coming — making the wait, and the moment, all the more meaningful.
Mail wasn’t just a comfort, it was morale. “I think those were what kept us going,” said James Masie. The flip side was real, too. News of a death back home, or a “Dear John” letter ending a relationship, hit hard. The distance made everything sharper: the good news and the bad, the packages that made it and the ones that didn’t, the letters full of holes and the ones that somehow said everything in code.
For the men of the North Carolina, mail call was a small piece of the world they’d left behind and a reminder of what they were fighting to return to.