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FAM 22 and East Bound Mail to Europe
Sam Pezzillo
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According to the catalog, FAM 22 began early in December, 1941, just as we entered WWII. Specially prepared first flight covers exist in some abundance for the various legs. And while there are nuances even with the first flight covers, the difficulty for the postal historian is to determine when the flights began regularly to carry normal commercial, civilian mail (especially to Europe and Scandinavia). The initial planning for the landed-based route was more in anticipation of resupplying, especially, Free French troops in central Africa. A second issue associated with the problem is whether mail was carried both E-W and W-E. The assumption is that early W-E flights carried war material, but return E-W flights could carry civilian mail, especially from Central and South Africa as well as mail from the middle East and beyond. The following covers illustrate some of the dilemmas
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Argentina to Switzerland , backstamped Lisbon 14.10.42
US censorship #2831, German censorship Berlin (the T sometimes treated as Transit -- other students as Tempelhof)
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The sender has provided us with a typed routing that suggests he was aware that W-E mail via Natal-Bolama-Lisbon was going to be available and that this cover would make the first flight. The Natal-Bolama segment would have been by FAM 22. But is that what happened? It turns out that the US censorship #2831 is in a block assigned to Puerto Rico. Thus, despite the senders intention, the cover was carried on an E-W route, possibly even by FAM 18, and made the transaltlantic crossing via FAM 18 to Lisbon on a flight that avoided British censorship in Bermuda. The cover never made it "via Bolama." Was it perhaps just a case of missing the ":first flight," primer avion?
Let's look at another:
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Brazilian and American censorship
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The date is faint, nor is there any backstamp along the way to give us a chronology. One should note that we do have some routing information from the three censor tapes. The fact that Brazil censored the cover typically puts it into 1943 and later. Someone in Brazil has provided in Portuguese a bold Linha Brasil-Africa boxed marking to suggest a routing via FAM 22 W-E where it would have connected with the British-KLM coastal Africa route into Lisbon and from there to Great Britain where the sender believed the British would transport it to neutral Sweden. If we only trusted the routing notations that would explain it. The difficulty is that the US cello tape number 64098 is in a block assigned to San Juan and the British paper tape is from Bermuda indicating an initial E-W transport with the transatlantic portion not reaching Africa at all; instead, it was the usual FAM 18 NY-Lisbon route with connection to Britain from there.
Yet another example:
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Once again we have no firm chronology. There is no year date in the cancellation, but it went during the summer months (July 14). This eliminates the winter weather issues associated with Atlantic flights. This time the sender has provided us with a typed VIA AFRICA, all caps, in red, as if to say, "Don't miss this." once again, the US cello tape #64083 indicates transit through San Juan and treatment like the cover above.
To indiate the routing people thought they were getting, here's a detail from a Brazilian cover carried on the first flight (backstamped Lagos December 11, 1941):
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