This catalog covers postal stationary airgraphs of the United Kingdom East Africa Command, Ceylon, Egypt, India, Palestine, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. An essential wartime service need of Great Britain in World War II was to enable troops in its far-flung empire to send and receive mail from home via airmail rather than by sea. This could not be done during the first years of the war due to the small number of airplanes available, and the extremely limited cargo capacity of those aircraft. Sending by sea took many weeks or months, and the danger of losing mail due to attack by German or Italian submarine was high. If mail were to be lost, morale of both the troops and their families back home would greatly suffer. Airmail letters, even aerograms that were soon introduced to obviate the need for an envelope, did not weigh much per item, but the volume needed per month was hundreds of thousands, resulting in mail cargo initially weighing more than a dozen tons weekly. The widely used Short Brothers “Empire” flying boats, extensively used to the east, had a 2.2-ton cargo capacity plus 17 passengers, with a 1,500-mile range.

The novel solution was the Airgraph service. Letters were written on standardized forms, microfilmed at or near the source, then flown to special development centers where the microfilm was developed into prints. These were inserted into window envelopes and mailed to destination. The Airgraph forms were designed so the address information was in a box located such that it would be positioned on the airgraph photo that, when inserted into the envelope, would appear in the window.

The number of British Airgraphs used in WW II was 313,745,182, and that amount of microfilm weighed 31.7 tons. If, instead, that correspondence had been lightweight aerograms, the air cargo weight would have been about 1,400 tons, and if it had been letter paper with light-weight envelopes, 3,000 tons. Each Airgraph message to be microfilmed was required to be on a special form so that the whole process could be automated to a large degree. The forms were usually printed locally by private or government printers. The result is that there are many hundreds of different types known to collectors. Virtually all were formular (including all USA V-Mail forms), and given out free. These Airgraph forms required the application of an adhesive stamp (though the American V-Mail service was free). The adhesive stamp was placed on the back side, and thus not microfilmed, and not visible on the developed Airgraph mailed to the addressee.

Eight countries issued some or all of their Airgraph forms prepaid. Two affixed adhesive stamps before selling the forms, so they were prepaid Airgraphs forms, while the other five sold them with indicia imprinted or implied. These are postal stationery, and the exclusive subject of this catalog.

The catalog shows all the different types of airgraphs in color, as well as many photos showing the photographing and processing operations. The catalog is well done and will be essential to any collector interested in World War 2 airgraphs.