IN a plane halfway across the Atlantic heading for Britain, Major Charity Adams nervously opened the letter she had held on to throughout the flight.
The 26-year-old American’s instructions were clear — “do not open until past the point of no return”.
The envelope contained top-secret orders for a near-impossible mission to boost morale on the front line in the battle to defeat Hitler.
Major Adams and her group of black female soldiers were tasked with an enormous challenge: deliver a whopping 17 million letters to American servicemen stationed all over war-torn Europe within a tight six-month timeframe.
This incredible backlog of news from home was demoralising American troops in the closing days of World War Two.
After the grueling battles across Europe following D-Day in the summer of 1944, many of the two million US soldiers fighting to defeat Germany were in desperate need of messages from their families and partners.
Unfortunately, the soldiers’ mail had been left undelivered for up to two years, piling up in warehouses in heavily bombed Birmingham, infested with rats.
So, in January 1945, Major Charity Adams, the leader of 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — nicknamed Six Triple Eight — was given the unenviable job of getting this enormous mountain of mail to the front line.
She and her team of 855 women — who were predominantly African American — had to beat racism, sexism and unsurmountable odds to bring hope to soldiers.
Now their remarkable story is the subject of new film, The Six Triple Eight, starring Kerry Washington, Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey.
Some scenes in the Netflix movie were filmed in Bradford, West Yorks.
Major Adams arrived in Birmingham ahead of her troops to discover that their barracks had been reduced to rubble the day before in a German bombing raid.
She quickly commandeered King Edward’s School, in Edgbaston, as their makeshift base.
Making the quarters liveable and setting up a system to track down troops, who were scattered across the continent, was her first task.
One month later her battalion arrived by ship at Glasgow and made their way to Birmingham where they faced a Herculean task.
In nine dank, unheated warehouses with blacked-out windows and rife with rats near the city’s airport they set about tracking down the soldiers who the letters were addressed to.
Some were addressed to just nicknames while many soldiers had been killed in combat and had died without getting the heart-warming news from home.
All the while, bombs rained down around them from German air raids.
The 6888th Battalion was the first and only all-female black battalion to be deployed overseas during World War Two.
At a salute to African-American veterans in 1995, attended by President Bill Clinton, Major Adams said: “The longer the 6888 were on the job, the more we appreciated the value of our work. How mail would make the loneliness, the fear, the lack of friends all easier to bear.
“There was no black, no white, no rank. Just the understanding of our motto — no mail, no morale.”
‘Calmness under fire’
Major Adams died in 2002, but in an exclusive interview with The Sun her proud son Stanley, of Maryland, says: “They had 17 million pieces of mail to tackle.
“The job had to be done by hand, 24 hours a day without any computers. There were no optical scanning devices, no franking machines not even mechanical sorters.
“You can imagine what happens when you have mail with packages with food in that have been sitting for months and months and months in big warehouses. Rats had gnawed through them and many of the letters and packages were falling apart.
“It was an enormous task to do. The Army thought it would take at least six months, but they did it in 90 days.”
In the US, segregation meant shops, bars and restaurants were out of bounds for black people.
Not so in war-torn Birmingham.
The Midlands was far removed from America’s segregated Deep South where racism was embedded into every facet of daily life.
The racism Major Adams and her soldiers faced in Britain was not from English people, but by white American troops and their officers.
Stanley, 71, a finance officer, says: “Back in America the women weren’t allowed to go in certain shops. They were white-only shops, white-only bars, white-only restaurants. In Birmingham and London they could go wherever they wanted and they were more than welcomed. That was pretty neat.”
It was an enormous task to do. The Army thought it would take at least six months, but they did it in 90 days
Major Adams was also impressed by the British people’s resilience in the face of daily bombing.
He son says: “She had a very positive impression of Birmingham. There was a British woman officer who would invite my mother to tea at her house and a bomb went off nearby.
“This British officer calmly said, ‘It didn’t go off here, you heard it over there, so we’re fine’. My mother loved their calmness under fire.
“There were some problems in the UK, but mainly from the American soldiers who brought their issues from back home. The women of the 6888th were invited into white people’s houses, which would have been unthinkable back home.
“These families had limited resources because they had been at war for a long time, but they would share what they had.”
Among the countless tales of valour during the World War Two, the work of the unglamorous 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion went largely unnoticed.
But in 2019, Woody Johnson, the US Ambassador to the UK, presented a blue plaque to King Edward’s School to commemorate the unit’s achievements in Birmingham.
Three years later, President Biden awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the members of the 6888.
The story inspired actor Tyler Perry to write and direct the film and his first choice to play Major Charity Adams was Kerry Washington.
Oscar-winner Oprah Winfrey agreed to return to the big screen to play civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune while Susan Sarandon is Eleanor Roosevelt, the humanitarian wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
‘Over my dead body’
Mary and Eleanor were active in getting many African American women into the Armed Forces.
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Charity had to travel north to enlist to fight the Nazis.
But women and black soldiers were still looked down on despite wanting to give their lives for their country.
Her son Stanley, 71, says: “When they first went to Fort Des Moines there was both racial and sexual segregation.
“In Officer Candidate School there were four classes: one for black men; one for white men; one for white women; and one for black women.
“Finally, it occurred to somebody that you could actually have all these people sitting in the same lecture.
“It was like a radical idea.”
Charity’s leadership skills quickly shone through and she was rapidly promoted to major. Even then she faced discrimination.
Major Adams was threatened with a court-martial when she told a general, who wanted to bring in a white officer to run her battalion, “over my dead body”.
She filed her own charges against him and the case was quietly dropped. After VE Day in May 1945, the 6888th moved to the destroyed French town of Rouen to tackle another giant mail backlog.
Major Adams eventually returned home and married trainee doctor Stanley Earley.
She became an assistant professor of education at Georgia State College. An all-girls school in Ohio and the former Fort Lee army base, in Virginia, are named after her.
Director Tyler was able to show an early cut of the film to Lena Derriecott King, 100, who is one of the last survivors of the Six Triple Eight and played by Ebony Obsidian.
Tyler says: “She loved it. At the end she just said, ‘Thank you so much for letting the world know that we contributed’.”
- The Six Triple Eight is in cinemas from December 6 and Netflix on December 20
