12th January 1940
'POST AUX ARMEES'

POSTE AUX ARMEES

French armed forces post office

The French army post office in 1939 had been shaped by the organisation put in place during the Great War, then by the successive reforms between the two wars:

1914: establishment of postal sectors (numbers identifying a military postal office serving units).

1924: application of the law of separation between postal functions and treasury functions of the army post (law of 1921). This reform created the army post office as it would be in 1939.

1940: introduction of the 5-digit postal sector. It was the last major reform before the Armistice of June 1940.

Source: gallica.bnf.fr

Upon mobilisation, the organisation of post to the armies in times of war is activated. It is structured around the following main elements:

• Military central offices, responsible for collecting and sorting mail to and from the armies. They are made up of civilians from the post administration seconded to the military post. They are the link between the border offices (for the front postal sectors), the garrison postal sectors and the civil post office.

  
  
  
  

• Postal sectors, military postal offices collecting and distributing mail from soldiers of units depending on them. This service is provided by soldiers (wavemasters, officers in charge of mail). Some are fixed geographically and serve units in garrison, others are mobile and serve units in the field (front).

  
  
  
  

• Border offices, army sorting centers ensuring the transit of mail between central military offices (rear) and postal sectors in the countryside. Their name refers to the military border separating the rear zone from the front zone. There was a border office per army and the border offices were most often located within a regulatory station (a marshalling yard regulating military rail traffic between the rear and the front).

  Both border offices and military central offices could postmark mail entrusted directly to them.

  
  
  
  

  The army post is under the direction of a central director of the army post attached to the Ministry of War (4th Bureau).

  However, the establishment of this organisation was not done without difficulty: in the early days, the necessary personnel were not yet in place and the army post office was not able to properly ensure the processing of the immense mass of mail addressed to those mobilised. The difficulties were increased by the fact that the mobilisation had also lost a large part of its staff from the civil postal system and therefore the processing of mail as a whole was disrupted.

  
  
  
  

  Shortly before the armistice and the disappearance of the postal sectors, a reform was undertaken in May 1940, aiming to set up a system of 5-digit postal sectors constituting a postal address for each unit.

Source: ww2postalhistory-fr

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