When we query the Post Office as to why. for example, an ordinary letter is received ahead of air mail, or a letter from Kansas City takes as long to get to New York or Boston as one from Los Angeles before "Pearl Harbor," the answer is, "There's a war on." Then the official will go on to explain that shortage of help and train delays are the main reasons for lateness of mails, adding that the Post Office handled eight hundred and eighty-one million more pieces of mail in 1942 than in 1941, and with less help. Post Office officials cite the following reasons for delays in the mails:
1. First class mail, ordinary letters, is about ten per cent above former years. Around thirty thousand mail clerks, carriers, and banders, or ten per cent of the force, have gone into the Army or Navy. Sorting, handling, and carrying have been slowed therefore because the crack men lost to the armed services have been replaced in most cases with novices.
2. Mail trains are delayed by troop movements going all over the country. The Army has taken some of the Department's postal cars for Army kitchens to serve these moving troops.
