October 20 is Military Communications Day. Field mail had two meanings: A special service providing postal-fief-yoke communications in the troops. During the war, it was called military field mail (WFP).
The conventional numerical designation of the military units of the Soviet Armed Forces (paras. 92180 and the like).
Since 06. 02. 1943 all military units and their units have been renamed with new conventional numbers. Since that time, the postal address of the front-line soldier consisted of only five figures: the number of the military unit and field mail. From the point of view of postal workers, as the Soviet troops moved westward in each of the conquered districts, it was necessary to restore the postal connection again.
And they coped with this task, because during the war years the mechanism was perfected. And most importantly, there were already highly qualified and experienced communication specialists.
The tasks of the WFP are the implementation of postal service, warships, military educational establishments among themselves, organizations, institutions and enterprises of civil departments, as well as with the population of the USSR. In addition to letters to servicemen, relatives of relatives and organizations were sent by mail packages of not more than 5 kg for privates and sergeants and not more than 10 kg for officers. At the final stage of the war, a number of changes occurred in the dispatch of parcels from the active army (DA) -the trophies, gentlemen, a whole waterfall of trophies poured ...
But in 1941 to large-scale German trophies was still oh-how far ... Following the introduction in the country The martial law revealed numerous facts of the inability of the communication to ensure the delivery of even the most important messages and letters to the Active Army (YES). It is written that Stalin called the link the "Achilles' heel" of the Soviet Union, while noting the need to raise it to an entirely new level in an urgent manner. It is known precisely (thanks to the "Journal of visits to Comrade Stalin") that in the first days of the war he was summoned to the People's Commissar of Communications by Peresypkin IT. for the report on the developed urgent measures for the transfer of state communications to martial law. And for this it was necessary to radically reorganize all available means of communication, including mail. The head of the Red Army communications department, Gapic, was removed from his post. All his duties were now assigned to Peresypkin.
He combined two posts at once: the chief of communications of the army and the deputy of the People's Commissar for Defense, while remaining a People's Commissar of Communications. Such a decision is quite natural. Being an energetic and strong-willed person, the new thirty-nine-year-old commander of communications was also an able and competent organizer. It was he who proposed, in spite of the norms, to call civilian specialists into the army, who were instructed to urgently establish the unsatisfactory work of the military postal service.
Ivan Terentyevich Peresypkin