It’s a true but little-known story told in the film “Messengers of War”, which arrives this Friday on Netflix. The feature film by actor and director Tyler Perry plunges us, at the end of the Second World War, into the America of segregation, in 1945. And it highlights the incredible adventure of Battalion 6888, composed entirely of black women, who achieved the impossible: delivering, in less than six months, late mail from American troops at the front.
It was President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, alerted by soldiers’ families, who first had the idea of asking these women to put an end to the blocking of letters. They first receive specific training on a base in the State of Georgia. Then crossed the Atlantic on a ship, heading to Glasgow, in difficult conditions.
Tens of thousands of letters from soldiers and families
Arriving in the United Kingdom, they were housed in Birmingham, where tens of thousands of letters from soldiers and families, which never reached their destination during the conflict, were stored in hangars. The general staff (finally) understood that not having any news from loved ones could affect the morale of the troops.
We give them six months. It will only take three of them to carry out this mission, deemed impossible by the military. The success is notably due to the grip and energy of Major Charity Adams, who commands the battalion, played by Kerry Washington, impressive in the film. After this first success, the postal workers crossed the Channel for a new mission to distribute backlogs of mail in Rouen.
Never featured in accounts of the Second World War
In this fiction, we see the obstacles of all kinds, mockery, taunts, contempt, that these women had to overcome. Their housing conditions are poor, in unheated buildings, much worse than those of their male colleagues.
The film clearly shows their daily life in this perilous task. We see them living to the rhythm of the bombings. They have to suffer losses. We particularly follow a group of women, each of whom has their own story.
Lena, above all, tries to recover with difficulty from the disappearance of her fiancé, who died at the front. We see them gaining confidence and refusing injustices by standing up to the general staff.
This fiction, a little too emphatic and caricatured, lacks finesse, but seduces with the careful image. It also has the merit of telling the journey of these women, never before highlighted in the stories of the Second World War.
American drama by Tyler Perry with Kerry Washington, Ebony Obsidian, Milauna Jackson… (2h10). On Netflix.
