part0017

“I don’t know whether wartime propaganda meets your criteria for legends or not,” writes Lewis S. English of Wilmington, Delaware, sending me a story of wartime atrocity that he heard back in the 1940s.

Of course, it does. As it happens, that old archetype “the war story” has produced its share of urban legends, including the one Mr. English sent me—“The Message Under the Stamp.”

During World War II, English served with the Merchant Marine on an oil tanker stationed in the Pacific. In 1943, his mother recounted in a letter a story that was going around about another sailor stationed in the Pacific.

The sailor was a regular, punctual letter writer, and his mother eagerly awaited his news from the Far East. But after a time, his letters suddenly stopped coming.

The mother was distraught. And she was well-nigh inconsolable after Navy authorities contacted her and reported that her son had been taken prisoner by the enemy.

The mother eventually received a letter from her son. He was confined to a Japanese prison camp, he said, but he was safe and was being treated well.

When the mother steamed the stamp off the envelope, though, she found a hidden message from him: “They’ve cut off my hands!”

“Right away I was suspicious of the story,” English says. If the man’s hands had been cut off, how was he able to write the letter, especially the secret message? And what prompted the woman to steam off the stamp?

Sure enough, while on leave a year later, he overheard two men in a tavern talk about the war. One was telling the other about a man who had received such a letter from his son, a prisoner of war in Germany.

This time, the Gestapo was said to have cut off the prisoner’s hands after trying unsuccessfully to extract top-secret information from him.

The story meets all the criteria for an urban legend. It’s an unusually tidy tale, it was passed on orally, variations were heard in different times and places. And its verity depends on several questionable details.

I’ve heard versions of the story that try to explain what led the mother to remove the stamp. In these versions, the son suggests in his letter that she should steam off the stamp for “little Alf” or “little Johnny” to add to his collection. But there is no little Alf or Johnny in the family. Nor are there any stamp collectors. The mother finally realizes that this is a clue and steams the stamp off the envelope, finding the message.

Given its wartime setting, it’s not surprising that one variation pushes the origin of the story back from the Second World War to the First.

In his autobiography Exit Laughing , published in 1941, journalist and humorist Irwin S. Cobb described a “sad little tale which sprang up 24 years ago and now is enjoying a popular revival. It’s the heart-moving one about the German housewife who writes a letter to her kinfolks in America that everything is just dandy in the Vaterland but suggests that the stamp be soaked off the envelope for a souvenir, and when the stamp is soaked off there underneath are the words, ‘We are starving.’ I don’t know how we’d get along without that standby every time war breaks out in Europe,” Cobb added. He clearly disbelieved the heart-moving tale.

It’s interesting that between the wars, the story seems to turn inside out. When told during World War I, the story condemned the conditions endured by civilians. But during World War II, it accused the enemy of mistreating their prisoners.

In debunking “The Message under the Stamp,” I worked out all the fallacies in the story except one, which several readers of my column were quick to grasp. The major flaw in the story is that during World War II all soldiers and prisoners of war were granted free mailing privileges. Stamps were not required for these postings—so there were none to be steamed off letters “for little Johnny’s collection,” revealing mysterious messages.