Vapore - (Italian) Ship.


V-Mail - Short for Victory Mail, introduced in Casablanca on June 15, 1942, after the first American troops had landed in North Africa. It was designed to save valuable cargo space on oversees shipments. Correspondence was written on special forms, microfilmed, and then reprinted at a reduced size back in the States. A 7-ounce roll of film could contain 1,500 letters. When the service ended on April 1st 1945, a total of 556,513,795 pieces of V-mail had been sent from the United States to military post offices, and over 510 million pieces had been received from military personnel abroad. Regular paper mail during these years still outnumbered these figures. V-mail was modeled after a similar service in Britain known as Airgraphs.


Vignette - Small picture occupying an otherwise blank area in a postage stamp design. The term is also sometimes applied to blue air mail labels or framed designs in picture postcards.