Romay Johnson Davis served in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only predominantly Black unit of the Women’s Army Corps to serve overseas during World War II. (Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Romay Johnson Davis, one of the few surviving members of the only predominantly Black unit of the Women’s Army Corps to serve overseas during World War II, a long unheralded group that lifted the spirits of American soldiers — and proved their own skill — by diligently delivering mountains of mail from home, died June 21 in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
She had a stroke in March, said her executor, Stacia Robinson.
Davis was the oldest living veteran of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a WAC unit formed in 1944 and made up of more than 800 women, most of them African American and a few Hispanic. Together they became known as the “Six Triple Eight.”
At the time, the Army was segregated by race as well as by sex. The women of the Six Triple Eight faced dual forms of prejudice as they took on an unglamorous but sacred mission — one that the U.S. military, despite its logistical prowess, had failed to accomplish until they arrived in Europe.
In early 1945, they shipped out across the Atlantic, braving German U-boats and waves that threatened to swallow their vessel whole. After an 11-day journey, they arrived in Birmingham, England, where Davis, who was 25 at the time, and the rest of the Six Triple Eight were greeted first by a German buzz bomb and then by what seemed like an impossible task.
Romay Johnson Davis in uniform. (Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
For two years, the U.S. military had allowed millions of pieces of mail from the home front to pile up in dank warehouses. “Rats the size of cats,” in the description of one Army history, had gnawed away at the spoiled contents of lovingly assembled care packages. Letters informing soldiers of births, deaths and other news of their families sat unread. In some cases, the recipients were dead, killed in action before the missives reached their hands.
Toiling under the motto “No mail, low morale,” the women set about clearing the backlog. Working seven days a week in round-the-clock shifts, they sorted the mail and directed it to the proper destination, an arduous task as soldiers made their way across Europe.
There were challenges beyond those presented by the movements of the war. As many as 7,500 service members shared the name Robert Smith, according to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Loved ones sometimes addressed their notes, simply, to “Junior” or “Buster,” or “Joe in France.”
But soldiers “run on food and letters from home,” said Beth Ann Koelsch, who has studied Davis’s service and the work of the Six Triple Eight as curator of the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Knowing that every letter was precious, the women of the Six Triple Eight did their utmost to identify recipients, processing up to 195,000 pieces of mail per day.
“We knew how important those letters were for the soldiers,” Davis told The Washington Post in 2022. “They were homesick and tired, and letters from home would really boost their spirits.”
In three months — half the expected time — the women conquered the backlog. They then moved on to Rouen, France, where they undertook a similar project. Throughout her service, Davis served primarily as a driver.
Romay Johnson Davis, right, with two fellow service members. (Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Along with smaller groups of African American nurses who served overseas during World War II, the members of the Six Triple Eight were credited with helping prepare the way for the integration of the U.S. military under President Harry S. Truman in 1948.
They went largely unrecognized until the 74th anniversary of that event, in 2022, when Davis and the rest of the Six Triple Eight received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress.
Some African Americans had joined the military during World War II in what was known as the “double victory” campaign, an effort to defeat racism in the United States while also participating in the fight to vanquish totalitarianism abroad.
Davis, by her account, enlisted at least in part for a more personal reason. She had five brothers, all of them serving in the war effort. “I quit to go with my boys,” she remarked years later.
Romay Catherine Johnson, the only daughter among six children, was born in Dahlgren, Va., on Oct. 29, 1919. Her father was a rigger for the Navy, and her mother was a nanny.
Davis recalled growing up in “wild open spaces,” surrounded by “animals of every description, feathered and hair,” including dogs, cats, ducks, turkeys, geese and pheasants.
The society beyond that world was less idyllic, and entirely segregated. Davis was forced to leave home when she reached high school because there were no Black high schools in her county. She moved from relative to relative, eventually settling in Washington, where she graduated from the historically African American Dunbar High School.
An inspection of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in Birmingham, England, in 1945. (National Archives)
Davis said that she aspired to be a doctor but that the medical profession seemed closed to her because of her race. “I found out there was a lot of prejudice,” she told an interviewer, “and they didn’t want me around.”
After high school, she was an elevator operator and worked for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington. She had always wanted to do what her brothers were doing, she said in an oral history with the Women Veterans Historical Project, and had that chance after the United States entered World War II in 1941.
Two years later, Davis volunteered as a WAC and served stateside at Camp Breckinridge, Ky., as a mechanic and a driver before her deployment overseas.
The Six Triple Eight was formed in 1944 amid efforts by Mary McLeod Bethune and other civil rights activists, with the support of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, to broaden opportunities for African Americans to contribute to the war effort. Davis was proud of her service, she told The Post years later — “the fact that I was able to go, that they wanted women to do something … that I was brave enough to leave home.”
After her discharge, she studied at the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York City and worked for three decades in Manhattan’s Garment District designing children’s clothing.
At the end of her career, she decided to pursue a graduate education and received a master’s degree in technology and industrial education from New York University in 1981.
After retirement in the early 1980s, she and her husband, Jerry Davis, who had worked as a carpenter for the New York City subway system, moved to Montgomery, where he was from. There she worked in real estate, ran a vending-machine business and, until the age of 101, greeted customers and stocked shelves at a Winn-Dixie grocery store.
Davis also pursued various hobbies, including taekwondo — she earned a second-degree black belt at age 79, said her executor — as well as furniture making, landscaping and painting. On one occasion, she experimented with taxidermy.
Davis’s husband died in 1999 after more than four decades of marriage. Her only immediate survivor is a brother.
As she advanced in age, Davis expressed her hope that the women of the Six Triple Eight would not be forgotten.
“Women are as capable … as men are in their chosen positions,” she told People magazine in 2022, when she received the Congressional Gold Medal. “So if you give them more chance — and Black women especially, because they haven’t had the same opportunity — give them a chance and see what they can do. Ask them.”
Members of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion sort mail with French civilian employees in Paris in 1945. (National Archives and the National WWII Museum)
