War Department to extend the opportunity to serve overseas to African-American WAC units. (4) In November 1944, the War Department approved sending African-American women to serve in Europe. A battalion of all African-American women drawn from the WAC, the Army Service Forces, and the Army Air Forces was created and designated as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion (referred to in this section as the 6888th ), which was nicknamed the Six Triple Eight . (5) Army officials reported a shortage of qualified postal officers within the ETO, which resulted in a backlog of undelivered mail. As Allied forces drove across Europe, the ever-changing locations of servicemembers hampered the delivery of mail to those servicemembers. Because 7,000,000 individuals from the United States were serving in the ETO, many of those individuals had identical names. As an example, 7,500 such individuals were named Robert Smith. One general predicted that the backlog in Birmingham, England would take 6 months to process and the lack of reliable mail service was hurting morale. (6) In May 1945, the 6888th arrived in Birmingham. Upon their arrival, the 6888th found warehouses filled with millions of pieces of mail intended for members of the Armed Forces, United States Government personnel, and Red Cross workers serving in the ETO. (7) The 6888th created effective processes and filing systems to track individual servicemembers, organize undeliverable mail, determine the intended recipient for insufficiently addressed mail, and handle mail addressed to servicemembers who had died. Adhering to their motto of No mail, low morale , the women processed an average of 65,000 pieces of mail per shift and cleared the 6-month backlog of mail within 3 months. (8) The 6888th traveled to Rouen, France later in May 1945 and worked through a separate backlog of undelivered mail dating back as far as 3 years. (9) At the completion of their mission, the entire unit returned to the United States. The 6888th was discontinued on March 9, 1946, at