Under Cloak of Night - Book Two

If you want to know who I am, and you had better, because we are going to be together a whole book, then let me start where everything about me starts, which is nine blocks in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Book Two of the Six Triple Eight Saga.

February 1945. Staff Sergeant Millie Dunn stands on the deck of the biggest ship in the world with 855 Black women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, crossing an Atlantic full of U-boats toward a mission nobody has explained to them.

What waits in Birmingham, England, is a warehouse stacked to the ceilings: two years of letters and packages for American soldiers, rotting, chewed by rats, addressed to “Junior, US Army” and to seven thousand different Robert Smiths. The Army expected the job to take six months. Under Major Charity Adams, working three shifts around the clock and refusing to let a general insult her women, the 6888th clears it in three.

No mail, low morale. That was the motto, and they meant it. Seventeen million pieces of mail, a city of their own, and then orders for France.

Twenty-seven chapters, from the girl from nine blocks to Rouen in the fog. Every dated event is drawn from the record, and the author’s note at the close of the book separates record from invention, item by item.

EPUB edition. Read it on any e-reader, tablet, phone or computer.