An advertisement in a recent Sunday New York Times featured the upcoming Netflix film “The Six Triple Eight,” a true story about an all-Black female postal unit during World War II. The film will air on Dec. 20 and is a Tyler Perry production. It is based on an article by Kevin Hymel, a military historian, and a subject I covered 10 years ago and again recently. Notice of its arrival is an opportunity for another iteration here, but this time, centered on Lena Derriecott Bell King rather than the unit’s leader Major Charity Adams Earley, who died two years ago.
One of the reasons I selected King from the 855 women who served in the five units of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion is because she, at one time, was considered one of the last surviving members, and there is a photo and bio of her online. But choosing her comes with a caveat: All the women are listed in the Times advertisement, but only by their first names, so tracing their ancestry is difficult since many of them married after the service and changed their surnames. Such appears to be the case with Derricotte, who is listed as Bell during her tenure in the WAC.
Although Hymel was not a resource in my earlier research into the unit, he was indispensable in providing information about Derriecott, who died on Jan. 18, 2024, at 100 years old, having been born on Jan. 27, 1923, in Washington, Ga. She enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1943 when she was 18 and living in Philadelphia. After completing basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, she was assigned as a nurse at Douglas Army Airfield near Bisbee, Arizona.
She was a corporal by the time she joined the 6888, whose mission was to facilitate the backlog of mail in the European Theater of Operations in six months from their station in Birmingham, England. As Derriecott recalled, the unit’s motto was “No Mail, Low Morale,” and under the leadership of Adams Earley, they performed beyond expectations. As the Times ad notes, they “Delivered Hope” and inspiration.
“One thing people in the service looked forward to was mail, knowing somebody was still thinking about them,” she told Hymel. “In the military, mail calls (when soldiers gather around a designated mail carrier as they call out their names for letters or packages) is a very important time.”
When the unit arrived in Birmingham, after traveling from Scotland, they were organized and ready to dispatch the accumulation of undelivered mail. By then, the war was over, although England was still a battleground. It was during this phase of the operation that Derriecott met Adams, then a major and to become a lieutenant colonel — the first African American woman to earn an officer’s rank in the U.S. Army. Today, the Army base once known as Fort Lee is now Fort Gregg-Adams, honoring her name along with another African American, Lt. General Arthur J. Gregg.
During her interview with Hymel, she recalled how hard the work was, working in a dark, rat-infested, unheated warehouse. They had the onerous task of reducing the pile of letters and packages, some of which had been there so long that rats had chewed into them. Even so, the women worked through the difficulties of transferring letters to soldiers, many of whom had relocated to other units since their mail had been sent. “That took a lot of work,” she remembered. “It kept you really busy, on your toes.”
With the war over, Derriecott, then based in France, was offered an opportunity to stay in Europe. She entered her name in an education lottery and won a spot to study design in Leicester, England. It was not an exciting experience for her since she and her roommate were the only Black people in town. Later, after her unit was back in the States, she returned to France and secured passage with a group of white WACs. Eventually, she was on a luxury liner homeward bound, and again the only Black person on the ship.
By 1948, she was back in the States, where she had been married four years before to Hugh T. Bell. Census records note that the couple were living in Los Angeles in 1950. They had two children. It was here that she applied for U.S. Veteran Compensation. There is no record that she returned to her original work as a coppersmith after service, and very little is known about her endeavors after her interview with Hymel, when she was in her 90s.
Perhaps more about her will be disclosed in the film, and like the rest of the country, we certainly look forward to seeing how she and her co-workers completed that task — delivering the mail, hope, and upliftment to thousands of troops stationed in Europe. .