World War II and the Fountain Pen

(This page revised September 16, 2023)

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This article is a revised and expanded version of a four-part series that appeared in the February, April, June, and August 2022 issues of Pen World Magazine.

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From war rationing to active combat duty, fountain pens from the World War II era embody layers of history.

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In almost every aspect of life on the home front, the effects of World War II were profound. Rubber and gasoline rationing changed travel habits, creating a boom in railroad ridership — so much so that the U.S. government found it necessary to produce posters reading, “Millions of troops are on the move… Is YOUR trip necessary?” Quotas on fuel oil made knitting fashionable again as families needed sweaters to keep warm in winter, and many women also knitted socks and scarves to be sent to the troops in the field. Diets changed as meat, butter, coffee, and sugar were rationed; note the ration book and the Red and Blue OPA Ration Point tokens in the illustration above. People saved their extra waste fat and turned it in at the butcher shop to be sent off and made into explosives. Victory Gardens sprang up everywhere to supply more fresh vegetables. Limits on clothing and shoes turned many housewives into seamstresses and even cobblers — and skirts got shorter. As the lyrics of a novelty song by the Hoosier Hotshots put it, “So we’ll eat less, and see a bit more, if it’s gonna help win the war.”

The war even touched that most prosaic of tools, the pen. The need for writing instruments did not diminish during the war. Instead, it burgeoned as families at home flooded the postal system with letters and packages for servicemen and women scattered around the world — but that did not mean that pen manufacturers had a field day selling vastly increased numbers of pens.

War Work

The principal effect on U.S. pen manufacture resulted from the restrictions put in place by War Production Board. The WPB designated rubber, steel, aluminum, brass, petroleum, and many other raw materials as critical war resources and strictly rationed them, with most of the supply going to the manufacture and shipping of war matériel and the operation of the Allied war machine. War work was allotted based on the capabilities of the various companies; automobile manufacturers, for example, were put to work building tanks, trucks, Jeeps, and airplanes, while bridge builders found themselves building ships. Pen companies were ordered to scale back their production, retool, and turn most of their efforts to the manufacture of precision goods such as radio parts. In November 1942, the WPB limited production of fountain pens to 46% of 1941 output, and most pen makers were assigned specific production quotas that were not to be exceeded.

Companies that excelled in war production received the Army-Navy “E” Award for Excellence in Production, and they proudly displayed the award banner (shown to the left above) at their factories and in their advertising. The G. S. Parker Pen Company received the “E” Award on October 29, 1943, for the production of bomb and shell fuzes, and the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Company received it on May 13, 1944, for the production of bomb and shell fuzes, microphone and headphone plugs, and automatic radio tuners for aircraft. The enameled sterling silver lapel pin shown to the right above is one of those given to Sheaffer’s employees at the company’s award ceremony. Shown below is a cutaway example of the 75-millimeter M48 point detonating shell fuzes made by Sheaffer. This type of fuze could be set to explode instantly or with a delay of 0.05 second (M48) or 0.15 second (M48A1) and was used primarily on high-explosive shells.

The poster shown to the right is one of a series that companies that had received the award would display in their factories to encourage workers to keep up their efforts. Some companies also provided additional awards to their workforces. The Parker “51” shown here, engraved to commemorate the awards ceremony, was given to a Parker employee:

“Sell It” Even If You Can’t Actually Sell It!

The heart of a free-market economy, even in the midst of a war that caused severe shortages, was advertising. But how to advertise a product you can’t sell? American companies came up with novel ways to do that, and the first and best guideline was to play on the people’s patriotism. A classic example of this technique was the advertisement shown to the left (one of many Parker ads illustrated by Boris Artzybasheff), which appeared in the April 29, 1944, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It compared the streamlined look and smooth performance of the Parker “51” to those of the North American P-51 Mustang fighter. Of course, you might not be able to buy a “51” right then because fountain pen production was restricted by the government, but (as the ad was careful to point out) the “World’s Most Wanted Pen” was worth the wait.

Other companies found different ways to link patriotism to their advertising. All sorts of products, from shoes to pens, were advertised with encouragements to readers and listeners to take care of the things they had: treat them properly, and they would last longer. But if you had to buy something new, as explained in the Ink-O-Graph ad to the right, which appeared in Life Magazine’s August 23, 1943, issue, you would get longer and more reliable service from the advertiser’s product than from the competition.

When the U.S. went to war in December 1941, Parker had just introduced the “51”, whose body is made of Lucite (acrylic). The “51” was revolutionary in both technology and appearance, and it became an overnight hit; everybody who could afford it wanted one. The war put its success in jeopardy because Lucite was suddenly needed in greater quantities for aircraft canopies. Parker did continue making the “51”, but in severely restricted numbers — of which the majority went to the military. The difficulty of obtaining a “51” in the civilian market only heightened the pen’s desirability; Parker’s wartime advertising used patriotic sentiments to capitalize on the temporary obstacles to owning the pen, and “51” sales took off like a rocket after the war ended.

The advertisement shown to the left, which appeared in the June 23, 1945, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, explained that more than half of the already-limited “51” production was being delivered to the military “under Priority AA-1 orders.” What it carefully does not say is that the U.S. military did not issue fountain pens to personnel in the field. As explained by former T/Sgt John A. Hauck, shown to the right in 1943 at his desk on Kiska Island in the Aleutians, clerks and other staff in forward areas used wooden-handled dip pens like the one shown below, with untipped nibs made of ordinary steel, not stainless, just as had their predecessors since the early 19th century.

The fountain pens that went to the military were sold in Stateside and rear-area Navy Exchanges (NEXes) and Army Post Exchanges (PXes) operated by civilian contractors, not by the military, where officers and enlisted personnel alike could buy whatever pens their budgets could afford. Writing letters became such a widespread pastime, both overseas and at home, that it was the subject of popular songs like “Dear Mom”:

Not Your Grandfather’s Paper and Ink

The huge volume of mail being sent from the American home front to the men and women fighting overseas created the need for a more efficient way to use the limited space available for transport. Letters and parcels could be sent the usual way, but that mail went by ship and could take many weeks to arrive. In fact, given the Germans’ unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, mail sent by ship might not arrive at all. The U.S. government recognized how important mail could be to the morale of those at home as well as to that of the troops in the field, and on June 15, 1942, to provide for reliable, expedited delivery, the government launched V-Mail (“V” for Victory). Copied from the existing British Airgraph system, V-Mail was used until November 1, 1945.

Airgraph or V-Mail. Whichever it was called, it was a system whereby people would write their letters on special forms that folded up to make their own envelopes (e.g., the Wessel’s V-Mail Envo-Letters illustrated to the right here). Folded, sealed, and mailed, the letters were sent to a central post office where they were unsealed, censored, and photographed onto rolls of microfilm that were then sent overseas by air. On arriving at rear-area centers in the war zones, the microfilmed letters were printed at 60% of their original size onto inexpensive photostat paper, sealed, and delivered to their destinations.

The three dots and a dash between the letter V and the word Mail in the V-Mail logo are Morse code for the letter V. They carried a double impact during the war because they also resembled the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Because security restrictions frequently prevented the public broadcasting of military successes or failures, broadcasters would play that symphony to tell their listeners that the Allies had achieved a victory somewhere.

V-Mail worked in both directions. Service personnel could send V-mail, too, and their letters went without charge. Others paid the usual rates, 3¢ for ground transport to the central post office for microfilming, and 6¢ for airmail. Not only did V-Mail save thousands of tons’ worth of space and weight, but it also foiled potential attempts at espionage because invisible ink, microprinting, and microdots would not reproduce on microfilm.

Photographic films designed for microfilm work were not panchromatic (sensitive to all colors). Betty’s beautiful Persian Rose ink and Edith’s gorgeous Peacock Blue ink would not register properly on microfilm. To solve this problem, pen and ink companies produced special V-Mail ink. Shown here is a bottle of Parker Micro-Film Black.

Changes in Body Materials

Parker was able to obtain enough Lucite that it did not have to cease “51” production entirely, and because celluloid was not on the critical materials list, Parker and other companies were able to continue making most of their pens using the same body materials as before. The L. E. Waterman Company, on the other hand, appears to have seen the war coming and taken steps to forestall a materials crisis. Waterman’s Hundred Year Pen, introduced in 1939, priced at $8.50, and made of Lucite, was produced in black and transparent red, green, and blue. In 1940, Waterman followed up with another Lucite pen, the $5.00 model 515. Here are a 1939 Hundred Year Pen and a 515:

The first step toward working around what promised to be serious material restrictions was an unpublicized change, as late-production black 1940 Hundred Year Pens (made in early-to-mid 1941) acquired some celluloid body parts. The black Hundred Year Pen shown here has a Lucite cap and a celluloid barrel:

Things went further, however. The Hundred Year Pen took on a dramatically different (but rather more conventional) style for the 1941 Christmas season, as the company had already introduced its new pens before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Hundred Year Pen wore a new body of celluloid, offered with or without a transparent barrel end that was an apparent nod to the transparency of the barrels of previous models. The 515 stepped up the patriotism game, becoming the all-celluloid Commando, with a transparent or opaque end on the barrel only. In 1945, when Waterman introduced the Taperite, some trim versions of that model also had transparent barrel ends. Here are a brown 1942 Hundred Year Pen (upper two views) and a black Commando (bottom view), both made of celluloid.

Another material change, one that was probably seen as a technological advancement rather than merely as a way to cope with the exigencies of war, was Eversharp’s transition from celluloid to polystyrene in the manufacture of its Skyline pens. At the outset of the war, all Skylines were celluloid. IG Farben had pioneered polystyrene production in Germany before the rise of Adolf Hitler, and when the material became commercially viable in the U.S. during the war, Eversharp adopted it. There are several significant advantages to polystyrene as a pen material, principal among which is that — unlike celluloid, which must be made ahead and cured for several months — it is sold in pellet form and can be fabricated very rapidly on demand by injection molding. This process eliminates most of the costly machining required to produce a Skyline barrel from celluloid rod. Polystyrene also resists the corrosive action of some inks, making it a material of choice for use in pens that could handle the new faster-drying formulas then appearing on the market.

Polystyrene could not be made in the brilliantly patterned colors that were available with celluloid, and this minor deficiency led to the eventual discontinuation of the Modern Stripe Skylines. Eversharp continued to produce striated celluloid caps, however, because the sleeve that makes the body of a Skyline cap could be turned easily from tube stock. Shown here are a Modern Stripe Red Skyline in celluloid and a Jet Black Skyline in polystyrene:

Eversharp was not the only maker to adopt polystyrene. David Kahn, Inc., had been experimenting with injection molding since David Kahn himself had purchased molding equipment in Germany in the late 1920s, some years before IG Farben had perfected the process. Kahn’s company contributed to the war effort by producing huge quantities of injection-molded valve caps for inner tubes to go into military vehicle tires. The company further capitalized on the cost of the valve-cap molding dies by using them to mold blind caps for the button-filling Wearever Pacemaker (below, upper), a celluloid Striped Duofold knockoff that Kahn introduced during the war. Beginning in 1943 with the solid-colored Wearever Zenith (below, lower), Kahn also produced polystyrene pens.

Oops!

Seen in retrospect, Waterman’s new celluloid design, while it produced aesthetically pleasing pens, had a consequence that made the Hundred Year Pen’s century-long guarantee a sad joke. Unfortunately, celluloid is a relatively unstable material. Its instability appears as ambering (discoloration) and, in more severe cases, as crystallization, crazing, cracking, and eventual crumbling. The tendency to crystallize is directly proportional to the object's thickness and inversely proportional to the curing time and the amount of colorant in the celluloid. The combination of these factors has led to the disintegration of the transparent barrel ends on celluloid Waterman pens that featured this design, including Hundred Year Pens, Commandos, and Taperites. (The transparent amber barrel end of the Hundred Year Pen shown earlier has been professionally replaced with a more stable material.)

The worst disadvantage of Eversharp’s polystyrene did not become evident until some decades after the Skyline ended its product life in 1948. The early resin formulation was relatively untested, and the pens often faded. As annoying as a cosmetic defect like that can be, a more serious problem was that under the chemical action of some inks, certain parts could deteriorate mechanically to the point of becoming brittle and frangible over time. Polystyrene Skyline inner caps, molded integrally with the cap derby, are sometimes found in a crumbled state.

David Kahn, Inc., had more than a decade’s experience with polystyrene before Eversharp got into the fray, and in that time Kahn’s people had learned a thing or two that turned out to be beneficial. Wartime molded Wearever pens do not appear to be subject to the crumbling decay that ruins some Eversharps.

Making Do Now Pays Off Later

Times change, and with them the things of everyday life. In times of war, the changes are frequently sudden and profound. Resources that had been cheap and available before the war suddenly became critical. Because of their popularity among collectors, the Parker Vacumatic and “51” are widely recognized as having “gone under the knife” due to material restrictions. The Vacumatic’s filler pump had been made almost entirely of metal, primarily aluminum. With aluminum needed for aircraft manufacture, Parker went back to the drawing board and redesigned the filler, producing a new version that used much less aluminum and was also less costly and less likely to jam or suffer corrosion. The new filler’s plunger is made of celluloid and features an external spring instead of the one enclosed by the older tubular aluminum plunger. Shown here are a 1939 Vacumatic Speedline Major (upper) and a 1946 Vacumatic Major (lower):

As the war went on, Parker tried further refinements of the new filler; the final version appeared in late 1943 or early 1944 and is made entirely of plastic except for the spring. This all-plastic version is sometimes cemented into the pen barrel very securely and can be very difficult to remove when diaphragm replacement is required. Parker retained the new filler design after the end of the war but reverted to metal for the two collars that secure the diaphragm and the filler itself into the pen.

Parker also responded to the restrictions on brass by switching to a silver base for its furniture, and it took an additional step by redesigning the exterior of its pens to eliminate the blind-cap tassie. This change saved material, and — like the filler redesign — reduced the manufacturing cost of the pens. Shown here are the same two Vacumatics illustrated above:

More immediately important to most pen companies’ designers, however, was the restriction on rubber. Pens that used only a little rubber, like Parker’s Vacumatic and Sheaffer’s Vacuum-Fil models, could skate through with minor functional changes; but pens that used more rubber, i.e., anything with a sac, presented a problem. Sac pens continued in production, but there were far fewer of them, proportionally speaking. Sheaffer’s Vacuum-Fil, with its tiny rubber usage, was immensely popular among those who could afford it; this was fortunate because Sheaffer, in response to the WPB’s enactment of serious restrictions on rubber in October 1942, ceased manufacturing lever-filling pens. Thus, the number of lever-filling “TRIUMPH” pens produced (shown below, upper) was minuscule in comparison with the much greater numbers of the Vacuum-Fil “TRIUMPH” version (below, lower).

The vicissitudes of wartime production, however, are only the beginning of the story. After they were made, fountain pens were sold, and they accompanied their new owners, whether working on the home front or fighting in foreign lands.

Alfred E. Lindow, Jr., shown here in uniform, probably received the Vacuum-Fil Defender shown below, a military-clipped Balance model, as a gift for his 22nd birthday on September 16, 1942. Lindow joined the U.S. Naval Reserve in May 1942; and 11 days after his birthday, he was assigned to the light anti-aircraft cruiser U.S.S. San Juan in the Pacific Theater.

Alfred Earl Lindow, Jr., was born in Houston, Texas, on September 16, 1920, to Alfred and Eva Lindow, of 2308 Russell Street. He did well in school, graduating from high school in 1938 and then attending Massey Business College. In 1940, Al was earning a wage as a bookkeeper in a radio shop.

On May 12, 1942, Al enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and was assigned Service Number 6247012. After boot camp and training in his specialty, he served in the Pacific Theater of Operations. He is shown below in a hand-colored photograph taken on his graduation from FC “A” school, the Navy’s training school for fire controlmen.

Sent to Pearl Harbor on September 1, 1942, he was assigned to USS San Juan (CL-54), an Atlanta-class light anti-aircraft cruiser then undergoing repairs to a gun mount damaged during the early days of the Guadalcanal campaign. He reported aboard on September 27 as a Fire Controlman 3rd class, part of a team that was responsible for the operation of several types of range-finding equipment and for solving ballistics calculations to control the firing of the ship’s guns.

He probably received the Sheaffer’s Vacuum-Fil Defender shown below, a military-clipped Balance model, as a gift for his 22nd birthday on September 16, 1942.

Lindow’s first action was a raid on October 16, 1942, in which the ship sank two Japanese patrol vessels. San Juan then joined the U.S.S. Enterprise task group, just in time to engage in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, in which she took damage. She was detached for repairs in Australia.

Lindow’s pen was with him in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and at Saipan in the Marianas; Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima, Japan; the islands of Palau, Ulithi, and Formosa; and Luzon, the Philippines. In December 1944, the task group suffered badly in Typhoon Cobra and returned to the Navy’s advance base on Ulithi. On December 26, Lindow was detached from San Juan for advanced gunfire control training.

Lindow’s first action was a raid on October 16, 1942, in which the ship sank two Japanese patrol vessels, taking aboard the greatest number of Japanese prisoners captured in naval action to that time. San Juan then joined the U.S.S. Enterprise task group, just in time to engage in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, in which she took damage; but she remained with the task force as far as Nouméa, New Caledonia, where she was detached for repairs in Australia.

Lindow’s pen was with him in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and at Saipan in the Marianas; Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima, Japan; the islands of Palau, Ulithi, and Formosa; and Luzon, the Philippines. In December 1944, the task group suffered badly in Typhoon Cobra and returned to the Navy’s advance base on Ulithi. On December 26, Lindow was detached from San Juan for advanced gunfire control training.

Furniture Goes Down- or Up-Market

Until World War II, brass was the base metal for most pen furniture (clips, levers, and cap bands). With brass restricted, manufacturers turned to other metals. While cheap pens appeared with thinly gold-plated furniture of low-grade steel, first-tier models from the Big Four manufacturers acquired more intrinsic value in the form of gold-filled parts made with sterling silver instead of brass. (This material is not vermeil, which is plated, not sandwiched, and has much less actual gold in its makeup). Here are a cheap pen (Chicago Conklin) with a plated steel nib and painted-on cap bands, and a more expensive one (Sheaffer’s “TRIUMPH”, introduced in July 1942):

The use of sterling silver as the base material for clips, cap bands, and other trim led to an interesting phenomenon. Gold and silver are chemically similar, and over time, silver ions migrated upward through the gold and formed a new layer atop the gold. The migrated silver, which was deposited absolutely uniformly, appeared in a color that can best be described as “gunmetal” and might be believed to have been intentional. This phenomenon is most frequently seen on Sheaffer and Eversharp pens but is not exclusive to those brands. Illustrated to the left is the cap from a Sheaffer Tuckaway, showing the appearance of the silver layer on the clip and band. Fortunately for modern collectors, the silver can be removed easily; to the right is the same cap after restoration.

Borrowing Technology from the Military

It is an axiom that technology advances more rapidly in wartime than in times of peace. In the case of military technology, this is certainly true, but advances made for the military often spill over into the civilian world, and the fountain pen was not left behind during World War II. Before the war, metallurgical technology had not developed to a degree sufficient to support the economical manufacture of high-quality alloys suitable for tipping fountain pen nibs. Tipping material was culled from high-grade ores of platinum-group metals, principally iridosmine and osmiridium, naturally occurring alloys of iridium and osmium. Ore was crushed, fragments were selected based on their metal content and welded to nibs, after which the tips were ground and polished to finish them. This technology worked reasonably well, but the quality of finished nib tips could vary greatly: one might have a crystalline cleavage line that would result in a fracture of the tip, the next might have a spongy texture that made polishing it into a smooth tip impossible, and a third might be perfect in all respects.

The American military’s need for highly refined alloys that were very hard led to the development of the necessary technology to meet that requirement. When the U.S. went to war in December 1941, Parker had just introduced the revolutionary “51”. Early in the war, Parker advertised that the nib of the “51” was tipped with osmiridium. During 1943, on the back of new technology, the nib tipping material changed to a refined ruthenium-based alloy that Parker called Plathenium, a name derived from the inclusion of sufficient platinum to produce a weldable alloy. The “51” shown here was made in 1944 and has a Plathenium nib.

The initials on the cap of the “51” above, H.F.F., are those of Helen Frances Frisz (pictured to the right), a young woman from Vincennes, Indiana. After high school, Helen worked in her family’s household, but when the United States went to war she began to feel a need to serve her country (and incidentally to see some of it beyond the small area in southwest Indiana where she had grown up). On March 25, 1942, she volunteered for military service.

Helen was inducted into the SPARs, the women’s branch of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, in November or December 1942. She passed boot camp in New York City, took specialty training at Indiana University, and served in Seattle, Washington until December 1945. The “51” was given to her to celebrate her 25th birthday on November 13, 1944. She probably used it to write letters to, among others, her future husband, who was serving in the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division.

Other manufacturers quickly followed Parker’s lead, and soon nibs tipped with highly refined alloys were the rule rather than the exception for high-quality pens.

Making Nibs Without Steel

Because steel was a critical resource in the U.S., some lesser pen makers, among them David Kahn, Inc. and the Morrison Fountain Pen Company, began fitting their pens with gold nibs. They were fortunate because the price of gold in the United States remained relatively stable, floating at about $35.00 per Troy ounce from late 1941 to the end of 1945. With an average nib weighing approximately 0.5 to 0.6 gram, the value of the gold in most third-tier nibs was 40¢ or less, a rise in cost that was relatively easy to absorb. David Kahn, Inc., fitted the Wearever Pacemaker and Zenith, both pictured earlier in this article, with 14K nibs that appear to have been made by the Grieshaber Pen Company of Chicago.

As can be seen from some of the pens illustrated in this article, some third-tier manufacturers managed to stick with steel. It is reasonable to conjecture that these companies had determined that continuing to use stainless steel for nibs and mild steel for clips would not exceed their allotments under WPB regulations. Some third-tier pens continued to appear with untipped steel nibs, changed in no way from the nibs used before the war. The Conklin and DU-PONT pens illustrated in this article left their respective factories fitted with butterfly (untipped) nibs.

Shown to the left is a silver-palladium Esterbrook 8556 nib. The use of silver-palladiium alloys as a less costly nib material than gold that still offered many of gold’s benefits had been pioneered in England, in the mid-1930s. The technology received U.S. Patent N^o 2,095,890, issued October 12, 1937, to Alan Richard Powell and Ernest Robert Box, working for Johnson, Matthey & Company, Ltd, of London. In the United States, wartime quotas and restrictions led a few manufacturers to produce pens fitted with silver-palladium nibs. Third-tier makers Morrison and David Kahn, Inc., although both companies went with gold at the top of their wartime lines, used gold-plated silver-palladium nibs in lesser wartime models. Shown here are a Roxy pen (Morrison sub-brand) and a Wearever Deluxe 100 from Kahn.

Other makers that followed the wartime silver-palladium path included Eagle, which retained gold in its top range but switched its lower-line Eagle models (below, upper) and its Scout sub-branded models (below, lower); and Salz Brothers. The Salz Brothers advertisement shown to the right, from the February 21, 1944, issue of Life Magazine, featured actress Veronica Lake and a button-filling pen. It claimed, “Critical pen dealers, men who are fountain pen experts, hail the Stratford Conqueror as the finest $1.25 pen.”

All of the gold-plated silver-palladium nibs illustrated here appear to have come from the same unidentified U.S. manufacturer. They are all the same size and shape; and they all exhibit the same moderate quality level of manufacture, differing only in their imprints.

After peace was concluded in 1945 and material restrictions were lifted, third-tier manufacturers quickly reverted to steel nibs in models that had carried silver-palladium during the conflict.

The “Real Deal”

In wartime, patriotism is a major factor in maintaining morale on the home front. In every country that was involved in the war, patriotism sprang up everywhere. In some countries, you were patriotic “or else”; in others, patriotism was the natural outgrowth of the fact that the home front was as much a part of the war as were the young men and women who were off fighting somewhere. Especially in the United States, where the home front was virtually untouched by the ravages of the conflict, manufacturers played on people’s patriotic sentiments (as noted earlier) to sell their products. So much of patriotic Americans’ daily life was about supporting the “boys over there” that Olive Drab became a popular color. Patriotic merchandising affected pens, of course, and it also affected pen-related accessories and ephemera. One obvious example was advertising blotters. A staple of a world in which the principal writing instrument was the fountain pen, advertising blotters were given away by thousands of businesses, and some companies’ blotters got a wartime makeover. Shown to the left are several blotters from a series titled “America’s Finest Planes,” produced to promote Bond Bread, a product of the General Baking Company of New York.

Wartime pens in America did not spring suddenly into existence after Pearl Harbor. In Chicago, Illinois, Solomon M. Sager, founder of the Sager Pen Corporation, realized early on that Americans would be going into battle. His response was to reintroduce the trench pen, which had appeared during World War I. Trench pens were eyedropper fillers that made their own ink by mixing a dried ink pellet or tablet with water in the barrel; but Sager’s version — which he intended to be used by civilians as well — added the multiple-fill feature pioneered in the ’20s and ’30s. Sager even set up the Graphomatic Corporation to be the manufacturer of his new Inkmaker pens. Shown here is an Inkmaker De Luxe in “Military Khaki”; the pens also appeared in Jet Black, Burgundy, Navy Blue, and Hospital White, and it featured a 14K nib made by Grieshaber, which Sager owned and which he eventually subsumed into Graphomatic. There is a thoroough profile on this site of the Inkmaker and its sibling, the Colonel De Luxe.

Sager was careful in designing the Inkmaker to ensure that it met the needs of the military audience, foremost of which (after eliminating the need to carry bottled ink in the field) was a military clip so that the pen would not disturb the appearance of a soldier’s uniform while being carried in his pocket. (For obvious reasons, unless the soldier’s commander was a “chickenshit” officer, this restriction did not apply in combat.) He also ensured that it used no potentially critical resources: the nib was 14K gold, the feed was plastic, the clip was made of the same plastic as the pen body, the cap band and section trim were made of gold-plated sterling silver, and the seal at the back of the barrel was made of a flexible plastic. There was no rubber anywhere in the pen.

The pen model that got the biggest bang for the buck with Olive Drab was Morrison’s Patriot, which was also advertised by a peripheral product, in this case matchbooks like the one to the right. The Patriot had been introduced before the United States became a combatant, and it was produced in versions honoring the four U.S. military services and several other organizations such as the American Legion, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and the Blue Star Mothers, an organization of American mothers who had sons or daughters in the service. A U.S. Army Patriot is shown here, and there is a thorough profile on this site of the Patriot.

Each of the service pens has the crest of its service, on the cap crown. The most significant feature of these pens, however, is not the external design, but the internal one that resulted from the progressively stricter rationing of critical war resources. When limits were established on the use of steel, Morrison switched the Patriot to gold nibs that, like those in the Wearever Zenith, appear to have come from Grieshaber. In late 1942, when the WPB published an almost crippling limitation on rubber (which was needed for tires for military vehicles), Morrison began producing a version of its Patriot that complied with the new regulations. The new version used a syringe (Post) filler, with the entire barrel screwing off to expose the filling unit. Except for the disappearance of the filling lever, the new Patriot was exactly the same in appearance as the old.

The new Patriot lived up to its name when it came to conserving critical war resources. Except for the filler’s two gaskets, the nib, and the metal parts on the cap, the entire pen — including the section and feed — was made of celluloid.

Morrison’s Patriot was not the only syringe-filling pen to appear during World War II. With virtually crippling restrictions on the amount of rubber available for pen manufacture, and with the Rev. Woodruff Post’s patent (U.S. Patent N^o 510,145) long since expired, cheap pens with syringe fillers (including the blue Conklin illustrated near the beginning of this article) appeared in relatively great numbers. These cheap pens were made along more traditional lines, with the front half of the barrel forming the ink reservoir and the back half forming a blind cap that screwed off to expose the plunger in the same manner as in the Post pens of earlier decades. These pens were made extremely cheaply, with crudely fashioned filler parts and, in most cases, with celluloid sections fused onto barrels rolled up from thin celluloid sheet. Today, most are virtually impossible to repair. Here is a DU-PONT pen, better made than most of its competitors in that it has a hard rubber section. This pen has been refitted with a Pelikan M200 nib, with plating removed from the tines to match the original DURIUM TIPPED nib’s design.

Interestingly, although most of the cheap syringe fillers featured bright and cheery colors, there was at least one produced in Olive Drab. This pen has no brand markings:

Unlike many of its competitors, including the Morrison and DU-PONT pens shown here, this anonymous pen has a military clip and could indeed have been worn by a soldier or a Marine while in uniform.

Service Sets: Convenience for the Serviceman and Woman

Pen makers had long offered sets of a pen and pencil together; but for those in the military, carrying writing instruments in the breast pocket was not necessarily convenient and might (as did the Patriot) violate uniform requirements. People in the service needed a better way to carry their pens and pencils with them. Manufacturers answered the need by adding a leather carrying case that would keep the pen and pencil together and protect them while packing more compactly than a box (which might be crushed in a duffel bag or seabag). Sets with leather cases were called “service sets,” but anyone could buy them; the tacit assumption was that such sets were being purchased for service members. Shown here are service sets from Waterman and an unknown third-tier maker:

Lester Melvin Rolf as born on February 13, 1921, in Holland, Wisconsin, to Bernard “Barney” Rolf and Anna Van Vreede Rolf. On September 2, 1942, while still living in Hollandtown, he was enlisted in the U.S. Army as a “selectee,” meaning that he was drafted, and was assigned Army Service Number 36262624. After basic and infantry training. Lester was assigned to Company I, 3rd Battalion, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th (“Old Hickory”) Infantry Division.

The 30th arrived in Normandy, France, on June 11, 1944, five days after the D-Day landings. Along with the rest of his division, Lester fought in the bloody liberation of St Lô. In early August, in brutal fighting at Mortain, Rolf’s regiment repeatedly threw back a major German counteroffensive, holding its position against attack after attack and calling in fire missions by which artillery and aircraft virtually destroyed the German 7th Army. After the German surrender ending the war in Europe, members of the OKW, the German General Staff, identified this defeat as the moment when they knew the war was lost.

The pen and pencil below are a Morrison Patriot U.S. Army service set that belonged to Lester Rolf and was made probably in mid-1942. The cap-crown U.S. Army crests have been removed, possibly to reduce the chance that a glare of sunlight might give away Rolf’s position to an enemy observer.

In the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, on January 18, 1945, during a thrust southward from Malmédy, in Belgium, the 120th was advancing to the east of the Malmédy-St Vith road. The enemy launched a sudden counterattack with six tanks and about 100 infantry. The Americans drove the Germans off, but not without taking casualties, among whom was Staff Sergeant Lester M. Rolf, killed in action. The photo above appeared in an article reporting his death in the February 10 issue of the Green Bay, Wisconsin, Press Gazette.

Price Fixing

Production limits set by the WPB were not the only way U.S. government wartime regulations affected pen manufacture. The OPA, the Office of Price Administration, was authorized to set ceiling prices for all items except agricultural products. The purpose of price ceilings was to prevent war profiteering, and because fountain pens were scarce, they were among the articles for which the OPA established ceilings. As shown by the slip of paper illustrated here (included with a Morrison Patriot service set), the OPA placed a $6.25 ceiling retail price on that particular service set, and there was also a 20% federal tax, bringing the buyer’s actual price for the set to $7.50. The paper explains that the federal tax was imposed on service sets; it was an excise tax that applied because the carrying case was made of leather. (Leather was needed for certain military goods such as rifle slings and flyers’ helmets, and it was rationed.)

It’s Not as Though America Was Alone

Like Americans, civilians elsewhere suffered deprivation due to the needs of the military — and in nations torn by war, there were also the danger and destruction of the war itself. In Great Britain, people suffered so severely from the loss of merchant shipping due to the Germans’ use of unrestricted submarine warfare that rationing had to continue until 1954. As an island nation, Britain had before the war been importing about 70% of its cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits, about 70% of cereals and fats, and more than half of its meat (while relying on imported feed for domestic meat production). Foods that were rationed were available only in small amounts — when they were available at all. But food was not the only loss; adults were rationed to one new suit of clothes per year while growing children could have two, and farmers were required to cull most of their livestock and concentrate on dairy cattle to increase milk production for consumption by children. In the midst of all this, as manufacturers of all sorts were set to work producing war goods, British perseverance and ingenuity never flagged. Working under restrictions that limited their pen output to 25% of prewar quantities, and even after suffering bomb damage, London pen companies like Burnham and Conway Stewart (whose factory was almost destroyed during the Blitz) were able to produce pens despite material shortages that fortunately did not include gold. Shown here is a bandless wartime Conway Stewart 479 Universal.

A few British makers managed to maintain a high standard of quality throughout the war. Some others were not able to keep their quality up due to lack of staffing, war damage, or other causes, and perforce produced only pens of poorer quality than before the war.

Along with munitions, aircraft parts, and cap badges, London’s Spot Pen Company, makers of Mentmore and Platignum pens, also made “escape pens.” Red Cross packages sent to British personnel in German prison camps included pens so the POWs could write home, but Spot’s fully functional fountain pens came with something extra: they had compasses concealed under their cap crowns and maps printed on silk rolled within their bodies; if a POW could get away, he had a guide to help him work his way to Allied lines.

Spot also made “spy pens” that were actually dart guns, with poisoned darts for use by agents working in France; but far more deadly was a lever-filler pen made for Beatrice Darlow, an agent of SOE (Special Operations Executive, a secret British wartime organization; known internally as the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”).

Beatrice Darlow was born on February 10, 1921, in Billericay, Suffolk, England, to Mr. and Mrs. John Darlow. Her father died when she was 12 years old. Her mother remarried, and the couple took up residence on the country estate of Beatrice’s new stepfather, Count Fredrik Brockenhuus-Schack, in South Zealand, Denmark. Continuing her education at Eastfield, Ascot, and spending her holidays and summers in Denmark, Beatrice soon became bilingual.

When the Germans invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940, the 19-year-old Darlow had finished her secondary education and was living at her stepfather’s country estate. In the summer of 1941, she went off to university in Copenhagen, where she chanced to meet Eric Münte, a pioneer in the Danish Resistance. Münte was operating an “escape line” for downed British flyers, and he invited Darlow to join his organization. She was soon serving as a translator and bicycle courier, carrying messages concerning the fugitive airmen. Part of her kit was a hard rubber fountain pen, manufactured by MI9, a highly secret department of the British War Office, that wasn’t a pen at all. Shown here, it was a stiletto dagger. The lever, although it could be operated, did nothing and was there just for show.

(The dagger’s hard rubber cap and barrel have oxidized over time, and they are today badly browned, The photos above have been digitally altered to present the appearance of the dagger when Beatrice Darlow carried it.)

Darlow served from the autumn of 1941 until August 1943, when her courier activities attracted the attention of the Gestapo. She was advised to leave Denmark, and Münte saw her spirited aboard a fishing boat and carried to Sweden, where she was interned until the end of the war. She was recruited by the SOE in Stockholm and served as a Danish-English translator and for the debriefing of Danish Resistance workers who, like herself, were forced to flee to Sweden. The photo to the left above, taken in Sweden in October 1943, shows Darlow on the right side of the image, looking downward.

On her return to Denmark in 1945, she was reunited with her then-fiancé, a British Army major named Parsons, who was Aide de Camp to General Sir Evelyn “Bubbles” Barker. Major Parsons presented her with a huge Nazi flag and the Mercedes automobile seen with her in the photo here, explaining that he had “liberated” them from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. As Darlow had not the slightest desire to own a Nazi flag and was then living with rationing that made fabric difficult to obtain, she and a friend thriftily unstitched the flag, and she had the red cotton fabric made into a lovely evening dress that she wore to parties and balls for many years. Sadly, Major Parsons died of pneumonia four months before their planned nuptials.

Darlow returned to England in 1948, and she married former RAF Squadron Leader Edward A. F. Jackman in September 1948; her dagger is today known as the Beatrice Jackman dagger.

Outside of London, other manufacturers also worked through the war. In Birmingham, Macniven & Cameron (later known as Waverley Cameron Ltd) continued to produce pens that featured the justly renowned Waverley nib, like the bandless Cameron model shown here (upper) along with a Wyvern N^o 81 from Leicester (lower).

A few American companies also had factories in England, and their English operations suffered as did the British-owned ones. In some cases, arrangements became entangled somewhat more closely than the usual “We’re here, too” situation. The Valentine Pen Manufacturing Company, Ltd,located in Newhaven, England, produced parts and pens, including gold nibs, for Osmia, Parker, Waterman, and others. Valentine never became successful in its own right, apparently because of its willingness to accept small orders, even for as few as a dozen pens, rather than concentrate on building its own line. When World War II began, Parker was evicted from its premises in London because the facilities were needed by the BBC. For a while, Parker continued buying parts from Valentine, but in 1941 the two companies negotiated an agreement whereby they shared Valentine’s facilities. During the war, the factory turned out Parker-designed lever- and button-fillers under the Valentine brand. In 1945 Parker bought Valentine outright and continued producing Valentine-branded pens until about 1948.

On the Other Side of the Lines

Restrictions on materials did not affect only the Allied nations. Axis civilians too found the necessities of life rationed, as illustrated by the German “cereal ration card” shown to the right, which entitled the named bearer to purchase specified quantities of cereal grains, starch, ersatz coffee, and certain food additives. Living conditions in Germany and Japan became progressively worse as Allied bombing destroyed not only homes, businesses, and factories, but also domestic food production, while blockades prevented imports of both war matériel and home goods.

The Nazis had recognized well before the outbreak of hostilities that Germany lacked sufficient resources to conduct a war and also sustain the country’s people. They knew that they would have to purchase imported goods and raw materials. Reasoning correctly that neutral countries would be unlikely to accept Reichsmarks in payment, they established a policy of plundering and hoarding gold. They placed gold on Germany’s list of critical war resources to restrict its use in the making of jewelry or other precious items, and they seized the gold stocks of countries they annexed or overran and even pried gold fillings from the teeth of people murdered in their extermination camps.

The result of this policy, as it affected the pen industry, was that instead of fitting lesser pens with gold nibs, as happened with U.S. manufacturers such as David Kahn and Morrison, German first-tier makers such as Pelikan and Soennecken had to switch to nibs made of less valuable materials. Beginning in February 1937, Pelikan began fitting its mid-range Ibis pens with nibs of palladium instead of gold. By February 5, 1938, the Nazis had bought up gold nibs that were already in the hands of retailers and had forbidden the production of gold nibs for the domestic market. As of May of that year, all domestic models that had used gold nibs must be fitted with palladium instead. By March 1939, the use of precious metals for the German market was forbidden; by October, the use of palladium was also forbidden, and pen manufacturers were forced to switch to steel nibs.

Illustrated here are a Pelikan 100 and a Soennecken 118, both wartime pens fitted with flexible steel nibs. The Pelikan’s nib is imprinted with the letters CN in a circle. These letters stood for chromium and nickel, the two principal nonferrous elements in the Edelstahl (stainless steel) of which the nib was made.

Karl Dincklage was a Nazi Party official in the late 1920s. With the rank of Major in the Sturmabteilung (SA) and high in Hitler’s favor, he served as deputy Gauleiter of the Hannover district. He was also a good speaker who frequently bicycled from town to town to deliver political speeches. After several months in hospital during which he suffered from pneumonia thought to have been triggered by a bicycling accident, he died in October 1930. Hitler gave an oration at his funeral. To honor him, the Nazis established a system of charitable work to provide financial support for orphans of men killed in battle, calling it the Karl Dincklage Werk. One of the ways they raised money for the system was by selling special Pelikan 100 pens fitted with gold-plated clips and imprinted KARL DINCKLAGE WERK / DER N.S.D.A.P HANNOVER as shown on this pen:

In English, the imprint reads “Karl Dincklage Work / of the National Socialist German Workers Party Hannover”.

As in Allied countries, there were in Axis countries first-tier pens like those above, and there were lesser pens. One of the latter is the nameless German piston filler below. Like the two above, this pen has a flexible steel nib; the imprint reads Edel / Chromstahl / 1. Qual., meaning “Special / Chrome Steel / 1st Quality.” As on the Soennecken, the clip on this pen is gold plated rather than chromed as on the standard Pelikan.

It wasn’t only the combatant nations that suffered. Manufacturers in Axis-occupied countries sometimes encountered difficulties beyond the fallout from damage inflicted by the war itself. In France, for example, the Germans did not allow Parker’s licensed manufacturing agent, Fernand Laureau, to produce pens bearing the Parker brand because Parker was an American brand. The resourceful Laureau, however, invented a new brand, Plexor, and continued producing pens of Parker design. As illustrated by the button -filling pen shown here, Plexor pens had steel nibs, imprints were changed, and the Split Arrow clip was redesigned to read PLEXOR instead of PARKER (to the right, comparison between a Plexor clip and a contemporaneous Parker “51” clip). Otherwise, the pens were identical to Laureau’s prewar production. In the 1940 Christmas ad­ver­tise­ment shown to the left, Laureau even used a logo styled like the Parker logo of the time.

The Montblanc factory in Denmark opened in 1933 and continued production until 1964. During the war, the Germans occupied Denmark, and the Danish plant was pressed willy-nilly into overtime service after Montblanc’s Hamburg factory was utterly devastated by Allied air raids in November 1944. Production was not resumed in Hamburg until 1947.

It has been suggested that Montblanc produced pens bearing a swastika during the war, as some other German manufacturers are known to have done. Nazi officials, however, forbade the practice because they considered it necessary to control how their symbols and insignia were used in public, and there is no evidence that Montblanc ever produced swastika-marked pens.

Japan, being an island nation with precariously limited natural resources, was even more pressed than Germany. The 1944 ration booklet illustrated to the right was issued in Okinawa to a woman named Mitsuaki Moromi. The long coupons at the top and bottom were specifically for cotton towels, socks, and yarn, while the coupons on the left half, each worth 1 ration unit, could be used toward whatever the buyer chose. In the face of America’s rapidly increasing use of unrestricted submarine warfare, the choice of available foodstuffs, the most critical need, grew more and more circumscribed until many Japanese were surviving on acorns, rough grains, and small amounts of rice, supplemented in rural communities by scavenged roadside weeds and roasted grasshoppers.

With less gold to be acquired in China and the European colonies in Asia and Oceania than in Europe proper, the Japanese reportedly intended to finance their war effort with gold looted from Southeast Asia. It is not clear now much gold was looted, but there are persistent stories of a huge hoard collected by General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was called “The Tiger of Malaya.” Whether there was such a hoard or not, the Japanese government, as in Germany, listed gold as a critical war resource, and Japanese pen makers found themselves compelled to use progressively less gold. The gold-plated steel nib in the urushi-coated hard rubber eyedropper-filling pen shown below, made by the Morison Factory Company, indicates that the pen was made during the 1930s, after the company’s 1933 name change. In 1938, a total embargo on gold ushered in a period lasting until some years after the war, during which all new pens had chrome-plated furniture and nibs of unplated steel, known as 白 (shiro, “white” nibs).

During the war, as in Allied nations, companies in the Axis countries converted to the production of war matériel. In Japan, Morison made wireless transmitter parts for the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company until the Morison factory was totally destroyed by Allied bombing. The Sailor Pen Company produced munitions for the Imperial Japanese Navy but was still able to produce a small quantity of pens. The shiro nib and the poor quality of the chrome plating on the furniture of the celluloid Sailor eyedropper-filler shown here mark this latter pen as having been made during the war, with the clip design suggesting the closing years of the conflict:

Until concerted Allied naval blockades and aerial bombing crippled Japan’s industrial capacity, Japan was producing more aluminum than Great Britain and the Soviet Union combined (141,100 tons in 1943 vs 118,900 tons). Enough aluminum was available over the urgent needs of wartime aircraft manufacture to allow the production of pens like the unusual aluminum-overlay model shown here. This eyedropper-filling pen, made by the Best Pen Company, has a slightly flexible shiro nib, aluminum cap and blind cap, and an aluminum overlay on a hard rubber barrel. The high quality of its stainless steel clip, in comparison with the usual shoddy chrome-plated furniture on wartime Japanese pens, indicates that it was unusually well made for the time.

Material shortages did not prevent Japanese pen makers from advertising, and like their American counterparts they took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves. Pocket calendars have long been immensely popular among Japanese citizens, and the 1938 Pilot pocket calendar to the left is a typical example of something useful that was also a patriotic advertisement. The red text along the left side reads, “Pilot High Quality Fountain Pens” while the black text reads, “Invincible Japan.”

Afterword

The war wrought its changes on all aspects of life. When daily life returned to normal, it turned out that even “normal” had changed. New technology enabled more rapid and more economical manufacture of better pens, and new cultural norms made the sexes more nearly equal than at any time in the past — which also played a role in pen design and marketing. (See, for example, the Waterman adver­tise­ment to the right, clearly targeted at the postwar “Modern Woman”!) Pens from the war years offer a surprisingly penetrating look at the times, and a collection containing nothing made before 1938 or after 1945 would be a richly fascinating one indeed.

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The information in this article is as accurate as possible, but you should not take it as absolutely authoritative or complete. If you have additions or corrections to this page, please consider sharing them with us to improve the accuracy of our information. My thanks to David Rzeszotarski, who provided images and information about life in Japan during the war.