Thread by @wesleysmorgan

Today I learned that during the 1970 NYC postal strike, the Nixon administration deployed 18,000 troops for a few days to replace strikers in New York—mostly sorting mail.

Here's the Department of the Army's after-action report on Operation Graphic Hand: governmentattic.org/2docs/Army-AAR…

As the strike heated up, the Pentagon drew on a standing contingency plan to prepare to deploy troops to post offices in as many as 35 cities to take over for striking postal workers.

They came close to deploying to Boston and Philadelphia, but wound up just going to NYC.

It wasn't just the National Guard, either. The 18,000 troops in NYC post offices at the peak of Graphic Hand included over 2,000 active-duty troops from across the services and about 9,500 Army, Navy, and Marine Reservists.

The biggest contributing unit to the 1970 NYC postal mission was the NY Guard's 42nd Infantry Division, but the active-component troops included an MP battalion, Marine and Navy recruiters, and crew members from the destroyer USS Zellers.

From the Reserve came dribs and drabs of troops from all kinds of large and small units: MI, MPs, PSYOPs, unit bands, 300 soldiers from the now-defunct 11th Special Forces Group, 570 from 2/25 Marines, etc.

Here’s an NYT story about the 1970 NYC postal operation getting underway. Marines at one location were expected to sort mail at half the rate of an experienced mail clerk.

Some troops interviewed, including the two-star commander, had a gloomy outlook. nytimes.com/1970/03/24/arc…

The Army after-action report doesn't say much about how the Operation Graphic Hand troops actually did sorting and delivering NYC mail, except to include a line of vague line of praise from unnamed postal supervisors.

It does note that there were no casualties, though!