She was named after her grandmother Millie Gunter Henry. Henry inspired Dunn to serve others in the community. Dunn said that while growing up she was frail and often sickly. Dunn graduated from Washington High School in Raleigh. Although the posters depicted only white women, Dunn recalled, she was determined to enlist. She enlisted in December at the age of Her mother was worried about her because of her poor health and small size.
Nevertheless, Dunn persevered through her initial physical training and examinations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She later said she was one of three women out of 21 who were selected. Their mission was to sort, organize, and direct mail to U.
On February 3, , Dunn was in the first group of women from the th to sail to Great Britain. The voyage took 11 days, during which they survived close encounters with Nazi U-boats. They arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 14, The th was then stationed in Birmingham, England, where they discovered warehouses full of undelivered mail.
The unit worked in three shifts around the clock seven days a week to clear the backlog. Before the th, mail delivery was intermittent at best. The morale of the soldiers was waning because they had no connections outside the military. The women developed a new system of organizing and tracking mail. The system required tracking individual servicemembers by maintaining about seven million information cards.
The cards included serial numbers to distinguish different individuals with the same name. They also tried to deliver mail with insufficient information through this system.
