ROLL CALL: Martha Schuchart Sachs (17 Dec 1913–31 July 2004)

Photo By Lori Stewart | On 31 July 2004, Lt. Col. Martha Schuchart Sachs, one of the first women assigned to the Second Signal Service Battalion, passed away at the age of ninety. She served for twenty-three years, from 1944-1967, with the Army Security Agency.  

UNITED STATES

07.28.2023

Story by Lori Stewart 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian

31 JULY 2004
On 31 July 2004, Lt. Col. Martha Schuchart Sachs, one of the first women assigned to the Second Signal Service Battalion, passed away at the age of ninety. She served for twenty-three years, from 1944-1967, with the Army Security Agency (ASA).

Martha Schuchart was born 17 December 1913 near Union, Missouri, the oldest of four girls in a family of nine children. She attended school in a one-room schoolhouse and graduated high school in 1932. For the next eleven years, while teaching in rural schools, she studied through the summers and earned a degree from Cape Girardeau Teacher’s College (today’s Southeast Missouri State University). As soon as she graduated in early June 1942, she was visited by a recruiter who convinced her to enlist in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). The creation of the WAACs had been approved on 14 May 1942 and recruiting began just two weeks later. Martha was one of the earliest enlistees.

After completing basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in the fall of 1942, Martha remained at the training center as an instructor for several months. She recalled, “I must have done OK, because I was invited to attend OCS [Officer Candidate School] without applying. Suddenly officers were in great demand, so I completed the 9-month OCS course in 3 months.” She was commissioned in mid-1943 and, again, stayed to instruct the new classes.

Beginning in April 1943, Signal Security Agency (SSA) representatives traveled to the now-renamed Women’s Army Corps (WAC) training centers at Fort Des Moines and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to recruit women who met their rigid requirements. They favored college graduates with considerable training in languages, a high academic record, and an IQ of 120. Candidates also had to be of “excellent character…whose loyalty, integrity, discretion and trustworthiness are unquestionable, [and] whose financial status and/or habits…render them unlikely to succumb to any temptations….” Initially, SSA was allotted eleven WAC officers and eight hundred enlisted personnel to work at its headquarters at Arlington Hall Station, Virginia, as well as its monitoring stations at Vint Hill Farms, Virginia, and Two Rock Ranch in California. The Arlington Hall allotment increased to 1,250 in early 1944, although SSA never reached that goal.
 
Martha obviously met the SSA requirements because in early 1944 she was assigned to the Second Signal Service Battalion at Arlington Hall Station. The men and women of the battalion manned the SSA’s network of monitoring stations in Virginia, Texas, California, Hawaii, and Alaska. With her background as an instructor, Martha was assigned as a training officer. She related, “No matter how long you’re in the Army, you’re always in training. I had to meet with the troops once a day, go through drill, go through all the courses, such as health—all things you train them in to keep them alert.”

As the SSA evolved into ASA in 1945, Martha continued her work with the signals intelligence organization. She served at Two Rock Ranch, helping close down the WAC detachment there after the war, and in overseas assignments in the Philippines, Japan, and Germany. Back at Arlington Hall Station in the 1950s, she was the ASA personnel chief, responsible for assigning enlisted and officer personnel to ASA units worldwide. In 1961, she served at Kagnew Field Station in Eritrea, where she was promoted to lieutenant colonel. She returned to Arlington in 1963.

In 1965, at the age of fifty-one, she married Col. Abner Sachs. Martha Schuchart Sachs retired from the U.S. Army two years later. Throughout her military career and travels, Martha took advantage of all new opportunities. She taught English to Japanese children, volunteered in orphanages, climbed Mount Fuji, and competed in dirt-track car races in East Africa. She passed away on 31 July 2004 and was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

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• Date Taken: 07.28.2023
• Date Posted: 07.28.2023 16:37
• Story ID: 450239
• Location: US