When Janice Martin was a girl, her mother told her she had served in the Women’s Army Corps (WACS) during World War II. That’s about all she said about that.
So it was quite a surprise to Martin when the University at Buffalo’s Brenda Moore called up because she was writing a book about the battalion in which her mother had served.
Indiana Hunt Martin was born in Georgia and moved to Niagara Falls when she was 5. She lived on 11th Street, worshipped at New Hope Baptist Church, attended local schools, including South Junior and Niagara Falls High School, from which she graduated in 1940. By that time, due to some family challenges, she also basically took over raising her younger sister and brother. One of those kids who Peter Bailey might say was “born older,” Indiana kept busy, worked, and at 22, enlisted.
Assigned to the 855-member 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion or the “Six Triple Eight,” as it was called, Hunt Martin became part of the first and only all-female African-American WAC battalion to be deployed overseas during World War II. It was commanded by the first African American woman to achieve the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, Maj. Charity Edna Adams Earley.
Posted in an abandoned school for boys in Birmingham, England, the Battalion sorted two or three years’ worth of undelivered mail sent from stateside to the seven million Americans stationed in the European Theater of Operations. The mail often had incomplete addresses, addresses that were no longer correct, or, often enough, was addressed to a recipient who had died. It was their job to find out where the soldiers were and send it on – an unimaginable task in the days before computers — or return the mail to the sender, a deeply unhappy task.
The hangers in which the mail was stored were beacons to rats, and here the Six Triple Eight worked three shifts daily, sorting 65,000 pieces of mail per shift (approximately 195,000 pieces per day) for three months in Birmingham. When they finished work in England, they moved to Rouen, and Paris, France and started again. In another three months, that work was done, too.
After 15 months of service, during which time they had been pursued by German U boats, had been witness to bombing raids, had suffered in the unheated, rat-infested storage with the mail, and lost three members in a vehicle accident, the work of the Six Triple Eight was done.
Indiana Hunt Martin came home to work for the Unemployment Office in the Falls. After 41 years she retired, and moved to Maryland with her daughter, Janice Martin.
But eventually, the story was told of the women whose motto was “No mail, low morale.”
In Fort Leavenworth, Kan., at the Buffalo Soldier Military Park, you can visit a monument to the Battalion.
If you do a simple computer search, you can find books and articles and documentaries about the Six Triple Eight.
As recently as April, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed U.S. Senator Jerry Moran’s (R-Kan.) legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the members of the Women’s Army Corps who were assigned to the Six Triple Eight during WWII. To be awarded, House Bill HR1012 still must pass; that effort is being led by Rep. Gwen Moore, D4-Wis.
According to Martin, Rep. Brian Higgins currently is sponsoring HR2142, which would “designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 170 Manhattan Avenue in Buffalo, New York, as the “Indiana Hunt-Martin Post Office Building.”
And later this month, Indiana Hunt Martin, who traveled from Georgia to 11th Street, to England and France and Maryland will make one final journey, back home to Niagara Falls.
Hunt Martin passed away in September, and, because of Covid, has remained with her family. They will make the trip next week to inter Hunt Martin’s ashes in the plot she purchased in the 1980s, next to her parents’, at Oakwood Cemetery.
I think it would be a fitting act of thanks to this member of the Greatest Generation to carry on her work, inasmuch as we can in 2021. Her work was more than sorting mail; it was ministering to the souls of soldiers, making sure they received that little paper piece of home that reminded them they were not forgotten.
So many veterans are among us – in private homes, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, or at the Veterans Hospital. Why not take a moment and address a note of thanks to Any Veteran? Pop it in the mail and thank them for their service, especially those who, like Hunt Martin, are the last survivors of that great and awful war, those to whom we continue to owe so much.
We at Oakwood are proud and humbled to welcome Hunt Martin home, who truly fought the good fight and kept the faith. We are in her debt.