Sgt. Dorothy H. Schwartz Certificate of Merit

Dorothy Helen Schwartz was born on December 4, 1919 in the Bronx, New York, five minutes before the birth of her twin sister, Daisy Ruth Schwartz (1919-1981). Their parents were Hungarian immigrants Theodore Schwartz and Hermina Farkas Schwartz. Dorothy attended Bronx public schools P.S. 62, J.H.S. 60, and James Monroe High School. As a student at Hunter College in Manhattan, she organized the Thomas Mann Society in 1940 to help counter the rising voices of Communism on campus.

She applied to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps on August 18, 1942 and was accepted for active duty on September 11, 1942. After extensive training in military administration, she was assigned to the WAC detachment of the 9th Air Force. Dorothy and her unit sailed from New York to Scotland on the Aquitania on July 8, 1943. Journalist Doris Fleeson was along for that voyage and recounted the courage of the WACs during the tense trans-Atlantic trip in an October, 1943 cover article for Woman’s Home Companion, “650 WACs Defy the German Subs.”

Stationed in Europe, Sgt. Dorothy Schwartz's job was to take shorthand notes while listening in on phone calls between Allied officers deciding where and when to bomb German forces. Immediately after these calls, she quickly but carefully typed up orders for distribution to units carrying out the raids, always aware that lives depended on the accuracy of her work. For her wartime work in 1944 and 1945, Sgt. Schwartz was awarded the Bronze Star for “meritorious service in direct support of operations against the enemy.”

She left the service on August 31, 1945 and wrote the "History of the WAC Detachment, 9th Air Force, September 1942 to September 1945," privately published in 1946. In civilian life, Dorothy returned to school for education courses and became a New York City high school teacher of typing, stenography, and other business subjects. She began her teaching career at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, and then taught for decades at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx.

After Dorothy retired, she became an advocate for renters' rights and a consultant on retirement issues. She died on December 8, 2001, at the age of 82, and was buried in New Montefiore Cemetery in Suffolk County, New York, next to her twin sister.

Dorothy H Schwartz