Captain James Newton Sachse Wallace was born in Tuttle, Oklahoma, on April 2, 1917. He was the second son of John and Joyce Sachse Wallace. He had five sisters and an older brother. He was always known by the name Sachse (Sack-see), an old family name and his mother's maiden name. He graduated from Tuttle High School May 19, 1936 and attended Oklahoma University, but left OU to join the Army Air Corps on June 24, 1940.

Sachse trained as a pilot at the Spartan Air Corps Training Detachment in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He also trained as a navigator as, he said in a letter, "the army is in desperate need of navigators."

Sachse married Garnet Evelyn Hill, of Minco, Oklahoma, on July 4, 1941 and for a short period they were together while he was at Langley Field, Virginia.

By the fall of 1941, however, Captain Wallace was assigned to the 19th Anti-Submarine Squadron, 480th Anti-Submarine Group, in Gander Lake, Newfoundland. Garnet, his wife, was living with her parents, back in Minco. During this time he wrote numerous letters to his wife and to his mother, in Tuttle, only eight miles away from Minco.

On November 24, while serving as the navigator of a B-24D Liberator, Capt. Wallace and crew left Gander Lake on an anti-submarine mission to Benbecula, Hebrides Islands. After departing, radio checks were made, but there were no further successful radio contacts. A message was eventually received from Prestwick, Scotland reporting that the B-24D was overdue for arrival and had not contacted the Prestwick base. Numerous searches were made, but finally, on December 12, 1949, the remains of the crew were declared non-recoverable.

Capt. Wallace was awarded the Air Medal for his service and is memorialized on the 'Tablets of the Missing' at the East Coast Memorial, New York City. He is also memorialized at the VFW post of Tuttle, Oklahoma, along with Stanley Rooker, another Tuttle man. They were the first two from Tuttle to perish in World War II. Rooker was a Navy man who died in the sinking of the Truxton off Newfoundland in February 1942.

When Captain Wallace's wife, Garnet, received the November 28, 1942 telegram informing her that her husband was missing she was seven months pregnant with me, their only child. I was born February 13, 1943, a late to arrive baby! I was named Suzanne, for Sachse's oldest and favorite sister, and Sachse, for him. Garnet eventually married again, so I was fortunate to have a fine stepfather, a little brother and sister, and a wonderful small-town childhood amidst loving family and friends. However, I never knew much about my dad. There was so little said in those days, and, like many war orphans, I was uncomfortable asking questions.

At 56, following the death of my mother, 51 letters that my dad had written, and several telegrams, were found deep in a closet amongst my mother's things. Reading those letters began the quest to know my father. Reading, making notes, organizing them, trying to understand where he was, what he was doing, and what it was like as he wrote them was an incredible internal journey. Additionally, I began to have an entire new understanding of my mother.

That journey led, eventually, to a trip to Newfoundland and to the small town of Gander, where the air base had been and where there remains a small, international airport. The World War II museum and town officials in Gander were extremely gracious and helpful in adding information to fill out the picture of Captain Sachse Wallace, my dad. Many other contacts, chief among them discovering AWON, have deepened my experience of being honored to have had Sachse as my dad.