for the Army to function under battlefield condi-
tions. Monolingual infantrymen from the United 
States were unable to connect calls rapidly or com-
municate effectively with their French counterparts 
to put calls through over toll lines that linked one 
region of the country with another. The Army found 
that the average male operator required 60 seconds 
to make a connection. That rate was unacceptably 
slow, especially for operational calls between com-
mand outposts and the front lines. 
(4) During this time, in the United States, tele-
phone operating was largely sex-segregated. Hired 
for their speed in connecting calls, women filled 85 
percent of the telephone operating positions in the 
United States. It took the average female operator 
10 seconds to make a connection. 
(5) On November 8, 1917, General Pershing 
cabled the War Department and wrote, ‘‘On account 
of the great difficulty of obtaining properly qualified 
men, request organization and dispatch to France a 
force of women telephone operators all speaking 
French and English equally well.’’. To begin, Gen-
eral Pershing requested 100 women under the com-
mand of a commissioned captain, writing that ‘‘All 
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should have allowances of Army nurses and should 
be uniformed.’’. 
(6) The War Department sent press releases to 
newspapers across the United States to recruit 
women willing to serve for the duration of the war 
and face the hazards of submarine warfare and aer-
ial bombardment. These articles emphasized that pa-
triotic women would be ‘‘full-fledged soldier[s] under 
the articles of war’’ and would ‘‘do as much to help 
win the war as the men in khaki who go ‘over the 
top.’ ’’. All women selected would take the Army 
oath. 
(7) More than 7,600 women volunteered for the 
100 positions described in paragraph (5) and the 
first recruits took the Army oath on January 15, 
1918. 
(8) Like nurses and doctors at the time, female 
Signal Corps members had relative rather than tra-
ditional ranks and were ranked as Operator, Super-
visor, or Chief Operator. When promoted, the 
women were required to swear the Army oath again. 
(9) Telephone operators were the first women 
to serve as soldiers in non-medical classifications 
and the job of the operators was to help win the 
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war, not to mitigate the harms of the war. In pop-
ular parlance, they were known as the ‘‘Hello Girls’’. 
(10) Signal Corps Operators wore Army uni-
forms and Army insignia always, as well as stand-
ard-issue identity disks in case of death, and were 
subject to court martial for infractions of the mili-
tary code. 
(11) Unbeknownst to the women operators and 
their immediate officers, the legal counsel of the 
Army ruled internally on March 20, 1918, that the 
women were not actually soldiers but contract em-
ployees, even though the women had not seen or 
signed any contracts. Military code allowed only for 
the induction of men and the code remained un-
changed despite the orders of General Pershing. 
Nevertheless, legal counsel also recognized that the 
National Defense Act of 1916, which allowed for the 
induction of members of the telephone industry of 
the United States into the Armed Forces, imposed 
no gender restrictions. 
(12) Four days later, on March 24, 1918, the 
first contingent of operators began their official du-
ties in France. The operators arrived before most in-
fantrymen of the Armed Forces in order to facilitate 
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logistics and deployment and spent their first night 
in Paris under German bombardment. 
(13) After the arrival of the operators, tele-
phone service in France improved immediately, as 
calls tripled from 13,000 to 36,000 per day. 
(14) The Army quickly recruited, trained, and 
deployed 5 additional contingents of female Signal 
Corps operators. With these personnel, calls in-
creased to 150,000 per day. 
(15) In addition to standard telephone oper-
ating, bilingual Signal Corps members provided si-
multaneous translation between officers from France 
and officers from the United States, who were com-
municating by telephone. 
(16) The AEF fought their first major battles 
in the last 2 months of the war. By that point, the 
Signal Corps considered the contributions of women 
to be so essential that, in telephone exchanges clos-
est to the front line, the Army exclusively used 
women, in rotating 12-hour shifts. In the rear, the 
Army established rotating 8-hour shifts and gave 
male soldiers the overnight shift when telephone 
traffic was slower. 
(17) Seven bilingual operators— 
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(A) served at the Battles of St. Mihiel and 
Meuse-Argonne under the immediate command 
of General Pershing; 
(B) staffed the Operations Boards through 
which orders to advance, fire, and retreat were 
delivered to soldiers in the trenches, to artillery 
units on alert, and to pilots awaiting orders at 
French airfields; and 
(C) were awarded a ‘‘Defensive Sector 
Clasp’’ for the Meuse-Argonne operation. 
(18) The Chief Operator supervising the Hello 
Girls, Grace Banker of Passaic, New Jersey, was 
awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Out of 
16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers, Banker was 
one of only 18 individuals so honored. 
(19) Thirty additional operators received special 
commendations, many signed by General Pershing 
himself, for ‘‘exceptionally meritorious and con-
spicuous services’’ in ‘‘Advance Sections’’ of the con-
flict. 
(20) The war ended on November 11, 1918. As 
of that date, 223 female operators served in France 
and had connected 26,000,000 calls for the AEF. 
(21) The Chief Signal Officer of the Army Sig-
nal Corps wrote in his official report 2 days after 
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