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Dear Doug Collins

The Hello Girls: Sworn In as Soldiers, Sent Home as Contractors

They were recruited because the Army could not fight without them. They swore the Army oath, wore Army uniforms with Signal Corps insignia, held rank as operators, supervisors, and chief operators, and worked the switchboards through the largest battles in American history to that date — and when the war was won, the Army informed them that they had never been soldiers at all. This page is the documented record of the 223 women of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit — the "Hello Girls" — what they did in France, what their own institution did to them when they came home, and the two separate fights, sixty years and then a century long, that it took to set the record straight.

The service and the promise

The telephone was the nervous system of the First World War — the means by which orders to advance, fire, and retreat moved between headquarters and the trenches — and the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in France in 1917 with a communications problem it could not solve with the men it had. Calls had to pass between American and French officers, in two languages, at speed. According to Congress’s later findings, it took a male infantryman an average of 60 seconds to connect such a call. The Army needed people who already knew the switchboard and spoke flawless French.

General John J. Pershing, commanding the AEF, asked for them directly. In November 1917 the Signal Corps called for bilingual women telephone operators, and American women answered in numbers the Army had not anticipated: 7,600 women applied for the first 100 positions, according to the National Archives. From those applications, roughly 450 women were accepted and trained — many of them experienced operators from the telephone companies — and of that number, 223 ultimately served in France, deployed in six units. The distinction matters, and this page keeps it: 223 is the number who served overseas, the number Congress itself uses; the larger figure, about 450, is the number recruited and trained.

What the Army gave those 223 women was, by every measure the Army itself uses, soldiering. The first of them took the military oath on January 15, 1918, and Congress’s findings record that they were considered “full-fledged soldiers under the articles of war.” They were issued Army uniforms with regulation buttons and Signal Corps insignia, with rank shown on the brassard worn on the left arm — operator, supervisor, chief operator. They were assigned to units commanded by commissioned officers. They were subject to military discipline, up to and including court-martial. They signed no civilian contracts, and as the Doughboy Foundation’s account puts it, they were repeatedly told: “you’re in the Army now.” The promise made to them was the ordinary one, made in the ordinary way — oath, uniform, orders — and nothing in their service suggested it would be read back to them differently when the war ended.

The first unit — 33 women under Chief Operator Grace Banker of Passaic, New Jersey — sailed in March 1918 and spent its first night in Paris under German bombardment. Banker, a Barnard graduate and former AT&T switchboard instructor, would lead operators at General Headquarters in Chaumont, then forward with First Army headquarters for the offensives that ended the war.

What happened

What happened, first, was the work — and the record of the work is not in dispute, because the Army’s own commanders wrote it at the time.

The effect was immediate. After the operators arrived, according to Congress’s findings, calls tripled from 13,000 to 36,000 per day; as five further contingents arrived, the system the women ran reached 150,000 calls per day. The bilingual operators did in about 10 seconds what had taken a minute — and they did more than connect: they provided simultaneous translation between French and American officers on the line, passing orders for troops in the trenches, artillery units on alert, and pilots at French airfields awaiting instructions. By the last two months of the war, the Signal Corps considered the women so essential that the exchanges closest to the front were staffed exclusively by women, in rotating twelve-hour shifts; male soldiers took the quieter overnight hours in the rear.

Seven operators went forward with Pershing’s own headquarters through the Battles of St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, staffing the operations boards through which the orders for those offensives moved, and were awarded the Defensive Sector Clasp for the Meuse-Argonne operation. Banker, who had moved with First Army headquarters to Ligny-en-Barrois and then Bar-le-Duc, later described being woken at 1:30 in the morning by the guns at St. Mihiel and going straight back to the boards while the barracks shook. In 1919, the Army awarded Banker the Distinguished Service Medal — according to Congress’s findings, one of only 18 individuals so honored out of 16,000 eligible Signal Corps officers. More than thirty additional operators received special commendations, many signed by Pershing himself, for “exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous services.” The Chief Signal Officer’s official report, written two days after the Armistice, concluded that “a large part of the success of the communications of this Army is due to … a competent staff of women operators.”

The total, in Congress’s findings, is stated as a single sentence of arithmetic: as of November 11, 1918, the 223 female operators had connected 26,000,000 calls for the AEF.

The service continued after the guns stopped. The women worked the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and served with the Army of Occupation in Germany. Two of the 223 did not come home at all: Chief Operator Inez Crittenden died on the day of the Armistice, November 11, 1918, of complications of influenza, and was buried at Suresnes American Cemetery near Paris; Operator Cora Bartlett died on June 23, 1919, of typhoid fever, and her fellow soldiers gave her an elaborate military funeral procession before her remains were returned to Michigan. The last of the Hello Girls came home in January 1920 — the final operator was discharged, if that is the word, on January 20, 1920.

And then the women discovered what the Army had decided they were. They received no honorable discharges. They received, instead, “service termination letters.” The Army’s position was that they had been civilian contract employees all along — this despite the oaths, the uniforms, the rank, the discipline, and the Distinguished Service Medal pinned on their chief operator while she was still in France. The legal reasoning, such as it was, rested on Army regulations written in the male gender — even though, as Congress’s findings note, legal counsel had recognized that the National Defense Act of 1916, under which members of the telephone industry were brought into the service, imposed no gender restriction. Chief Signal Officer General George Squier, the top officer in the Signal Corps, objected to the denial. He was overruled by his own institution.

The practical consequences were exact, and Congress later enumerated them: the women were denied what male soldiers and Army nurses received as a matter of course: hospitalization for disabilities incurred in the line of duty; cash bonuses; soldiers’ pensions; flags on their coffins; and the Victory Medals they had been promised in France. Operator Isabelle Villiers’s experience was typical: she applied for the standard $60 bonus granted to members of the AEF and was refused, on the ground that the telephone operators fell outside the law. They had been soldiers for every purpose that involved risk. They were civilians for every purpose that involved obligation.

What the institution did afterward

For the next sixty years, the institution did nothing — and the women did everything.

Led by Merle Egan of Montana — later Merle Egan Anderson — the surviving operators petitioned Congress, in Congress’s own count, more than 50 times. Bills were introduced session after session, beginning in the 1920s, and died session after session. The women wrote to presidents, testified when anyone would hear them, and pressed state bonus boards and the Veterans Administration. Seattle attorney Mark Hough took up their case in the 1970s and helped carry it through its final push. Banker, the decorated chief operator, died in 1960, seventeen years before the end of it.

The breakthrough, when it came, arrived by a side door the Army had not guarded. In 1977 Congress took up the cause of a different unit — the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots of the Second World War, sponsored in the Senate by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, himself a wartime pilot — and wrote the statute broadly: it covered the WASPs and “the service of any person in any other similarly situated group” whose members had rendered service to the Armed Forces in a capacity treated at the time as civilian employment or contractual service. With Representative Lindy Boggs of Louisiana championing the cause in the House, the Hello Girls’ advocates got the operators inside that language. On November 23, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the GI Bill Improvement Act of 1977 — Public Law 95-202 — into law.

The statute did not itself declare the Hello Girls veterans. What it did was direct the Secretary of Defense to determine, group by group, whether such service had constituted active military service. The telephone operators applied under that process — and in 1979, they were granted veteran status, sixty years after the last of them had come home. Honorable discharges and the Victory Medals promised in France were finally issued that year.

Congress’s findings record how many women were left to receive them: only 33 of the operators who had returned home after the war were still alive in 1979 to receive their discharge papers and Victory Medals. (Some later accounts put the number who personally received discharges lower still; the figure of 33 is the one Congress wrote into its findings, and it is the one this page uses.) Some moments from that year survive. Olive Shaw of Massachusetts, who had worked on Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers’s staff, lived to receive her discharge — and in October 1980 became the first burial at the Massachusetts National Cemetery. Oleda Joure Christides of Michigan raised her discharge paper to her lips and kissed it; the only thing she had ever wanted from the government, Congress recorded, was a flag on her coffin. And Merle Egan, receiving the honorable discharge she had spent a lifetime pursuing, delivered the verdict the whole fight had earned, as reported by historian Elizabeth Cobbs and repeated since: “I deserve this medal not for serving in France but for fighting the U.S. Army for sixty years.” She died in 1984, a veteran of the United States Army at last in the Army’s own records.

What the 1979 recognition did not include is also part of the record. It came with no retroactive pay and no back compensation for the six decades in which the women had been denied the bonuses, pensions, and care their male comrades received as a matter of course. For the 190 women already dead, it changed the history books and the headstones — Crittenden’s grave in France eventually received a marker reflecting her military service — but it could not reach them. Veteran status, for most of the Hello Girls, was a posthumous correction.

Where it stands now

The second fight — the one for the nation’s highest civilian honor — was carried by the next generation, and it is the reason the Hello Girls are known at all to most Americans today.

Historian Elizabeth Cobbs recovered the story in her 2017 book The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, built in part on Grace Banker’s diary and papers, preserved by Banker’s granddaughter Carolyn Timbie. Filmmaker James William Theres — then an executive writer for the Department of Veterans Affairs — turned it into the 2018 documentary The Hello Girls, told through century-old letters, photographs, archival film, and the only known audio recording of an actual Hello Girl. A musical followed. And in 2018, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission formally recommended the Congressional Gold Medal; Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Dean Heller of Nevada introduced the first medal bill that year.

The bill that finally passed was the work of the 118th Congress. In the Senate, the Hello Girls Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2023 (S. 815) was introduced on March 15, 2023, by Senator Tester with Senators Jerry Moran, Maggie Hassan, and Marsha Blackburn — the Tester–Heller pairing of 2018 having given way, after Heller left the Senate, to a new bipartisan team — and it passed the Senate unanimously in September 2024. In the House, the companion effort was led by Representatives Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, Sam Graves of Missouri, and Sharice Davids of Kansas. Behind the members stood the descendants and the research team the Centennial Commission had assembled — more than fifty volunteer researchers, among them retired Lieutenant Colonel Ed Saunders of Montana, who had first taken the Montana Hello Girls’ story to Tester in 2017 — working to document every one of the 223 women well enough to carry a gold medal bill through both chambers.

Rather than pass as a freestanding law, the medal act was folded into the must-pass defense bill. It became law as Section 5703 of the Servicemember Quality of Life Improvement and National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025 (H.R. 5009), which President Joe Biden signed on December 23, 2024 — Public Law 118-159. One hundred and six years after the Armistice, the Hello Girls had their Congressional Gold Medal.

On March 19, 2025, during Women’s History Month, descendants, advocates, and the American Legion gathered at the Military Women’s Memorial at Arlington to celebrate the medal — Carolyn Timbie among them, speaking for a grandmother she never met, who had died in 1960 still officially a civilian. “It has been long overdue,” Timbie said. The gold medal itself, as the Veterans of Foreign Wars has reported, is in design, and when struck it will be held by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; bronze duplicates are the customary means by which families obtain a copy. In May 2025 the unit received a tribute plaque at the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir — alongside the plaques of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 82nd Airborne, units whose soldiering was never questioned.

That is where the record stands: the status fight closed in 1979, the medal fight in 2024, and the medal itself in production. Every woman in the unit is dead; the last recognitions arrived addressed to descendants and to history.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The Hello Girls left no combat film of their own. What the record has instead is the historian who rebuilt their story, the museum that teaches it, the medal celebration their descendants finally held, and the news cameras that covered the medal’s passage. Five films:

The historian's account. Elizabeth Cobbs at the National Archives, April 2017, presenting the research that became The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers — the book that brought the unit back into public view. (U.S. National Archives.)

At the National WWI Museum. Cobbs's full lecture at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City — the service in France, the denial at home, and the sixty-year fight, told where the nation's WWI record is kept. (National WWI Museum and Memorial.)

The medal, celebrated. The Military Women's Memorial's March 19, 2025 celebration of the Congressional Gold Medal — descendants, including Grace Banker's granddaughter Carolyn Timbie, marking the honor none of the 223 lived to see. (Military Women's Memorial.)

The medal in Congress. FOX4 News Kansas City on the legislation honoring the operators — reported through the family of Hello Girl Marie Edmee LeRoux and her granddaughter Catherine Bourgin, one of the descendant-advocates who carried the bill. (FOX4 News Kansas City.)

The story, in brief. AT&T — the company many of the women came from, and whose people trained them — tells the unit's story in short form: the call, the switchboards, and the recognition that took a century. (AT&T.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.