“They will tell of her in the West, tell of the vision of loveliness as she flashed through on her last burning mission, flashed through to her death, a falling star in the western heavens,” Maud Younger continued. “But neither legend nor vision is liberty, which was her life. Liberty cannot die. No work for liberty can be lost. It lives on in the hearts of the people, in their hopes, their aspirations, their activities. It becomes part of the life of the nation.”[24]
The moment of Inez’s passing opened another area for women to demonstrate their bravery and worth on the world stage. Only four months after her death, the United States officially entered the Great War. The U.S. military recruited some twenty-two thousand female nurses to serve overseas, but there is one group that stands out in my mind who never get the credit they deserve: the Hello Girls.
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The United States may not have had a fantastic military when World War I broke out, but what it did have was a booming telecom industry. Companies like American Telephone & Telegraph crisscrossed the country with wires, seizing the opportunity to capitalize on what they undoubtedly saw as the wave of the future: the telephone. At the time, placing a telephone call didn’t require dialing anything, you simply picked up the receiver, and an operator would be waiting for you on the other end, cordially asking for the number you wished to ring. You were then connected using a series of signals, interchanges, and a bit of magic to someone half a continent away, or even down the street.
Once the decision was made to enter the war, the U.S. government began working with AT&T to assemble telecom equipment that would be needed overseas. But telephone and telegraph lines were only part of the communication system the military needed: someone had to operate the switchboards. Most people who worked as telephone operators in the early twentieth century were women.
Because they would be working in France, the women who were to serve overseas as telephone operators also had to speak French fluently. When applications for the positions opened, the government was deluged with women wanting adventure (and of course, a steady paycheck and the ability to say they did their part in the war). Ultimately, only 223 women were chosen for a duty that had massive and lasting impacts on the world.[1]
If I asked you how women ultimately gained suffrage in the United States, you would probably point to people like Inez Milholland. And you would be right. But the women who took possession of the ball and ran, dodging bullets, being denied pensions and military benefits, braving fire and hypothermia, to move that ball the remaining yards over the finish line? It was the “Hello Girls,” even though they didn’t know it yet.
Woodrow Wilson felt that women who worked for suffrage were “abhorrent,” and that they should not be engaged in things like speaking in public.[2]
“No,” he said to the demands of suffrage fighters.
“No,” he said to the paraders and picketers.
“No,” to the members of Congress in favor of suffrage.
“No,” to the letters and telegrams from suffrage activists.
So what changed his mind? Historian Elizabeth Cobbs argues that the Hello Girls who risked their lives on the front lines of the military battles, operating telephone switchboards under abysmal conditions with speed and efficiency, slowly chipped away at Wilson’s resistance. Over time, Wilson began to realize that we couldn’t ask women to serve their country and not give them a say in how it was run.
One of the best-known Hello Girls was a take-charge gal with a baby face named Grace Banker. She was one of the more than seven thousand women who applied to work for AT&T and the Signal Corps, much like ambulance drivers worked for both the Red Cross and the Army.[3] When she finally received word back about her application, the Army asked for Banker’s educational and work history, her medical history, and a photograph—because, of course, one’s appearance was of great importance in such trying times. Grace, who had worked for AT&T for several years by the time the United States became involved in the war, was ultimately chosen to be the leader of a unit of female telephone operators in France.[4]
Before shipping out, groups of women assembled in New York, received some basic training, got fitted for their uniforms, and put together their kits. Women were given a list of things to purchase and bring with them, including iodine, sewing tools, gloves, and bloomers. They were also issued a uniform, which recruits later reported feeling very stylish in, that included a coat, skirt, hat, and more. But the telephone operators were required to pay for their own uniforms, unlike everyone else Uncle Sam was hiring.
And the price? Around $300, which is more than $7,000 in modern money.[5] I can’t think of another uniform that would cost $7,000, except for perhaps a suit someone would wear to work on the International Space Station. Seven thousand whole American dollars. Did all of the recruits have $300? Of course not. AT&T said they’d front them the money and then deduct it in increments from their paychecks.
Speaking of paychecks, the female members of the Signal Corps, the Hello Girls, were told they were part of the American Expeditionary Forces, and would be able to receive military benefits, like a pension. They swore an oath to the Constitution like everyone else. They wore (incredibly expensive) military uniforms. Yet when they applied for benefits available to others, like War Risk Insurance, they were told they weren’t eligible because they were contract employees.[6]
But the Hello Girls were never given a contract of any kind to sign. This meant that when women returned home, they were denied—over and over for decades—any kind of military benefits, even though enlisted men who worked in an office in New Jersey and whose lives were never at risk were eligible to get them.[7]
During the interim, after the telephone equipment landed and before the Hello Girls arrived, French women helped the military place phone calls on the exchanges. It took, on average, a full sixty seconds for calls to be connected. After the Americans arrived, it took twenty.[8] “Number, please,” they asked, with an expert mix of efficiency and warmth. Men reported that just hearing an American woman on the other end of the line gave them hope and made them feel like they were capable of turning the war around.
The women operating telephone switchboards in Europe, sometimes in gas masks, their nerves jangled by the booms outside their windows, were far removed from Inez’s suffrage fight. They knew it was happening, certainly, but they had to focus on the task at hand: connecting calls to win the war. “I just managed, managed, managed,” Grace Banker later said.[9] And these were not ordinary calls—in many cases, the calls were matters of grave security, and the Hello Girls had to exercise complete discretion. The threat of court-martial hung over their heads.
Telephones allowed men at the front to communicate their positions, which was particularly useful when they were trapped. From cellars and trenches, men were able to make phone calls using portable phones that didn’t require electricity, give the appropriate passcode, and be connected with someone who might be able to send in reinforcements or devise a plan.
But funnily enough, phones weren’t the only way men at the front communicated with each other. They also used birds. Pigeon birds. Carrier pigeons, which are the thoroughbred horse of the bird world. Capable of flying twelve to fifteen hours per day without a break, covering five hundred to seven hundred miles at speeds of thirty to sixty miles per hour, the cocks and hens of the U.S. Pigeon Intelligence Service delivered many an important message in a moment of trouble.[10]
(There’s no question that Bert from Sesame Street would be proud of the U.S. Pigeon Intelligence Service.)
When presented with the idea of using pigeons to carry messages, in addition to telephones, the Army at first was like, Mmmmmmmm, let’s pass on the birds. We’ve got enough to deal with without adding pigeons on a ship across the Atlantic into the mix. (Forget snakes on a plane, this was birds on a boat.) I was like, “Why are fully grown adult human women paying seven thousand dollars for an outfit, but somehow we have money for birds?” But hey, that’s just me. No shade to the pigeons, I love birds.
Very few military men had any pigeon skills. So even once the Army was like, “Let’s go with the pigeons,” they had difficulty finding people to help train, feed, and house them. When they eventually recruited two men—David Buscall and John Carney—to head up the pigeon program, it took some time to train other soldiers into the wizarding world of pigeoneering.[11]
Pigeons had their feathers marked with paint—boys were blue and girls were red—and they learned that they only got food at their roost. If they were hungry, they needed to get back home. And home, in the case of WWI pigeons, was a car chassis retrofitted with cages for individual birds. Men heading out into the front lines carried a bird with them in a wicker backpack, and if they needed help, they would write a message on a slip of paper, affix it to the pigeon’s ankle, and set it free.
Pigeons were so excellent at finding home that they could immediately begin winging their way back, no matter the time of day, no matter how hungry they were, no matter if there were bombs and guns being fired all around them. Once they made it home, the message was read and relayed to the appropriate people, often by telephone, and the birds got some food.
The Army eventually acquired around 4,400 pigeons for their use during the war, and had twenty mobile lofts that the birds would return to.[12] Germans who became aware that both the British and the Americans were using birds began to shoot at every pigeon they saw, hoping to intercept important messages.
The most famous moment in pigeoneering involved a bird named Cher Ami, whom I affectionately call Cher. Cher was presumed to be a girl and was treated as such, but genetic testing after his death later demonstrated his maleness.
A group of American troops found themselves completely fenced in by Germans in October 1918. Hunkered down on the side of a slope in a ravine, mortar fire began to rain down on the men, who knew that if they exposed their position to the Germans, they were toast.
The Americans soon realized they were taking fire from their own military, who couldn’t see them in the ravine. The stranded troops had only one pigeon left—the others had already returned messages or been killed by the enemy. So Cher was fitted with a pigeongram that read, “We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.”[13]
As Cher left the backpack basket, he first flew to a nearby tree and waited, disoriented by the sounds of mortar shells and gunfire around him. One of the men of the Lost Battalion, as it was later called, ran full tilt toward the tree, shaking the branches, trying to get Cher to fly away. Cher fluttered from branch to branch, momentarily unsure of what to do next. The soldier screamed at him to go, hurry, fly away, knowing the lives of his unit were on the line.
Finally, Cher took off from the tree branch. He was immediately spotted by the enemy, who took aim at his small pigeon chest. BOOM. Cher felt the bullet pierce his breast. A flurry of feathers followed him to the ground.
Breathing heavily, Cher considered his surroundings. Am I…alive? he might have wondered. After a few moments of rest, it dawned on him that the landscape of warfare surrounding him could hardly be birdie heaven. Staying where he was meant certain death, so Cher tested his wings, flapping strongly to see if he could get off the ground.
The moment came in which Cher realized he had no choice but to try. Ignoring the ripping feeling in his chest, he pumped his wings, and soon found himself three, six, nine, thirty feet in the air. Everything up here seemed familiar. He could feel the magnetic fields of the earth beneath him, steering his little pigeon compass over the sights and smells of the battlefield below.
Up, up, up his wings took him, too high for any bullet to reach. It took no time at all for the invisible forces that rule the earth—the forces that create auroras and were being studied by the likes of Einstein, who was tucked away in a flat in Berlin during the Great War, the forces that creatures like him had always felt and experienced and known as real—to guide him from the currents above to that one tiny, specific dot far below.
Cher began to dive, his compass telling him he was home, the pull growing stronger as he picked up speed. The smells and sounds of his roost drew nearer and nearer, until his flight wisdom told him it was time to brake and land softly on his perch.
“Cher Ami!” his keeper crooned, taking stock of the injured bird. He read the message attached to his ankle, and immediately the army commanders picked up the phone. “Number, please?” they heard as they executed plans to aid the trapped unit. Cher had done it, but it was not without cost. Emergency veterinary services were needed. A large portion of Cher’s breast had to be removed, and so did one of his legs.[14]
By the time the Lost Battalion was rescued, the men had been in the ravine for days. Of the six hundred men that went in, only 194 reportedly walked out without assistance.[15]
