The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs

Author:Elizabeth Cobbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

“First very important message through & I had to relay it,” Berthe Hunt recorded cryptically at Neufchateau on May 27, the day the army’s First Infantry Division moved into position on the eve of the Battle of Cantigny to stop the enemy from advancing deeper into France. The untested Signal Corps women and the U.S. Army would both have to prove themselves to win a spot on the dangerous, complex battlefield.8

The Allies remained mistrustful of Pershing’s larger strategy. They needed immediate help. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, appointed commander in chief of Allied operations at the nadir of Germany’s spring assault, prevailed at least temporarily. Black Jack Pershing agreed to siphon off several of his strongest divisions and place them under French and British leadership to halt the German offensive in late May. The American units would remain intact, however. As Pershing later recalled, “The Allies were skeptical as to the ability of our divisions … to conduct an offensive.”9 Pershing wanted to prove his men’s merit as a cohesive force. The same murderous spring day that the Americans moved into position, the German Army took fifty thousand French prisoners and advanced thirty miles over lands so battle scarred that they mimicked a moonscape.

Once again, long-range explosives rained on Paris. German forces imperiled the French capital. In early June, Signal Corps operators were told to prepare for immediate evacuation. The women protested that they would stay as long as the men did. “The telephone business, we felt, had become well-nigh unmanageable on account of the [German] drive going on, and it seemed to us that to put inexperienced boys in our places might prove disastrous,” one Hello Girl later recalled. When shell fragments shattered a window in the Paris telephone exchange, the women refused to abandon their switchboards for the bomb shelter. “We will stay until the last man leaves,” they insisted. Assuming that the operators were regular army, an admiring journalist observed, “This is the fiber of the enlisted sisters of our fighting men.”10

Not privy to the details of grand strategy, Grace Banker nonetheless suspected the Allies were not doing well. The bright blue skies over Chaumont gave her “that lazy feeling that every thing ought to be all right,” yet she sensed something was terribly wrong. She knew better than to ask. “I made that mistake only once with Lt. Riser,” she admitted, who told her, “I was in the Army and there one asks nothing but keeps one’s eyes open.” Banker despaired at Germany’s implacability and Russia’s indifference to the plight of its former allies. She longed to be closer to the front, but she noted, “Every one says it is no place for a woman.”11

While the French and British armies countered bigger attacks elsewhere, American divisions fought the first of three small offensives to halt the German march toward Paris. Each engagement bolstered Pershing’s claim that America could field an effective force. The first took place at Cantigny, an evacuated farming village on a ridge the Germans had taken and from which they could rain artillery fire down on the surrounding area.

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