The history of the "Hello Girls" begins in late 1917, when General Pershing's appeal for bilingual telephone-switchboard operators was published in newspapers throughout the United States. It was called an "Emergency Appeal" and specifically requested that women, who held the position of switchboard operators exclusively in the new Bell Telephone Company, be sworn into the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Pershing wanted women to be sworn into the Army as an emergency need, because, he stated, women have the patience and perseverence to do long, arduous detailed work. He had found that the men in the Signal Corps had difficulty operating the switchboards for these reasons and he also wanted them to be in the field, constantly stringing the wire necessary for communication from the trenches to the A.E.F. GHQ at Chaumont. It was the first time in the history of warfare that soldiers in the front-lines were connected to the General command. http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/hello.htm http://userpages.aug.com/captbarb/signal.html
