not to mitigate the harms of the war. In popular parlance, they were known as the Hello Girls . (10) Signal Corps Operators wore Army uniforms and Army insignia always, as well as standard-issue identity disks in case of death, and were subject to court martial for infractions of the military 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 employees, even though the women had not seen or signed any contracts. Military code allowed only for the induction of men and the code remained unchanged 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 duties in France. The operators arrived before most infantrymen of the Armed Forces in order to facilitate logistics and deployment and spent their first night in Paris under German bombardment. (13) After the arrival of the operators, telephone 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 increased to 150,000 per day. (15) In addition to standard telephone operating, bilingual Signal Corps members provided simultaneous translation between officers from France and officers from the United States, who were communicating 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 closest to the front line, the Army exclusively used women, in rotating 12-hour shifts. In the rear, the Army