front cover of The Hello Girls
The Hello Girls
America’s First Women Soldiers
Elizabeth Cobbs
Harvard University Press, 2017

In 1918, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France at General Pershing’s explicit request. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. While suffragettes picketed the White House and President Wilson struggled to persuade a segregationist Congress to give women of all races the vote, these courageous young women swore the army oath and settled into their new roles. Elizabeth Cobbs reveals the challenges they faced in a war zone where male soldiers wooed, mocked, and ultimately celebrated them.

The army discharged the last Hello Girls in 1920, the year Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. When they sailed home, they were unexpectedly dismissed without veterans’ benefits and began a sixty-year battle that a handful of survivors carried to triumph in 1979.

“What an eye-opener! Cobbs unearths the original letters and diaries of these forgotten heroines and weaves them into a fascinating narrative with energy and zest.”
—Cokie Roberts, author of Capital Dames

“This engaging history crackles with admiration for the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the First World War, becoming the country’s first female soldiers.”
—New Yorker

“Utterly delightful… Cobbs very adroitly weaves the story of the Signal Corps into that larger story of American women fighting for the right to vote, but it’s the warm, fascinating job she does bringing her cast…to life that gives this book its memorable charisma… This terrific book pays them a long-warranted tribute.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Cobbs is particularly good at spotlighting how closely the service of military women like the Hello Girls was tied to the success of the suffrage movement.”
—NPR

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front cover of Service with the Signal Corps
Service with the Signal Corps
The Civil War Memoir of Captain Louis R. Fortescue
J. Gregory Acken
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
"This book provides very informative and fascinating insight into the experiences of a Signal Corps officer of the Union Army.” —Steven J. Rausch, U.S. Army Signal Corps historian

In 1854 an assistant surgeon named Albert J. Myer entered the Union Army and created a system of transmitting information that would revolutionize military communications. His flag-and-torch system led to the formation of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Major Myer selected only educated men for this new arm of the military, and among these was twenty-three-year-old Louis R. Fortescue. Fortescue’s memoir, written in the postwar years but based on his wartime diaries, offers a rare view of this lesser-known support arm of the Union army.

The Signal Corps originally met with resistance, particularly from high-ranking Regular Army officers, but the men who served in the corps—including Fortescue—took great pride in their duties and eventually succeeded in changing the minds of their unit’s detractors by achieving the most basic, but often bedeviling, strategic objective on any battlefield: effective communication. Fortescue’s memoir not only presents a unique look at the corps, but it also provides important insights into the war as a whole. Fortescue experienced the conflict from several perspectives—infantry subaltern, signal officer, aide-de-camp (briefly), and prisoner of war—and took an active role in a number of significant campaigns and battles. Fortescue’s ardent opinions on the war, President Lincoln, army commanders, and the South are expressed without reservation, making this account a must-read for anyone interested in how Civil War veterans understood their cause and interpreted their experiences.

Expertly edited by J. Gregory Acken to place events in chronological order and make the text as complete and accessible to the reader as possible, this remarkable record of Fortescue’s Civil War service fills a much-needed void in the historiography of the conflict. As the first full-length, published memoir to deal with Civil War Signal Corps service, this book provides a glimpse into the most tumultuous era in the nation’s history from an underexplored new perspective.

J. Gregory Acken served for twelve years on the Board of Governors of theCivil War Library and Museum of Philadelphia. He is the editor of Inside the Army
of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson. He lives in New Jersey.
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