A ‘Hello Girl’ recognized

By Sgt. 1st Class Aaron Heft

This past week the Maryland National Guard Honor Guard provided burial honors for a reinternment of one of the nation’s earliest female veterans. A member of a unit known as the “Hello Girls” Marie Edmee LeRoux was a trailblazing female pioneer in the U.S. Army in World War I. Nearly 105 years after she left military service, Ms. Leroux was reinterred with an official VA headstone and full military honors.

With the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 masses of American soldiers began arriving in theater and quickly suffered from a lack of dedicated U.S. military communications lines. After the Signal Corps established a massive telephone network across France, the next challenged for leaders in the American Expeditionary Force, or AEF, was to find staff that was both experienced enough to operate the lines, and fluent enough in French and English to allow for communication between coalition forces.

AEF planners turned to a largely untapped population when it came to the war effort. American women. The American telephone companies across the United States had largely employed women in the role of switchboard operators, and the high education level of many of these women meant that they had attained a bilingual fluency in French and other languages. Beginning in November of 1917, the U.S. Army Signal Corps began recruiting female commercial telephone operators for service in France.

Over 7,000 women applied for service with the telephone operators, of these 377 would serve in uniform, and 233 of those would be deployed to France with the AEF. Among these volunteers was Ms. Marie Edmee LeRoux. Born in Montreal, Canada in February of 1895. Leroux emigrated to the United States in 1906 settling with her family in Rhode Island. By 1917 she was living in New York and working as a telephone operator when she volunteered for the war effort. LeRoux was inducted into the service in 1918 and trained with other operators at Campe Meade Maryland, before setting sail for France on June 28th, 1918 as part of Signal Corps Telephone Operators Unit Number 4.

In France, the female Signal Corps Operators earned the nickname “Hello Girls” for their verbal response upon receiving a call. The Operators of Unit #4 and other sections provided a critical link between frontline troops and rear areas. Initially deployed to rear areas only, as the war progressed into it’s final phase in September of 1918 “Hello Girls” moved to the frontlines with the 1st Army, providing critical communications support for advancing AEF units in the St Mihiel and Meuse Argonne Offensives.

Due to the unique status of the “Hello Girls,” the end of the war brought an end to their recognition as military members. Despite being uniformed, serving in France, and subject to Army regulations while in service, the group was denied military discharge

papers and considered civilian employees in the immediate post-war years. In the decades after the war tireless efforts by veterans of the group resulted in many Congressional bills attempting to recognize their unique and critical service. These efforts, in conjunction with the Department of Veterans Affairs and American Legion, resulted in formal recognition in 1977, authorizing discharges and veteran status to the telephone operators.

Unfortunately, Ms. LeRoux would not live to see the results of this legislation. Leroux remained in France after the war studying music and travelling across Europe. She raised a daughter, born in Paris in 1936, and eventually returned to her birthplace in Canada in 1940. After returning to the United States in 1941, she lived with family in Prince Georges County until her passing in 1945. 

Now over one hundred years later, the Maryland Army National Guard participated in a ceremony of recognition and honor alongside the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission, veterans’ organizations, and dignitaries to bestow the appropriate honors upon Ms. LeRoux.