September 8, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1943, the U.S. Army created a top-secret unit unlike any other. Known as the Ghost Army, it was made up of artists, sound engineers, and prop builders who used inflatable tanks, fake radio signals, and sound effects to trick the German army. Officially called the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, their mission was to create the illusion of large U.S. forces where none existed. Rick Beyer, author of The Ghost Army of World War II, tells the story of how this deception unit helped mislead Hitler’s troops and shaped the outcome of the war.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
In nineteen forty three, the US Army came up with
a daring plan to trick Hitler's Army. They created a
unit of artists, sound engineers, and prop builders who fooled
the German Army into seeing the US Army in places
(00:33):
it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The year is nineteen forty four and the world is
engulfed in the biggest catastrophe in human history, World War Two.
You're a soldier and you get your orders. You're headed
to the front, but you're not going to be firing
an M one rifle or I think a Sherman tank.
Your mission is to put on a show. To put
(01:05):
on a show for the enemy, you must stage a
complex multimedia presentation spread out over many miles and do
so right in the middle of a war zone for
an attentive and discerning audience that wants nothing more than
to kill you. Thousands of lives, including your own, depend
(01:28):
on how good a job you do, and you're going
to be asked to do it again next week. And that,
in a nutshell, is the mission that was handed to
the twenty third Headquarters Special Troops, also known as the
Ghost Army. They were designed to fool the enemy, and
to do so they employed battalions of inflatable tanks, a
(01:52):
vast array of sound effects, radio trickery. They even dressed
up as soldiers from other units, created phony headquarters, all
to fool the German Army into thinking the Americans were
in one spot, when in fact they were someplace else entirely.
(02:16):
The Ghost Army's really the brainchild of two American staff
officers who are polar opposites, Colonel Billy Harris and Major
Ralph Ingersoll. And Ingersoll's kind of a wild civilian guy.
He was a journalist, sort of flamboyant, left wing, very imaginative,
sometimes had only a tenuous relationship with the truth. He'd
(02:38):
been a publisher and an author and done all this stuff.
And now he's in the Army and he's working with
this very buttoned down West Point colonel and Billy Harris,
and the two of them together in the Special Plans
branch in the European Theater of Operations in late nineteen
forty three, they dream up this idea of let's create
a traveling road show of deception. Why do they do it?
(03:00):
The Americans want to have every advantage once they land
in Europe, and deception can give you an advantage. So
these two planners come up with this idea to create
a multimedia mobile deception unit, and then they sell it
to the high ranking generals and they come up with
this very imaginative idea. It's December nineteen forty three before
(03:29):
the orders really go out to form this unit. The
US Army doesn't have any doctrines, they don't have any manuals.
They basically have to figure out their mission on their own.
So it happens so fast, and it requires them to
basically learn as they're going, which will continue throughout the war.
(03:50):
And then by May they're in England and give it
another month and they're on the ground in France trying
to carry out these deceptions against the German to fool
them about the location and size of American troops. And
in a lot of ways, they're like a traveling road
(04:11):
show of deception with people who are actors and people
who are producers and people who are doing the sound,
and they're creating something very convincing. They hope for the
enemy and they hope it's convincing because that's going to
lead to the saving of American lives, and that's why
it's so important. Well, the headquarters Company is like the
(04:32):
box office, and then the six oh third camouflage engineers
who worked with the inflatables. They're like the guys doing scenery.
And you've got the Radio company they're doing dialogue. You've
got the four h six Combat engineers that's the security
arm of the unit. They're like the spear carriers. And
then you've got the thirty one to thirty second Signal
Company and they are like the orchestra. And you put
(04:56):
it all together and you hope that the result is convincing.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I was interviewed for a top secret organization which was
involved in psychological warfare and something to do with sound.
I thought sound we were going to zap all the
Germans within the war and that would be it. But
it was more psychology than zapping.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You couldn't really believe that what we were going to
do would be effective. How can we come along with
rubber dummies and blow it up and make it look real.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
I had no idea of why I was there or
what I was to be doing. After I was there
for a few days, I spoke to this major and
I said, what is this organization? And he said, let's
put it this way, lieutenant. If we are totally successful,
you may not come back.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
And the mission was to try to be able to
take it the thousand men and put them in so
that fifteen thousand men could move somewhere else and not
be detected.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
We were going to be in show business where we
set up one night stands and like ghosts, disappear.
Speaker 8 (06:14):
And with the point somebody said, you mean we're asking
for the enemy to fire on us.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
The answer was yes.
Speaker 9 (06:22):
At that point we all came to the conclusion.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
That this was a suicide outfit. What a story you're
hearing about a mini Hollywood production unit going out and
tricking the Nazis into thinking our troops were one place
(06:47):
when they were in another. A real suicide mission. This
turns out to be a really hard one. And you
heard from veterans of the Ghost Army, including Jack McGlenn,
Irving Stemple, Robert Conrad, ed Blow, Ned Harris Gills, Seltzer,
Dick Syracuse, Harold Flynn, Victor Dowd, and al Albrecht. When
we come back more of the story of the Ghost
(07:09):
Army of World War Two here on our American Stories.
Leah Abib here and I'm inviting you to help our
American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday
(07:32):
only a short time away. If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and
want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories
told ear to millions for years to come, please consider
making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories. Go
to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot, any amount helps. Go to
(07:52):
Olamericanstories dot com and give. And we continue with our
American Stories and with Rick Bayer telling the story of
(08:15):
the Ghost Army of World War Two along with men
who are actually in the unit. Let's pick up where
we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
The unit is a mix of soldiers who were specifically
recruited and some who are basically just draftees or enlistees
who get assigned to it. The visual deception is going
to be handled by the six ZHO third camouflage engineers,
and about half that unit are artists who have very
specifically been put into this camouflage unit to use their
(08:49):
art skills. Now they're not going to be using them
for camouflage. They're going to be using them to make
things that aren't real look real. It's kind of the
reverse of camouflage. Have engineers, telephone linemen, signalers, scriptwriters, all
sorts of people like that who are recruited or sort
of find their way into this unit, not by accident,
(09:12):
but that's mixed up then with a bunch of people
who are bartenders, farm hands, policemen, teachers, all sorts of
different jobs from forty six or forty seven states. The
twenty third Headquarters Troops consisted of about eleven hundred soldiers,
so it kind of sounds like a lot, but they're
(09:34):
pretending to be as many as twenty or thirty thousand,
and these eleven hundred soldiers were divided into different units
for the different types of deception they did. So visual
deception is handled by the six h third Camouflage Engineers.
That's the unit that has a lot of artists in it,
and they're using inflatable tanks and trucks and all sorts
of stuff to full enemy aerial reconnaissance and then sonic
(09:59):
deception using sound to fool the enemy is handled by
the thirty one to thirty second Signal Service Company, and
they've got giant speakers mounted on half tracks that can
project sound for fifteen miles. So it's not the sound
of battle, but like sounds of convoys on the move,
of tanks rumbling down a road, of convoy, of trucks
(10:21):
rumbling down a road, all sorts of different things like that.
The Sonic Deception unit went out and recorded all these
sounds before they left the United States onto big vinyl
sound effects records. They're actually I think they're glass transcription discs.
Then when they're doing any particular deception, they can mix
the different sounds together to get the exact sounds that
(10:43):
they want for a deception, and it's one of the
earliest uses of multi track recordings.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
Recordings brilliant, But there was a road leading up. The
music had to be described, the change of gears, tank's
going up, thanks going down, tanks assembling.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
And then we'd go to another spot where trucks were
just flying through on the highway.
Speaker 10 (11:11):
They had recording to building a pontoon bridge or any
cup a bridge, and you could hear them hammering away and.
Speaker 11 (11:17):
Swearing, enormous sounds of tracks racing through the forest. Sounded
like a whole division was amassing.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
And some of these sounds, really it's not just trucks
or tanks or bridge building. It's guy's voices.
Speaker 11 (11:34):
Sogeant's voices yelling, put out that cigarette.
Speaker 12 (11:37):
Now back of my half track, I tell my children,
was the biggest boombox you ever saw, But it played
sounds of tanks and activity.
Speaker 11 (11:48):
It was all fakery. It was all a big act.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
All the stuff to make it seem realistic for an
enemy listening in an outpost, outpost across the river and
kind of hearing these sounds and thinking, oh my gosh,
the Americans are really moving in in force. But you
also have a radio unit, the Signal Company Special it
(12:14):
was called, And these guys are doing fake radio transmissions because,
of course, if you have a division that's moving into
an area, they are communicating by radio because they're coming
in on a move. They haven't been able to lay
their telephone lines yet, and so you've got all these
radio operators sending out phony messages to each other and
also connecting with real radio networks. So if the Germans
(12:35):
are listening in. Well, they're starting to hear all this
stuff coming in, and they're going to again. It's another
reason to believe that a certain division is moving in.
And once they're in Europe, they develop a fourth type
of deception, which they call special effects, and this involves
pretending to be the soldiers of whatever division they're impersonating.
(12:56):
Let's say it's the seventy fifth Infantry. They're putting on
seventy fifth Infantry patches, they're putting those bumper markings on
their vehicles, they're setting up phony headquarters. This is all
the fool enemy spies that have left behind, so it
all airded up.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
My god, there they are, the tidy fifth in the
seventy ninth, the whatever, you know. They're up there and
that's where it's going to be. I don't bang on
the map. Well, really they were not there. They were
down here.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Why don't we put a stencil of the name of
the unit that we were simulating right on the trucks,
and why don't we start a counterfeit shoulder patch factory
where they would see we were with a seventy fifth
division one of the divisions.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
We did, so we began to put on their patches
and put their bumper markings on, and we physically assumed
the role. Only for every hundred of them, there might
be ten of us.
Speaker 13 (14:01):
Yeah, a sewing kit. That's one of the things that
was required that we carry with us all the time.
Speaker 10 (14:08):
Give us the patches, and we were good at sewing
them on seamstresses. My shirts were all wrecked from having
sewn so many different shoulder patches on them. The soldiers
are walking into bars and their cafes and you know, like, oh, yeah,
well we're moving out tonight or whatever it is. You know,
they're they're singing the song that the guys in the
(14:31):
seventy fifth always like to sing.
Speaker 14 (14:33):
Our job was to go in with our phony markings
and phony stories that we were pretending to be officers
and soldiers from another organization, and we were turned loose
in town, go to the pub, order some omelets and
talk loose.
Speaker 15 (14:53):
A lot of the guys go to the bakery, got
rolls and stuff and said we got to go an
extra supply because we're.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Moving on tonight.
Speaker 9 (15:00):
I kind of think it was almost kind of silly, really,
but I think what really confirmed the fact that there
was effectiveness was sitting in a cafe and seeing a
door open up gradually and somebody was taking pictures.
Speaker 6 (15:15):
We find out if, like the Vision or a special unit,
had a particular song that they liked to sing. We
get blitzed and then sing their song.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
It's just another detail to fool the enemy. And after
a while you get enough details, it's not too hard
to fool people. If a few of those details match
up and go together, you're going to stop thinking about
it and start believing the story the Americans are trying
to tell you, and that's really when the magic comes together.
Speaker 7 (15:53):
We wanted to create the natural debris that goes with
faking something.
Speaker 14 (15:58):
We did similar things with artillery. Lay on the artillery
shells around and make it look as if they had
been firing.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
After a while, my eyes were beginning to tell me
what my ears were hearing, and I began to see
thanks they weren't there. They were in my ear, but
they were.
Speaker 16 (16:23):
Crank the speakers up out in the back of the
half track and play a program for the enemy all
night from Russia. Bringing the equipment into the Sene, we
could make them believe that we were coming in with
an Armored Division.
Speaker 17 (16:38):
And of course you had attend these dummies all the time.
During the night they were the gun tourchs would sag,
and that's a bad visual effect. The next morning, if
the Germans are looking down there and seeing sagging gun burrels.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
It's amazing the fakery that we were able to perpetrate
upon the enemy.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And you've been listening to Rick Bayer, the author of
The Ghost Army of World War Two. He's also the
president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project and the co
creator of a great documentary called The Ghost Army. We
also heard it from a few more veterans of the
Ghost Army, including Stanley Nance, Jack Macy, John Jarviy, Fike Berry,
Joe Spence, John Walker, and Bob Tompkins. And what a
(17:27):
story we're listening to, that of visual deception, radio deception,
and sound deception, and even fake sets of army headquarters
down to the detail of soldiers with fake unit patches
to deceive the enemy and preserve life and win the
strategic objectives and the long term objective of taking Berlin.
(17:50):
The story of the Ghost Army of World War two
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(18:11):
our American stories and with Rick Bayer, who is telling
the story of the Ghost Army of World War Two,
a literal traveling road show of deception with Hollywood style
state of the art techniques which included everything from sound
effects straight down to building design and phony tanks. Let's
(18:34):
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So they come over to England. They train in England,
they arrive in France in late June early July nineteen
forty four, and they start doing a few deceptions. But
their first deception that uses all types of deception together
is Operation breast Out at the end of the Peninsula
in Brittany. So now they're using the inflatables, they're using
(19:02):
the sonic deception, they're using the radio to try to
fool the enemy, and it's it's pretty successful, although something
happens there that it kind of weighs on.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Them with the very successful sonic imitation of the assembling
of tanks, and for some reason or other, the commanding
office of this tank battalion sends us tanks right down
the ravine that we had played for dummy's sake, due
(19:40):
to a command mistake.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Not having anything to do with the Ghost Army but
elsewhere in the army. An attack is launched right from
the place where they have been drawing German attention.
Speaker 14 (19:52):
Those guys never reached the line of departure, which is
the point that they want to start to attack from.
They never even got that part.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Attack is launched right from the spot where the ghost
Army guys have been attracting German attention and sort of,
you know, attracting German weapons. A bunch of tanks are
hit and knocked out, and a bunch of guys are killed.
Speaker 14 (20:14):
They got decimated. We got no way of knowing they
were going to kick a wolf an attack, and they
had no way in knowing that we weren't going to
help them.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
A bunch of American tanks are destroyed, a bunch of
guys are killed, you know, and it.
Speaker 14 (20:30):
Makes you feel lousy, and.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
It weighed very heavily, and it really was kind of
a wake up call as to how deception correctly used
can save lives, but deception poorly used, or deception that's
misunderstood by the commanders and not they're not paying attention,
can can really be a problem. And that was kind
of like their first baptism. And then they go on
(20:59):
to September nineteen forty four to Operation Bettenberg. Patten has
been racing across France and he's now attacking the fortress
city of Metz, and there's this huge gap opens up
in his line. It's right near the German border. There's
about a twenty five mile gap in George Patten's line,
and the ghost Army guys are rushed in to fill it.
(21:20):
That's a deception that lasted for eight days, which is
a huge amount of time to out a fool people.
Most of their deceptions are one or two or three days,
but for eight days they are trying to pretend to
be the sixth Armored Division along the Mozelle River there
in Luxembourg and parts of France.
Speaker 11 (21:39):
Infantrymen would see us and realize what we were doing
with these dummy tanks, setting ourselves up as targets. Let's
say things like, you guys are crazy.
Speaker 14 (21:54):
We could position certain things so that they would be hidden,
but kind of hidden plain sight. So if the reconnaissance
planes came over, maybe they would just see the corner
of something sticking out, and they know if they can
see one or two sticking out, there must be more
that they can't.
Speaker 18 (22:15):
In most cases, like a German tank, we could have
it inflated and move within fifteen or twenty minutes.
Speaker 15 (22:22):
The artillery piece was good, the jeep was good, but
that in four tank that was the beauty. That was
a That was a piece of work.
Speaker 14 (22:30):
It really was.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
There was a little bundle of stuff which a tank
was in or compressed. Before you opened the bundle, spread
the nozzles around and inflated it, pulling this amorphic shape
out of it, and then watching it being filled with
air and taking four you know, like a monster. Things
(22:54):
went very well, there were air compressors. If things went
not so well, there were bicycle pumps, and if things
went terribly badly, they were our lungs.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
I was on guard duty and two Frenchmen on bicycles
got through the perimeter and I halted them, and they
weren't looking at me. They were looking at something over
my shoulder. And what they thought they saw was four
gis picking up what was a forty ton Sherman tank
(23:29):
and turning it around. They looked at me, and then
they looked at this situation. They were looking for answers,
and I finally said, the Americans are very strong.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
It's an incredibly important deception because if the Germans had
figured out that there was this hole in Patent's line,
they could have gone through and gotten behind Patent and
waked all sorts of havoc and changed the course of
the war and probably killed a lot of Americans. Operation
Bettenberg is the place where they really learned what they
(24:04):
were doing. The operations officer Clifford Simonson said, this is
where we really started to get good, and we finally
started to put it together and figure out really how
this should be done. And of course it leads to
a lot of other successful deceptions after that. You know,
things are going along. They've carried out a bunch of deceptions.
(24:25):
They're feeling really good. They've managed to get through the
Battle of the Bulge with minimal casualties and problems. And
now it's March nineteen forty four and they're carrying out
this little twenty four hour deception Operation Bouzon Veel. They've
taken some casualties over the preceding months. You know, the
enemy's been firing at them because they think they're a
(24:46):
real unit. But here in this operation, the enemy eighty
eights really zeroed in and just as they were about
to leave the area of carrying out the deception in
Operation Bouzon Veal, they got hit with that very heavy
artill barrage.
Speaker 18 (25:06):
And there are people probably no more than twenty thirty
feet away from me that lost limbs because of shrapnel
just falling all over.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Was sitting in the truck with my truck driver around
a bunch of guys in the back of the truck,
and a shell landed in front of us, and then
the shell flew over our heads and hit the truck
behind us, and I was thinking to our tell him
to get the hell out of here now. And with
that the signal came and we moved, and it was
(25:38):
just a case of luck. Luck is the paramount word.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
About twelve or fifteen guys are wounded. They have two
men who are killed. It's really one of their deadliest days.
Speaker 11 (25:52):
If you're in the wrong place, you can be dead.
If you're in the right place, you can live to
be as old as I am.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
That is a very sobering time for the soldiers in
this unit, because they've been really lucky up to this time,
and suddenly it feels like the luck is running out.
And I think for any soldier in any war, you
wonder when you reach the point that luck is going
to run out, and so it had started to feel
(26:22):
that way for some of these guys. And then two
weeks later they head into their biggest operation of the war, and.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
We're listening to Rick Byer, author of Ghost Army of
World War Two, and we're also hearing from actual Ghost
Army veterans, including Arthur Shilstone, and these guys, well, what
they did was simply astounding, and they got really good
at what they did, filling the gap in Patten's line
in September of nineteen forty four, and they did it
(27:06):
for six days for the sixth Army Division, six long days.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
the Ghost Army of World War two here on our
American Stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:42):
with Rick Bayer's story of the Ghost Army of World
War II. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Later in March nineteen forty five, they head into their
biggest operation of the war, Operation Werson. They are now
assigned to the Ninth Army. The Ninth Armies are going
to be trying to cross the Rhine River in one spot.
The Ghost Army guys they're going to try to make
it seem like the Ninth Army is crossing the Rhine
River ten miles to the south. And so for this
(28:15):
deception they have to pull out all the stops because
they are going to pretend to be two different divisions
of the Ninth Army, the thirtieth Division and the seventy
ninth Division. They're doing sonic deception. They have hundreds of
inflatables set up within ten miles of the Rhine River.
They are doing huge amounts of radio transmission. They set
(28:36):
up phony headquarters for these units. They've got people impersonating
generals driving around in jeeps.
Speaker 14 (28:43):
We did a lot of ride through with two guys
on the back of a truck to make it look
like it was full.
Speaker 16 (28:49):
If you're going to bring a division up, you better
have a headquarter somewhere and they're better be a major
general walking around, and so we had to have a
food general do that. Some charging were too charge for
an operation.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
It's really an incredible command performance. And when the attack
is finally launched by the Ninth Army, they get across
the Rhine River with almost no casualties, very very few casualties,
and their intelligence officers were completely convinced that it was
this deception by the twenty third Headquarter Special Troops that
(29:29):
had made that happen. And General William Simpson, who is
the commander of the ninth Army, he writes a letter
of commendation. It's great to read this letter because he
doesn't really say what they did, because of course that's
really secret, but he writes this letter and said, you
guys did something really important and it really materially affected
the success of this operation, and thank you very much.
(29:56):
That official commendation is basically the only the unit commendation
of any kind or unit honor of any kind that
they got during the war. Because this was so secret,
so everything they did was was hushed up. Some stories
got out, but basically the lid was kept on this
(30:17):
for nearly fifty years after the war, and so this
incredible tale of what these guys accomplished, you know, didn't
get into the history books in the nineteen fifties and
nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies and eighties and beyond into
the nineties, and so the story of World War two
(30:39):
kind of left them out, they got left behind. They
never received significant official recognition. They had one letter of commendation,
but there was you know, they didn't have a unit citation.
There wasn't anything that really kind of honored them to
(31:01):
the degree that I thought was appropriate. And so when
we started the Ghost Army Legacy Project, we set out
as a goal to convince Congress to award them a
Congressional Gold Medal. The Congressional Gold Medal is basically the
highest honor Congress can bestow. It's at the same level
as a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The first one went
(31:24):
to George Washington when he was a general, So that
kind of gives you an idea of the level that
we're aiming at there.
Speaker 14 (31:30):
Now.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The thing about a Congressional Gold Medal is that it's
really hard to get, and they've made it hard on purpose.
You cannot even have legislation considered for Congressional Gold Medal
unless it's already been co sponsored by two thirds of
the House and two thirds of the Senate. So that
(31:51):
means that before you can even get people to debate
about it or have a vote about it, you've already
got to have two thirds of them signed up. You know,
and saying yeah, I support this, I'm behind this, and
I'm putting my name to it, and I'm signing on
to it. Well, that's an incredibly high bar. Getting two
thirds of Congress to agree on anything might be challenging.
(32:16):
So that was kind of the daunting hill that we faced.
And what we did is we mobilized a bunch of
people who were concerned and committed about this. And we
didn't really know what we were doing when we started,
but we tried. Like the Ghost Army, we tried to
figure it out as we went along. We didn't have
a manual, we didn't have a doctrine. But by god,
(32:38):
we want to do this. We're smart people. We can
try to figure it out. And so we began lobbying.
We began doing lobbying trips, We began enlisting more people,
and we got smarter and smarter about it and got
a bigger group of lobbyists and slowly began to move things.
Some of our most effective lobbyists were teenagers. We had
(33:02):
three teenagers who were so excited by this story that
they wanted to help lobby. One of them, Madeline Christiansen,
was the great granddaughter of a Ghost Army veteran, another
Reese Holmes. Her family is part of the Daughters of
the American Revolution and so she had heard about the
story when I spoke to them in Massachusetts. The third
(33:25):
Caleb Sinwell, he did a National History Day project about
the Ghost Army that won a national prize. And so
these were just three young people who were really captivated
with the story. And I said to them, hey, do
you want to help us lobby. I'll help you figure
it out and learn how to do it. And they
were so gung ho, and they were so impressive when
(33:46):
they started fourteen fifteen years old walking into a senator's office,
walking into a congressman's office to do a briefing on
the Ghost Army and explain why it should get a
gold medal. I was so deeply impressed with this for me,
very inspiring to work with these young people. And they
(34:07):
moved the needle. I mean, I'm not suggesting that, oh,
they were involved, and that was nice. They lobbied, they
convinced senators, I mean, they scored. They were our secret
weapon to have them on our side. And it demonstrates
how this story appeals to so many different kinds of people.
(34:28):
Reese Holmes talked about how nervous she was. She's like,
she couldn't even believe that she had agreed to do this.
But then she's going in and these staff people, their
jaws are just dropping, I mean, and their faces are
like what I mean. They had this double disbelief disbelief
over this incredible story and disbelief that they're hearing about
it from a fifteen year old, which I think is
(34:50):
quite extraordinary. And Caleb Sinwell had been pestering Senator Grassley's office.
Caleb's from Iowa. He'd been pestering Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley,
and finally he got a call from Grossey's office saying
that Senator Grassley would talk to him. So he's very excited,
and he did his whole pitch, and basically before he
even started, Senator Grassley told him how impressed he was
(35:13):
and that he was going to sign on and co
sponsor the bill. But then Caleb got an award from
the US Army for this National History Day project he
had done, and Senator Grassley said, well, I'll come to
your high school for this awards ceremony. So he came.
You know, they have this big award ceremony in the
gym of this tiny little school in Nashville Plainfield, Iowa.
(35:35):
The Army sent out a major to present the award
and Senator Grassley is there and he gets up to
speak and he says, this story is so amazing. I'm
going to go back to Congress and I promise I'm
going to get some other people to co sponsor as well.
And by God, Senator Grassley went back and you know,
on the floor of the Senate the next day or
the day after, he convinced two or three other people
(35:56):
in a matter of minutes to come on and co
sponsor this bill. We worked hard, and we eventually got
to the point in late in twenty twenty one, we
got it over the two thirds margin in both the
House and the Senate, and then they both eventually voted
for it, and then President Biden signed that legislation in
February of twenty twenty two. The metal has been designed,
(36:19):
it's gone through all the design processes at the Mint.
It has to be officially presented to the Smithsonian. There's
this official presentation ceremony and that is scheduled by the
Speaker of the House. We had one guy turned one
hundred last week. I've got two other guys turning one
hundred in May. There's only about eight left, and half
(36:40):
of them are going to be one hundred years old
by the middle of the year, so you know they're
not going to be around really long. And I'd like
to have a ceremony. We mean a lot, not only
to them, but I think to a lot of the families,
to have a ceremony that happened with some of the
guys were still here.
Speaker 14 (36:56):
You know, you saved lives. You don't know how many
you saved, but you know your the.
Speaker 15 (37:00):
They aescimated that we save between fifteen and thirty thousand lives.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
With our maneuvers.
Speaker 15 (37:07):
But you know, even if we don't want to save
fifteen or thirty, it was worth it.
Speaker 13 (37:12):
One mother or one new bride was spared the agony
of putting a old star in their front window. That's
what the twenty third Headquarters was all about.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
And you heard that right. The Ghost Army of World
War Two saved between fifteen and thirty thousand lives through
their maneuvers and their courage. That's what the twenty third
Headquarters Special Troops did. And we want to thank John Elfner,
who worked on the story, our producer and contributor. And
thank you as well, not only to the veterans of
(37:53):
the Ghost Army for sharing their stories, but to Rick Bayer,
the director of the Ghost Army Legacy Project, author of
the Ghost Army of World War Two, and he also
helped curate an exhibition about the Ghost Army for the
National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, the finest
museum in this country. The story of the Ghost Army
of World War Two. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
In nineteen forty three, the US Army came up with
a daring plan to trick Hitler's Army. They created a
unit of artists, sound engineers, and prop builders who fooled
the German Army into seeing the US Army in places
(00:33):
it wasn't.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
The year is nineteen forty four and the world is
engulfed in the biggest catastrophe in human history, World War Two.
You're a soldier and you get your orders. You're headed
to the front, but you're not going to be firing
an M one rifle or I think a Sherman tank.
Your mission is to put on a show. To put
(01:05):
on a show for the enemy, you must stage a
complex multimedia presentation spread out over many miles and do
so right in the middle of a war zone for
an attentive and discerning audience that wants nothing more than
to kill you. Thousands of lives, including your own, depend
(01:28):
on how good a job you do, and you're going
to be asked to do it again next week. And that,
in a nutshell, is the mission that was handed to
the twenty third Headquarters Special Troops, also known as the
Ghost Army. They were designed to fool the enemy, and
to do so they employed battalions of inflatable tanks, a
(01:52):
vast array of sound effects, radio trickery. They even dressed
up as soldiers from other units, created phony headquarters, all
to fool the German Army into thinking the Americans were
in one spot, when in fact they were someplace else entirely.
(02:16):
The Ghost Army's really the brainchild of two American staff
officers who are polar opposites, Colonel Billy Harris and Major
Ralph Ingersoll. And Ingersoll's kind of a wild civilian guy.
He was a journalist, sort of flamboyant, left wing, very imaginative,
sometimes had only a tenuous relationship with the truth. He'd
(02:38):
been a publisher and an author and done all this stuff.
And now he's in the Army and he's working with
this very buttoned down West Point colonel and Billy Harris,
and the two of them together in the Special Plans
branch in the European Theater of Operations in late nineteen
forty three, they dream up this idea of let's create
a traveling road show of deception. Why do they do it?
(03:00):
The Americans want to have every advantage once they land
in Europe, and deception can give you an advantage. So
these two planners come up with this idea to create
a multimedia mobile deception unit, and then they sell it
to the high ranking generals and they come up with
this very imaginative idea. It's December nineteen forty three before
(03:29):
the orders really go out to form this unit. The
US Army doesn't have any doctrines, they don't have any manuals.
They basically have to figure out their mission on their own.
So it happens so fast, and it requires them to
basically learn as they're going, which will continue throughout the war.
(03:50):
And then by May they're in England and give it
another month and they're on the ground in France trying
to carry out these deceptions against the German to fool
them about the location and size of American troops. And
in a lot of ways, they're like a traveling road
(04:11):
show of deception with people who are actors and people
who are producers and people who are doing the sound,
and they're creating something very convincing. They hope for the
enemy and they hope it's convincing because that's going to
lead to the saving of American lives, and that's why
it's so important. Well, the headquarters Company is like the
(04:32):
box office, and then the six oh third camouflage engineers
who worked with the inflatables. They're like the guys doing scenery.
And you've got the Radio company they're doing dialogue. You've
got the four h six Combat engineers that's the security
arm of the unit. They're like the spear carriers. And
then you've got the thirty one to thirty second Signal
Company and they are like the orchestra. And you put
(04:56):
it all together and you hope that the result is convincing.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
I was interviewed for a top secret organization which was
involved in psychological warfare and something to do with sound.
I thought sound we were going to zap all the
Germans within the war and that would be it. But
it was more psychology than zapping.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
You couldn't really believe that what we were going to
do would be effective. How can we come along with
rubber dummies and blow it up and make it look real.
Speaker 5 (05:35):
I had no idea of why I was there or
what I was to be doing. After I was there
for a few days, I spoke to this major and
I said, what is this organization? And he said, let's
put it this way, lieutenant. If we are totally successful,
you may not come back.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
And the mission was to try to be able to
take it the thousand men and put them in so
that fifteen thousand men could move somewhere else and not
be detected.
Speaker 7 (06:07):
We were going to be in show business where we
set up one night stands and like ghosts, disappear.
Speaker 8 (06:14):
And with the point somebody said, you mean we're asking
for the enemy to fire on us.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
The answer was yes.
Speaker 9 (06:22):
At that point we all came to the conclusion.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
That this was a suicide outfit. What a story you're
hearing about a mini Hollywood production unit going out and
tricking the Nazis into thinking our troops were one place
(06:47):
when they were in another. A real suicide mission. This
turns out to be a really hard one. And you
heard from veterans of the Ghost Army, including Jack McGlenn,
Irving Stemple, Robert Conrad, ed Blow, Ned Harris Gills, Seltzer,
Dick Syracuse, Harold Flynn, Victor Dowd, and al Albrecht. When
we come back more of the story of the Ghost
(07:09):
Army of World War Two here on our American Stories.
Leah Abib here and I'm inviting you to help our
American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday
(07:32):
only a short time away. If you want to help
inspire countless others to love America like we do, and
want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories
told ear to millions for years to come, please consider
making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories. Go
to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot, any amount helps. Go to
(07:52):
Olamericanstories dot com and give. And we continue with our
American Stories and with Rick Bayer telling the story of
(08:15):
the Ghost Army of World War Two along with men
who are actually in the unit. Let's pick up where
we last left off.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
The unit is a mix of soldiers who were specifically
recruited and some who are basically just draftees or enlistees
who get assigned to it. The visual deception is going
to be handled by the six ZHO third camouflage engineers,
and about half that unit are artists who have very
specifically been put into this camouflage unit to use their
(08:49):
art skills. Now they're not going to be using them
for camouflage. They're going to be using them to make
things that aren't real look real. It's kind of the
reverse of camouflage. Have engineers, telephone linemen, signalers, scriptwriters, all
sorts of people like that who are recruited or sort
of find their way into this unit, not by accident,
(09:12):
but that's mixed up then with a bunch of people
who are bartenders, farm hands, policemen, teachers, all sorts of
different jobs from forty six or forty seven states. The
twenty third Headquarters Troops consisted of about eleven hundred soldiers,
so it kind of sounds like a lot, but they're
(09:34):
pretending to be as many as twenty or thirty thousand,
and these eleven hundred soldiers were divided into different units
for the different types of deception they did. So visual
deception is handled by the six h third Camouflage Engineers.
That's the unit that has a lot of artists in it,
and they're using inflatable tanks and trucks and all sorts
of stuff to full enemy aerial reconnaissance and then sonic
(09:59):
deception using sound to fool the enemy is handled by
the thirty one to thirty second Signal Service Company, and
they've got giant speakers mounted on half tracks that can
project sound for fifteen miles. So it's not the sound
of battle, but like sounds of convoys on the move,
of tanks rumbling down a road, of convoy, of trucks
(10:21):
rumbling down a road, all sorts of different things like that.
The Sonic Deception unit went out and recorded all these
sounds before they left the United States onto big vinyl
sound effects records. They're actually I think they're glass transcription discs.
Then when they're doing any particular deception, they can mix
the different sounds together to get the exact sounds that
(10:43):
they want for a deception, and it's one of the
earliest uses of multi track recordings.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
Recordings brilliant, But there was a road leading up. The
music had to be described, the change of gears, tank's
going up, thanks going down, tanks assembling.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
And then we'd go to another spot where trucks were
just flying through on the highway.
Speaker 10 (11:11):
They had recording to building a pontoon bridge or any
cup a bridge, and you could hear them hammering away and.
Speaker 11 (11:17):
Swearing, enormous sounds of tracks racing through the forest. Sounded
like a whole division was amassing.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
And some of these sounds, really it's not just trucks
or tanks or bridge building. It's guy's voices.
Speaker 11 (11:34):
Sogeant's voices yelling, put out that cigarette.
Speaker 12 (11:37):
Now back of my half track, I tell my children,
was the biggest boombox you ever saw, But it played
sounds of tanks and activity.
Speaker 11 (11:48):
It was all fakery. It was all a big act.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
All the stuff to make it seem realistic for an
enemy listening in an outpost, outpost across the river and
kind of hearing these sounds and thinking, oh my gosh,
the Americans are really moving in in force. But you
also have a radio unit, the Signal Company Special it
(12:14):
was called, And these guys are doing fake radio transmissions because,
of course, if you have a division that's moving into
an area, they are communicating by radio because they're coming
in on a move. They haven't been able to lay
their telephone lines yet, and so you've got all these
radio operators sending out phony messages to each other and
also connecting with real radio networks. So if the Germans
(12:35):
are listening in. Well, they're starting to hear all this
stuff coming in, and they're going to again. It's another
reason to believe that a certain division is moving in.
And once they're in Europe, they develop a fourth type
of deception, which they call special effects, and this involves
pretending to be the soldiers of whatever division they're impersonating.
(12:56):
Let's say it's the seventy fifth Infantry. They're putting on
seventy fifth Infantry patches, they're putting those bumper markings on
their vehicles, they're setting up phony headquarters. This is all
the fool enemy spies that have left behind, so it
all airded up.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
My god, there they are, the tidy fifth in the
seventy ninth, the whatever, you know. They're up there and
that's where it's going to be. I don't bang on
the map. Well, really they were not there. They were
down here.
Speaker 5 (13:27):
Why don't we put a stencil of the name of
the unit that we were simulating right on the trucks,
and why don't we start a counterfeit shoulder patch factory
where they would see we were with a seventy fifth
division one of the divisions.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
We did, so we began to put on their patches
and put their bumper markings on, and we physically assumed
the role. Only for every hundred of them, there might
be ten of us.
Speaker 13 (14:01):
Yeah, a sewing kit. That's one of the things that
was required that we carry with us all the time.
Speaker 10 (14:08):
Give us the patches, and we were good at sewing
them on seamstresses. My shirts were all wrecked from having
sewn so many different shoulder patches on them. The soldiers
are walking into bars and their cafes and you know, like, oh, yeah,
well we're moving out tonight or whatever it is. You know,
they're they're singing the song that the guys in the
(14:31):
seventy fifth always like to sing.
Speaker 14 (14:33):
Our job was to go in with our phony markings
and phony stories that we were pretending to be officers
and soldiers from another organization, and we were turned loose
in town, go to the pub, order some omelets and
talk loose.
Speaker 15 (14:53):
A lot of the guys go to the bakery, got
rolls and stuff and said we got to go an
extra supply because we're.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Moving on tonight.
Speaker 9 (15:00):
I kind of think it was almost kind of silly, really,
but I think what really confirmed the fact that there
was effectiveness was sitting in a cafe and seeing a
door open up gradually and somebody was taking pictures.
Speaker 6 (15:15):
We find out if, like the Vision or a special unit,
had a particular song that they liked to sing. We
get blitzed and then sing their song.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
It's just another detail to fool the enemy. And after
a while you get enough details, it's not too hard
to fool people. If a few of those details match
up and go together, you're going to stop thinking about
it and start believing the story the Americans are trying
to tell you, and that's really when the magic comes together.
Speaker 7 (15:53):
We wanted to create the natural debris that goes with
faking something.
Speaker 14 (15:58):
We did similar things with artillery. Lay on the artillery
shells around and make it look as if they had
been firing.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
After a while, my eyes were beginning to tell me
what my ears were hearing, and I began to see
thanks they weren't there. They were in my ear, but
they were.
Speaker 16 (16:23):
Crank the speakers up out in the back of the
half track and play a program for the enemy all
night from Russia. Bringing the equipment into the Sene, we
could make them believe that we were coming in with
an Armored Division.
Speaker 17 (16:38):
And of course you had attend these dummies all the time.
During the night they were the gun tourchs would sag,
and that's a bad visual effect. The next morning, if
the Germans are looking down there and seeing sagging gun burrels.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
It's amazing the fakery that we were able to perpetrate
upon the enemy.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
And you've been listening to Rick Bayer, the author of
The Ghost Army of World War Two. He's also the
president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project and the co
creator of a great documentary called The Ghost Army. We
also heard it from a few more veterans of the
Ghost Army, including Stanley Nance, Jack Macy, John Jarviy, Fike Berry,
Joe Spence, John Walker, and Bob Tompkins. And what a
(17:27):
story we're listening to, that of visual deception, radio deception,
and sound deception, and even fake sets of army headquarters
down to the detail of soldiers with fake unit patches
to deceive the enemy and preserve life and win the
strategic objectives and the long term objective of taking Berlin.
(17:50):
The story of the Ghost Army of World War two
continues here on our American Stories, and we continue with
(18:11):
our American stories and with Rick Bayer, who is telling
the story of the Ghost Army of World War Two,
a literal traveling road show of deception with Hollywood style
state of the art techniques which included everything from sound
effects straight down to building design and phony tanks. Let's
(18:34):
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
So they come over to England. They train in England,
they arrive in France in late June early July nineteen
forty four, and they start doing a few deceptions. But
their first deception that uses all types of deception together
is Operation breast Out at the end of the Peninsula
in Brittany. So now they're using the inflatables, they're using
(19:02):
the sonic deception, they're using the radio to try to
fool the enemy, and it's it's pretty successful, although something
happens there that it kind of weighs on.
Speaker 6 (19:11):
Them with the very successful sonic imitation of the assembling
of tanks, and for some reason or other, the commanding
office of this tank battalion sends us tanks right down
the ravine that we had played for dummy's sake, due
(19:40):
to a command mistake.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Not having anything to do with the Ghost Army but
elsewhere in the army. An attack is launched right from
the place where they have been drawing German attention.
Speaker 14 (19:52):
Those guys never reached the line of departure, which is
the point that they want to start to attack from.
They never even got that part.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Attack is launched right from the spot where the ghost
Army guys have been attracting German attention and sort of,
you know, attracting German weapons. A bunch of tanks are
hit and knocked out, and a bunch of guys are killed.
Speaker 14 (20:14):
They got decimated. We got no way of knowing they
were going to kick a wolf an attack, and they
had no way in knowing that we weren't going to
help them.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
A bunch of American tanks are destroyed, a bunch of
guys are killed, you know, and it.
Speaker 14 (20:30):
Makes you feel lousy, and.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
It weighed very heavily, and it really was kind of
a wake up call as to how deception correctly used
can save lives, but deception poorly used, or deception that's
misunderstood by the commanders and not they're not paying attention,
can can really be a problem. And that was kind
of like their first baptism. And then they go on
(20:59):
to September nineteen forty four to Operation Bettenberg. Patten has
been racing across France and he's now attacking the fortress
city of Metz, and there's this huge gap opens up
in his line. It's right near the German border. There's
about a twenty five mile gap in George Patten's line,
and the ghost Army guys are rushed in to fill it.
(21:20):
That's a deception that lasted for eight days, which is
a huge amount of time to out a fool people.
Most of their deceptions are one or two or three days,
but for eight days they are trying to pretend to
be the sixth Armored Division along the Mozelle River there
in Luxembourg and parts of France.
Speaker 11 (21:39):
Infantrymen would see us and realize what we were doing
with these dummy tanks, setting ourselves up as targets. Let's
say things like, you guys are crazy.
Speaker 14 (21:54):
We could position certain things so that they would be hidden,
but kind of hidden plain sight. So if the reconnaissance
planes came over, maybe they would just see the corner
of something sticking out, and they know if they can
see one or two sticking out, there must be more
that they can't.
Speaker 18 (22:15):
In most cases, like a German tank, we could have
it inflated and move within fifteen or twenty minutes.
Speaker 15 (22:22):
The artillery piece was good, the jeep was good, but
that in four tank that was the beauty. That was
a That was a piece of work.
Speaker 14 (22:30):
It really was.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
There was a little bundle of stuff which a tank
was in or compressed. Before you opened the bundle, spread
the nozzles around and inflated it, pulling this amorphic shape
out of it, and then watching it being filled with
air and taking four you know, like a monster. Things
(22:54):
went very well, there were air compressors. If things went
not so well, there were bicycle pumps, and if things
went terribly badly, they were our lungs.
Speaker 8 (23:06):
I was on guard duty and two Frenchmen on bicycles
got through the perimeter and I halted them, and they
weren't looking at me. They were looking at something over
my shoulder. And what they thought they saw was four
gis picking up what was a forty ton Sherman tank
(23:29):
and turning it around. They looked at me, and then
they looked at this situation. They were looking for answers,
and I finally said, the Americans are very strong.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
It's an incredibly important deception because if the Germans had
figured out that there was this hole in Patent's line,
they could have gone through and gotten behind Patent and
waked all sorts of havoc and changed the course of
the war and probably killed a lot of Americans. Operation
Bettenberg is the place where they really learned what they
(24:04):
were doing. The operations officer Clifford Simonson said, this is
where we really started to get good, and we finally
started to put it together and figure out really how
this should be done. And of course it leads to
a lot of other successful deceptions after that. You know,
things are going along. They've carried out a bunch of deceptions.
(24:25):
They're feeling really good. They've managed to get through the
Battle of the Bulge with minimal casualties and problems. And
now it's March nineteen forty four and they're carrying out
this little twenty four hour deception Operation Bouzon Veel. They've
taken some casualties over the preceding months. You know, the
enemy's been firing at them because they think they're a
(24:46):
real unit. But here in this operation, the enemy eighty
eights really zeroed in and just as they were about
to leave the area of carrying out the deception in
Operation Bouzon Veal, they got hit with that very heavy
artill barrage.
Speaker 18 (25:06):
And there are people probably no more than twenty thirty
feet away from me that lost limbs because of shrapnel
just falling all over.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Was sitting in the truck with my truck driver around
a bunch of guys in the back of the truck,
and a shell landed in front of us, and then
the shell flew over our heads and hit the truck
behind us, and I was thinking to our tell him
to get the hell out of here now. And with
that the signal came and we moved, and it was
(25:38):
just a case of luck. Luck is the paramount word.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
About twelve or fifteen guys are wounded. They have two
men who are killed. It's really one of their deadliest days.
Speaker 11 (25:52):
If you're in the wrong place, you can be dead.
If you're in the right place, you can live to
be as old as I am.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
That is a very sobering time for the soldiers in
this unit, because they've been really lucky up to this time,
and suddenly it feels like the luck is running out.
And I think for any soldier in any war, you
wonder when you reach the point that luck is going
to run out, and so it had started to feel
(26:22):
that way for some of these guys. And then two
weeks later they head into their biggest operation of the war, and.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
We're listening to Rick Byer, author of Ghost Army of
World War Two, and we're also hearing from actual Ghost
Army veterans, including Arthur Shilstone, and these guys, well, what
they did was simply astounding, and they got really good
at what they did, filling the gap in Patten's line
in September of nineteen forty four, and they did it
(27:06):
for six days for the sixth Army Division, six long days.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
the Ghost Army of World War two here on our
American Stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(27:42):
with Rick Bayer's story of the Ghost Army of World
War II. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Later in March nineteen forty five, they head into their
biggest operation of the war, Operation Werson. They are now
assigned to the Ninth Army. The Ninth Armies are going
to be trying to cross the Rhine River in one spot.
The Ghost Army guys they're going to try to make
it seem like the Ninth Army is crossing the Rhine
River ten miles to the south. And so for this
(28:15):
deception they have to pull out all the stops because
they are going to pretend to be two different divisions
of the Ninth Army, the thirtieth Division and the seventy
ninth Division. They're doing sonic deception. They have hundreds of
inflatables set up within ten miles of the Rhine River.
They are doing huge amounts of radio transmission. They set
(28:36):
up phony headquarters for these units. They've got people impersonating
generals driving around in jeeps.
Speaker 14 (28:43):
We did a lot of ride through with two guys
on the back of a truck to make it look
like it was full.
Speaker 16 (28:49):
If you're going to bring a division up, you better
have a headquarter somewhere and they're better be a major
general walking around, and so we had to have a
food general do that. Some charging were too charge for
an operation.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
It's really an incredible command performance. And when the attack
is finally launched by the Ninth Army, they get across
the Rhine River with almost no casualties, very very few casualties,
and their intelligence officers were completely convinced that it was
this deception by the twenty third Headquarter Special Troops that
(29:29):
had made that happen. And General William Simpson, who is
the commander of the ninth Army, he writes a letter
of commendation. It's great to read this letter because he
doesn't really say what they did, because of course that's
really secret, but he writes this letter and said, you
guys did something really important and it really materially affected
the success of this operation, and thank you very much.
(29:56):
That official commendation is basically the only the unit commendation
of any kind or unit honor of any kind that
they got during the war. Because this was so secret,
so everything they did was was hushed up. Some stories
got out, but basically the lid was kept on this
(30:17):
for nearly fifty years after the war, and so this
incredible tale of what these guys accomplished, you know, didn't
get into the history books in the nineteen fifties and
nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies and eighties and beyond into
the nineties, and so the story of World War two
(30:39):
kind of left them out, they got left behind. They
never received significant official recognition. They had one letter of commendation,
but there was you know, they didn't have a unit citation.
There wasn't anything that really kind of honored them to
(31:01):
the degree that I thought was appropriate. And so when
we started the Ghost Army Legacy Project, we set out
as a goal to convince Congress to award them a
Congressional Gold Medal. The Congressional Gold Medal is basically the
highest honor Congress can bestow. It's at the same level
as a Presidential Medal of Freedom. The first one went
(31:24):
to George Washington when he was a general, So that
kind of gives you an idea of the level that
we're aiming at there.
Speaker 14 (31:30):
Now.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The thing about a Congressional Gold Medal is that it's
really hard to get, and they've made it hard on purpose.
You cannot even have legislation considered for Congressional Gold Medal
unless it's already been co sponsored by two thirds of
the House and two thirds of the Senate. So that
(31:51):
means that before you can even get people to debate
about it or have a vote about it, you've already
got to have two thirds of them signed up. You know,
and saying yeah, I support this, I'm behind this, and
I'm putting my name to it, and I'm signing on
to it. Well, that's an incredibly high bar. Getting two
thirds of Congress to agree on anything might be challenging.
(32:16):
So that was kind of the daunting hill that we faced.
And what we did is we mobilized a bunch of
people who were concerned and committed about this. And we
didn't really know what we were doing when we started,
but we tried. Like the Ghost Army, we tried to
figure it out as we went along. We didn't have
a manual, we didn't have a doctrine. But by god,
(32:38):
we want to do this. We're smart people. We can
try to figure it out. And so we began lobbying.
We began doing lobbying trips, We began enlisting more people,
and we got smarter and smarter about it and got
a bigger group of lobbyists and slowly began to move things.
Some of our most effective lobbyists were teenagers. We had
(33:02):
three teenagers who were so excited by this story that
they wanted to help lobby. One of them, Madeline Christiansen,
was the great granddaughter of a Ghost Army veteran, another
Reese Holmes. Her family is part of the Daughters of
the American Revolution and so she had heard about the
story when I spoke to them in Massachusetts. The third
(33:25):
Caleb Sinwell, he did a National History Day project about
the Ghost Army that won a national prize. And so
these were just three young people who were really captivated
with the story. And I said to them, hey, do
you want to help us lobby. I'll help you figure
it out and learn how to do it. And they
were so gung ho, and they were so impressive when
(33:46):
they started fourteen fifteen years old walking into a senator's office,
walking into a congressman's office to do a briefing on
the Ghost Army and explain why it should get a
gold medal. I was so deeply impressed with this for me,
very inspiring to work with these young people. And they
(34:07):
moved the needle. I mean, I'm not suggesting that, oh,
they were involved, and that was nice. They lobbied, they
convinced senators, I mean, they scored. They were our secret
weapon to have them on our side. And it demonstrates
how this story appeals to so many different kinds of people.
(34:28):
Reese Holmes talked about how nervous she was. She's like,
she couldn't even believe that she had agreed to do this.
But then she's going in and these staff people, their
jaws are just dropping, I mean, and their faces are
like what I mean. They had this double disbelief disbelief
over this incredible story and disbelief that they're hearing about
it from a fifteen year old, which I think is
(34:50):
quite extraordinary. And Caleb Sinwell had been pestering Senator Grassley's office.
Caleb's from Iowa. He'd been pestering Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley,
and finally he got a call from Grossey's office saying
that Senator Grassley would talk to him. So he's very excited,
and he did his whole pitch, and basically before he
even started, Senator Grassley told him how impressed he was
(35:13):
and that he was going to sign on and co
sponsor the bill. But then Caleb got an award from
the US Army for this National History Day project he
had done, and Senator Grassley said, well, I'll come to
your high school for this awards ceremony. So he came.
You know, they have this big award ceremony in the
gym of this tiny little school in Nashville Plainfield, Iowa.
(35:35):
The Army sent out a major to present the award
and Senator Grassley is there and he gets up to
speak and he says, this story is so amazing. I'm
going to go back to Congress and I promise I'm
going to get some other people to co sponsor as well.
And by God, Senator Grassley went back and you know,
on the floor of the Senate the next day or
the day after, he convinced two or three other people
(35:56):
in a matter of minutes to come on and co
sponsor this bill. We worked hard, and we eventually got
to the point in late in twenty twenty one, we
got it over the two thirds margin in both the
House and the Senate, and then they both eventually voted
for it, and then President Biden signed that legislation in
February of twenty twenty two. The metal has been designed,
(36:19):
it's gone through all the design processes at the Mint.
It has to be officially presented to the Smithsonian. There's
this official presentation ceremony and that is scheduled by the
Speaker of the House. We had one guy turned one
hundred last week. I've got two other guys turning one
hundred in May. There's only about eight left, and half
(36:40):
of them are going to be one hundred years old
by the middle of the year, so you know they're
not going to be around really long. And I'd like
to have a ceremony. We mean a lot, not only
to them, but I think to a lot of the families,
to have a ceremony that happened with some of the
guys were still here.
Speaker 14 (36:56):
You know, you saved lives. You don't know how many
you saved, but you know your the.
Speaker 15 (37:00):
They aescimated that we save between fifteen and thirty thousand lives.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
With our maneuvers.
Speaker 15 (37:07):
But you know, even if we don't want to save
fifteen or thirty, it was worth it.
Speaker 13 (37:12):
One mother or one new bride was spared the agony
of putting a old star in their front window. That's
what the twenty third Headquarters was all about.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
And you heard that right. The Ghost Army of World
War Two saved between fifteen and thirty thousand lives through
their maneuvers and their courage. That's what the twenty third
Headquarters Special Troops did. And we want to thank John Elfner,
who worked on the story, our producer and contributor. And
thank you as well, not only to the veterans of
(37:53):
the Ghost Army for sharing their stories, but to Rick Bayer,
the director of the Ghost Army Legacy Project, author of
the Ghost Army of World War Two, and he also
helped curate an exhibition about the Ghost Army for the
National World War Two Museum in New Orleans, the finest
museum in this country. The story of the Ghost Army
of World War Two. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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