SYMHC Classics: The Ghost Army

We’re revisiting a 2015 episode about the U.S. Ghost Army, a top-secret group assembled to create confusion and mislead Axis forces during WWII. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. The Ghost Army came up briefly in
our recent episode on Joan Current, so it seemed like
exactly the right time to put out that episode again.
This one originally came out almost exactly five years ago
on January, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in

(00:23):
History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Collie Frying and I'm
Tracy by Wilson. And today we're gonna talk a little
bit about military history, and it's World War two specifically,
and even though this particular piece, uh that we're discussing

(00:44):
is in fact military history, if there were a history
of ingenuity or sleight of hand, I think this would
probably be one of the big events on that timeline. Uh.
So we're gonna be talking about the US Ghost Army,
which was a top secret group that was assembled to
create confused and mislead access forces. And it's a really
amazing story that stars Ingenuity and Bravado as sort of

(01:06):
the the main elements of the piece. And the idea
of military deception was of course not new to World
War Two. Everyone has heard of like the Trojan Horse,
for example, and deceit as a tactic as part of
sun sus art of war. Almost any culture in history
that found itself at war with another culture use some
type of trickery to try to outsmart the enemy, because

(01:27):
that's sort of a vital part of getting the upper
hand in a conflict is misleading so that you can
kind of swoop in with your forces. But this group
really went to some pretty extraordinary measures to achieve their goals,
and they did some really fascinating and cool things, uh
and so, and it was classified for a long time
and then kind of came to light. So we are
going to talk about it today because it is really cool.

(01:50):
So to start out at the beginning like we normally do.
That's one third. Headquarters Special Troops was the one and
only deception outfit that US Army had ever authorized. The
goal was to corral a group of creative thinkers to
approach warfare in new ways, and this sort of trickery

(02:11):
focused effort was inspired by the success of Operation Bertram,
in which Allied forces used dummy tanks and camouflage to
trick Rommel's forces into an incorrect assessment of the Allies
position and strength during the second Battle of l A
l Amain in North Africa. And also bolstering this case
for a deception unit was the u S success in

(02:32):
misleading German intelligence leading up to the Battle of Tunisia.
They realized deception was working and they thought, let's just
have a unit that's focused on this. The idea of
forming a unit dedicated just to this is attributed to
Captain Ralph Ingersoll. Before the war, he had been a
celebrity journalist and he had been working with Great Britain

(02:53):
on deception techniques to mislead the Germans and the time
leading up the D Day. On Christmas Eve of three,
a memo to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations
War Department in Washington, d C officially requested the creation
of a unit with a mission quote to simulate a
core of two infantry divisions and one armored divisions and

(03:14):
core installations railhead dumps, etcetera. So, beginning in nine more
than one thousand young men were recruited, and they were
often recent art school graduates or ad agency creatives and
they were handpicked for this assignment. Recruits were sent to
Camp Forest in Tullahoma, Tennessee to train within there were

(03:36):
several companies. For the two four Signal Company worked on
radio counter intelligence. Second Signal Service Company, which was actually
trained at Pine Camp, New York, worked to develop sonic
deception techniques. The four oh six Engineer Combat Company worked
on the big construction projects and was in charge of security.

(03:58):
And often you'll hear this effortmen anctioned, like when people say, oh,
the Ghost Army they used inflatable tanks to deceive the Germans,
And that is partially true, but as we mentioned in
breaking down these different companies within the twenty three, it
was a whole lot more than that. Yeah, I feel
like the tanks get the big, like kind of bud
speedy headlines all the time, which is understandable. There's really

(04:21):
cool video that exists, like where you can see them
rolling over these inflated tanks and there. I don't know
that I have ever heard any of the audio recordings,
and I don't think I've ever seen anyone reference them online.
So you can see where the tanks get all the attention.
But I was not all there was. For instance, audio
work sometimes referred to as sonic deception, was a huge

(04:44):
piece of the Ghost Army puzzle. Yeah, they would mount
these huge speakers to project elaborate soundscapes and radio plays
that were created by the Second Signal Service Company. And
these men had recorded tanks and trucks and our tillery units,
and they sound engineered them into a number of different soundtracks.

(05:04):
And these recordings would include sounds of tanks on the
move or military construction, and they would even have things
like vehicle sputtering. And they basically amassed this really amazing
sound catalog of basically every military vehicle that they had
access to, doing everything those machines could do, so they
could kind of piece them together and create unique and

(05:25):
specific radio dramas. Basically, so if you wanted to broadcast
a battalion of vehicles starting up in the distance and
moving closer, they could create that with their vast library
of recordings, complete with idiosyncratic engine noises for specific vehicles
and kind of mimic that distance too slowly moving forward

(05:46):
nearness that you would hear if you were in one
position with an actual troop going by. I like to
imagine this as an extremely high tech version of following
King Arthur around banging coconuts together. But it was very
high tech even for the time. I mean, they were
really kind of on the advanced edge of technology and

(06:08):
how they were using sound. Yeah. Well, and it's like
these that kind of sound work happens in movies and
TV and things like that all the time now, like
that's yeah, that's just sort of how it works. So
this was a different use for that. In addition to
the three companies created with new recruits, another company was
looped into their headquarters Special Troops, and that was the

(06:29):
sixth oh third Engineer Camouflage Battalion. The men of the
six h third had been working on camouflage for a
couple of years already, so they brought their expertise to
a group already in a fairly polished state. They had
already managed an impressive accomplishment that by disguising the plant
in Baltimore where by six bombers were assembled, and the

(06:51):
event that access forces wished to look for the plant,
what they would see when they flew over was just
a regular rural area. And before we get to how
the twenty third trained and then made their way to Europe, Uh,
do you want to pause for a moment for a
word from a sponsor? Yes, I do so. During the

(07:16):
spring of n The men of the twenty three were training,
but they were training in skills that seemed in many
ways more appropriate for a touring theater company than for
a group of soldiers. So they built prototype prop vehicles
burst out of wood and burlap and then out of rubber.
The rubber versions looked incredibly realistic, but they weighed less

(07:36):
than a hundred pounds apiece. The men would also train
with dummy artillery and other prop equipment. They practice sending
each other fake radio messages, and they learned just enough
about other different outfits that they could impersonate them, either
as individuals or as a group, and men who couldn't
so had to learn because they were going to have

(07:57):
to quickly alter their uniforms and switch out patches as
they sort of performed these presto changeo masquerades. In May,
the majority of the twenty three boarded the U S. S.
Henry Gibbons in New York, bound for Great Britain. They
spent about a month near Stratford on Avon while they trained,
although by all accounts there was also quite a bit

(08:19):
of partying. Yeah, this sounds like really a lovely time
that they had while they were in Britain. UH. But
the first wave of men from the twenty third shipped
out to France just following D Day, and this was
a small platoon. It was just fifteen men and they
landed at oma Omaha Beach on June fourteenth, so just
out a week a little more UH and nurses actually

(08:40):
flew with them so that they could tend to the
wounded that we're waiting there on the beach. Going from
a month in the idyllic British countryside having what was
kind of a party esque atmosphere into the reality of
war in France was of course something of a shock.
Knowing that they were there to draw fires. Some of

(09:00):
the men thought that there was really a suicide outfit. Yeah.
They they had been trained in different sort of arts
and UH deceptions, but not so much in actual combat,
so they really did. Some of them really did think
at that point like, oh, they're just sending us there
to die and take the heat off the real soldiers.
But over the course of the next two months, the

(09:21):
rest of the twenty three joined their fellows in France.
Leading up to their first big mission, which was Operation Elephant.
About half of the men in the unit were involved
in Operation Elephant, during which they pretended to be the
Army's Second Armored Division. The real Second Armored Division was
on the move while the twenty three kept up the appearances. Yeah,

(09:42):
and that's sort of a theme of their their missions throughout.
And while this sham did indeed work, nearby German troops
held their position rather than following the real Second Armored
Division because they did believe they were still there. This
was also a pretty big learning experience. During this particular operation,
it was revealed that if the inflatable tanks that they

(10:03):
used lost even a small amount of air, the cannons
would droop and give the whole thing away. They really
there are some paintings that you can find online and
in documentaries where you see sort of this droopy cannon barrel,
and it really does look comical. It's an inherently comical image. Yeah,

(10:25):
Their tanks are not made to fire into the ground,
and so it looked very, very silly. And while they
were not discovering their theatrics during Operation Elephant, it also
became apparent that setting up an entire false division was
going to be better executed in the dark of night.
They had not waited until really late. They used some
daylight hours to do it, and they also realized that

(10:46):
they really needed to like tighten up their disguise and
camouflage game if they wanted to ensure future success. The
entire twenty three was then tasked with Operation Breast, which
was named for the nearby French ports city that was
an odd ues. The Sonic unit was the last to
arrive in France, so Breast was the first time that

(11:06):
they three had their full arsenal of tricks at their disposal,
and the goal was to create the impression of an
existing tank unit having far greater power than it actually did,
with the hopes that they would trick the Germans into
a surrender, and so they used a mix of actual
tanks and dummies, flash canisters too, sort of fake tanks firing,

(11:30):
and sound mixing to create this really convincing illusion of
a huge tank division. And the main bravado move of
this mission came in the delivery of some of these
soundscapes that they had mixed. So late at night, members
of the three would actually sort of creep forward with
their sound equipment. They would get within about five hundred

(11:51):
yards on the enemy line and they would play sounds
of what sounded like officers issuing orders and people yelling
counter order, and even like fake situations of arguments where
there would be accidents that were staged and there would
be cursing at these imaginary errors. They were all doing
this really pretty close to enemy lines. It was pretty

(12:15):
to think about what that must have been like, sitting
there in the dark with your speaker playing these things,
knowing how very close you were. It's so bring to
think about. It was effective, so effective that it confused
friendly units positioned about a mile away, and while it
didn't get the Germans under General Herman B. Von Ramkat

(12:35):
to turn tail, it did keep them from going anywhere.
This was a good thing, since that was an estimated
thirty eight thousand troops, and that was almost double what
the Allies had initially estimated. If they had not been
tricked into holding their line against this perceived threat from
this puffed up, half fake tank battalion, they might have

(12:56):
gone on the offensive and then really damaged the Allied forces.
And throughout the rest of ninety four and on into nine,
the twenty three continued to run these military masquerade games,
and with every mission they would kind of regroup and
refine their playbook and see what had worked and what
had and they just got better and better and better.

(13:17):
They learned how to stage and set dress their fake
camps more and more authentically, and they started hand painting
patches to mimic those of existing units, so they if
they couldn't get ahold of real ones, then they would
stage fake headquarters to give out fake promotions so low
ranking men would look like generals and other officers, creating

(13:38):
the full illusion of real operations. And then late at
night they would you know, go where they were called
and inflate their fox vehicles and artillery undercover of darkness,
so that when dawn came, it would appear as though
a huge surge of troops had arrived in the area.
And in addition to providing this false image of battle
ready army troops where there was really only a line

(13:59):
of fake vehicles and prerecorded noise, the twenty Third's ability
to seem to appear out of thin air and vanish
just as quickly actually had a really unnerving effect on
the enemy, so the German Army started calling them the
phantom Army. Other tricks included the ongoing burning of fires
at camps that were deserted, and different ways to create

(14:20):
fake tank tracks. In addition to the inflatable tanks and trucks,
they also used dummy planes and buildings. They could mix
fake radio transmissions within with the real ones to confuse
the enemy, and they mounted fake parachute drops and put
up signs directing Allied vehicles that were never actually coming.
But this elaborate spectacle also included a whole lot of

(14:43):
acting on the part of the troops. So knowing that
any US troops were always being watched by German soldiers
or spies, or sometimes there were French people working for
the Germans as informants, the boys of the would really
employ all manner of ruses. They would change out their
unit insignias as we mentioned, on uniforms as well as

(15:03):
on vehicles. They would do quick stencil work to change
everything up, and they would make sure that they were
seen about town wherever they were kind of drinking and
hanging out. And if they were asked what unit they
were a part of, they would just make up names
or reference a unit that they were covering for. And
some of them even would uh sort of mount these
these fake little tableau where they would feign drunkenness and

(15:27):
blab false information in public places. So this sort of
became this ongoing game of misinformation and subterfuge where they
were just sort of always acting. This wasn't completely flawless,
though sometimes there were mistakes and problems. On occasion, a
dummy tank would be inflated facing the wrong direction. Because
all of these set up parts are being done at night,

(15:50):
it was easy enough to lift one and turn it around,
but if it was already daylight when they realized the problem,
they were going to have to do it with really
careful timings so as not to be noticed. That one point,
several vehicles that had been inflated in the night were
warmed so much the sun came up that the air
expanding inside them caused them to pop loudly as they
sprang leaks. And while while this sort of sounds hilarious,

(16:14):
it was happening during a war. So all of these
accidents put the men involved at serious risk. And all
in all, there were twenty one missions mounted by the
twenty three And before we get to sort of the
biggest one that they undertook, uh, do you want to
do a quick word from a sponsor, let's do so.

(16:40):
The biggest in what is arguably the most successful of
the twenty third missions was Operation Veerson, and this took
place near the war's end, relatively speaking, it wasn't right
at the end, but it was in March, and this
basically launched a big visible decoy mission to once again
cover the movements of other troops. While parts of the
Ninth Army were moving north to quietly cross the Rhine,

(17:03):
the twenty three was making a big show of pretending
to be those troops farther south. They masqueraded as the
ninth and ran practice and training maneuvers for a crossing
at person and just publicly enough to draw lots of attention.
And this was really a massive effort. So they set
up fake medical and engineering facilities. They had trucks and

(17:27):
sonic crews creating the illusion of convoys moving supplies. At
one point they were just having trucks loaded up where
they would be driving them back and forth, and they
would put two guys at the very back, so it
looked like it was full of troops, but in fact
there are only two guys at the back. They arranged
everything perfectly so that an aerial reconnaissance taking pictures would

(17:49):
have no idea that the entire thing was a hoax.
They one of the reasons that they used artists was
so they could conceptually visualize, like how things would look
from multiple angles, even when they didn't have those angles
available to them, So they really made this whole thing
beautifully realistic, even though it was in fact all a hoax.
When the real Ninth crossed the rhyme, the Germans were

(18:10):
taken totally by surprise. Those German troops that could resist
them were disorganized and unprepared, so US casualties were very few.
The twenty three received a commendation from the Ninth Army
Commander William Simpson for their effort. A later estimate by
Simpson placed the number of troops that were saved by
this deception at ten thousand UH and it ended up

(18:33):
being the last mission of the war, and in September
there was completely shut down. So one of the inherent
dangers of being in a ghost army designed to draw
attention is that it also draws fire. So it's easy
to think of all this pageantry and strategic slide of

(18:55):
hand is really fun and fascinating, but it really put
the men involved at great risk. At one point they
were actually set up in beastone and they actually missed
the start of the Battle of the Bulge by about
four hours. They had been pulled out around midnight of
December six, and this is as P and the fighting
started around four am. So had those men been trapped

(19:19):
there with their phony equipment, they would have been in
incredibly dire straits and unable to defend themselves. During the
Battle of the Bulge. The three returned to Luxembourg City,
where they had already spent a lot of time, and
fired from the rooftops at the incoming Liftwoffe aircraft. This
is the only time they ever really four real fired
at the enemy. Yeah, it was there one there one

(19:42):
time that they actually got to perform actual combat activities. Uh.
And the twenty three after that was very quickly moved
to Verdunn. So, in part, the Allies wanted to maintain
the secrecy of the Ghost Army, and in another part
they realized that this blow up dummy artillery was not
going to be you good in a fight, so they
just wanted to clear them out. And the men ended

(20:03):
up spending Christmas in Verdune. While the group had been
extraordinarily lucky throughout their time, their luck finally ran out
in the spring of nine. On March twelfth, while impersonating
the eightieth Infantry, the twenty three drew German artillery fire.
Two of their men were killed in fifteen others were wounded.

(20:23):
This was really their worst day, in spite of having
been an incredibly dangerous areas many times as they kept
up false appearances all through the war. And one of
the problems that comes up when discussing the twenty three
and their effectiveness and sort of assessing what they were
able to achieve lies in the fact that so much

(20:44):
of their work was secret, and often it fooled Allied
forces as well as the enemy. Like the Allied forces
didn't even really know what was going on with them
a lot of the time, they thought they were just
another unit. After the war, most of the men stayed
quiet about the amaze sing works of deceptive are that
they had been part of. The work was classified, so

(21:04):
in the event that the US found itself at war again,
having a ghost army would be a really valuable asset,
So the military didn't want to tip its hand and
reveal this resource. But finally, in x SO, almost nineteen
years ago from when we're recording this, the work of
the twenty three was declassified, and the men who had
only been able to give KG answers to their families

(21:26):
about what they had done in the war were now
free to speak of their incredible efforts. One of the
truly significant aspects of the twenty three and the work
that they did is the fact that an entire division
of creative people was successfully managed within the structure of
the military. Yeah. This is one of those things that
people often go like, look, these were all artists and

(21:46):
they totally were able to work together in this this effort.
And I don't know if that speaks to like their
level of commitment or independence. You know, It's one of
those things that often likes to get bandied about, particularly
when you're talking about modern business, like, oh, it's hard
to manage creative people. It's like these guys managed and
they were doing some scary stuff. Yeah. I think it
also speaks to the like perpetual mythologizing of creative work

(22:10):
as some kind of extraordinary thing when in a lot
of cases it is work. Yeah, which isn't to say that, like,
creative inspiration isn't really fabulous and cool and unique in
many ways. But I just I find that to be
a really interesting one that we do mythologize working with
creative types. And I say this as a creative person
married to an artist as well, Like, but then it

(22:33):
can be anybody can be managed, any sort of effort
that can be put together. It's it's all about, you know,
using people's assets. And another really incredible legacy is the
artwork that a lot of these men were doing while
they were deployed. I'll talk a little bit more about
that in a minute. Yeah, it's really no surprise that

(22:54):
a lot of the men who were involved in effectively
doing art for the army went on to careers the arts.
So for example, Bill Blast of course went on spuilt
a fashion empire. He had actually been sketching women's clothing
during the war. Yeah, there was one interview that I
saw with one of the other members of the twenty
third and he was saying, and I don't know if

(23:15):
he was serious or not, that Bill Blast would read
Vote magazine in foxholes, but I have no idea, but
I loved it. Art Kane, of course became a very
well known photographer. His photo entitled A Great Day in Harlem,
which was taken in Night, featured fifty seven prominent jazz
musicians and it's still considered one of the most important

(23:36):
images of jazz history. And he also took a lot
of incredible celebrity portraits, and he was the photographer for
the one and only DeLorean magazine ad to ever run.
Ellsworth Kelly made a career as a painter and a
sculptor and became known for use of really bright color
and very hard edges. Arthur Singer became an illustrator and

(23:56):
he really became known for his incredibly detailed bird illustrations.
So if you have ever looked at an illustrated birding
field guide, uh, odds are really good that you've seen
as work, because it's been in everything. Jack Macy went
on to design backdrops for the State Department. Eventually he
designed the kitchen set that was used for the Nixon

(24:17):
Cruise Chef debate of nineteen fifty nine. And there's a
really wonderful documentary called The Ghost Army that I highly
recommend for people that UH want to hear accounts from
some of the surviving members of the twenty three. And
one of the reasons I really loved it too is that,
uh it being a visual medium, they're able to show
a lot of the artwork that these men were doing

(24:37):
while they were in France and in performing all these
amazing maneuvers. And one of the men says something like,
you know, we were in all these crazy circumstances, but
we could always find time or a place to duck
away and do a quick watercolor, which I think it's
just super termining, like they just were all artists at heart,
even though they were part of this amazing war effort.
And that documentary is as of this recording in early

(25:01):
is available on Netflix, and it's a little longer than
an hour, uh and you get to see a lot
of this really amazing art and just interviews with these guys,
and it deals a little bit more with with them
as individuals rather than like what we've covered is so
much of sort of the bigger, kind of broad strokes
of the whole unit, but this really focuses on some
of the different men and has interviews with them that

(25:21):
are really quite charming and touching and really really entertaining.
Uh So I highly recommend that and that is the
Ghost Army, which is just such a The whole thing
is so cool, and I'm surprised even though it does
pop up sometimes in like uh, you know, listic goals online, Uh,
people don't really know about it. Like it's another one

(25:42):
of those things where I thought, Oh, everyone's heard about this,
We've had a few requests for it. But then when
I mentioned it to people, they look at me like,
I don't know what you're talking about. And then when
I say a few things, they get sort of this,
like agog really what. So clearly this is there's there's
some gap in their uh, in the knowledge about these guys,

(26:03):
and it's they did such amazing things that I think
everybody should know what their work was like. Thank you
so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic.
If you have heard any kind of email address or
maybe a Facebook you are l during the course of
the episode, that might be obsolete. It might be doubly

(26:23):
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(26:44):
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