How A Hollywood-Style Production Team (Known as the "Ghost Army") Duped and Helped Defeat Hitler's Army

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. In 1943, the U.S. 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 U.S. Army in places it wasn't.

The year is 1944 and the world is engulfed in the biggest catastrophe in human history, World War II. You're a soldier and you get your orders. You're headed to the front, but you're not going to be firing an M1 rifle or driving a Sherman tank. Your mission is to put on a show, to put 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 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 23rd 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 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. The Ghost Army is really the brainchild of two American staff officers who are polar opposites, Colonel Billy Harris and Major Ralph Ingersoll. And Ingersoll is 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 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 button-down West Point colonel named Billy Harris and the two of them together in the Special Plans Branch in the European Theatre of Operations in late 1943, they dream up this idea of let's create a traveling road show of deception. Why do they do it? 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 1943 before the orders really go out to form this unit. The U.S. 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 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 Germans to fool them about the location and size of American troops and in a lot of ways they're like a traveling road 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 box office and then the 603rd camouflage engineers who worked with the inflatables they're like the guys doing scenery and you've got the radio company they're they're doing dialog you've got the 406th combat engineers that's the security arm of the unit they're like the spear carriers and then you've got the 3132nd signal company and they are like the orchestra and you put it all together and you hope that the result is convincing. 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. You couldn't really believe that what we were going to do would be effective.

How could we come along with with rubber dummies and blow it up and make it look real. 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. And the mission was to try to be able to take a thousand men and put them in so that 15,000 men could move somewhere else and not be detected.

We were going to be in show business where we set up one night stands and light ghosts disappear. At which point somebody said do you mean we're asking for the enemy to fire on us? The answer was yes. At that point we all came to the conclusion 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 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 McGlynn, Irving Stemple, Robert Conrad, Ed Blow, Ned Harris, Gil Seltzer, Dick Syracuse, Harold Flynn, Victor Dowd and Al Albrecht. When we come back more of the story of the ghost army of World War II here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country. Stories from our big cities and small towns but we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. When you use the cheap Caribbean.com budget beach finder to save time and money booking your next vacation you get to be a little extra.

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Where we last left off. 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 603rd camouflage engineers and about half that unit are artists who've very specifically been put into this camouflage unit to use their 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. You also have engineers, telephone linemen, signalers, script writers, all sorts of people like that who are recruited or sort of find their way into this unit not by accident. But that's mixed up then with a bunch of people who are bartenders, farmhands, policemen, teachers, all sorts of different jobs from 46 or 47 states. The 23rd headquarters troops consisted of about 1100 soldiers. So it kind of sounds like a lot but they're pretending to be as many as 20 or 30,000. And these 1100 soldiers were divided into different units for the different types of deception they did. So visual deception is handled by the 603rd 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 fool enemy aerial reconnaissance. And then sonic deception, using sound to fool the enemy is handled by the 3132nd signal service company.

And they've got giant speakers mounted on half tracks that can project sound for 15 miles. So it's not the sound of battle but like sounds of convoys on the move, of tanks rumbling down a road, of a convoy of trucks 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, or 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 they want for a deception and it's one of the earliest uses of multi-track recording. So recordings were brilliant. There was a road leading up, the music had to be described, the change of gears, and the tanks going up, tanks going down, the tanks assembling.

And then we'd go to another spot where trucks were just flying through on the highway. They had recordings of building a pontoon bridge or any type of bridge and you could hear them hammering away and swearing. Enormous sounds of tracks racing through the forest sounded like a whole division was amassing. And some of these sounds really, it's not just trucks or tanks or bridge building, it's guys voices.

Sergeant's voices yelling, put out that cigarette now. Back on my half track I tell my children was the biggest boombox you ever saw, but it played sounds of tanks and activity. It was all fakery.

It was all a big act. All the stuff to make it seem realistic for an enemy listening at an outpost, a listening 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 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 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.

Let's say it's the 75th Infantry. They're putting on 75th Infantry patches. They're putting those bumper markings on their vehicles. They're setting up phony headquarters. This is all to fool enemy spies that have left behind.

So it all added up. By God, there they are, the 35th and the 79th or whatever, you know, they're up there and that's where it's going to be right on, bang, on the map. Well, really, they were not there. They were down here. 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 send them to the factory? Why don't we start a counterfeit shoulder patch factory where they would see we were the 75th Division, one of the divisions 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. We had a sewing kit. That's one of the things that was required that we carry with us all the time. Give us the patches and we were good at sewing them on, seamstresses. My shirts were all wrecked for 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 singing the song that the guys in the 75th always like to sing. 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 omelettes and talk loose. A lot of the guys went to the bakery, got rolls and stuff and said we got to get an extra supply because we're moving out tonight kind of thing. 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. We find out if like a division or a special unit had a particular song that they like to sing. We get blitzed and then sing their song. 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. We wanted to create the natural debris that goes with faking something. We did similar things with artillery. Lay phony artillery shells around to make it look as if they had been firing. After a while, my eyes were beginning to tell me what my ears were hearing, and I began to see tanks. They weren't there.

They were in my ear, but they weren't. Crank the speakers up out in the back of the half track and play a program for the enemy all night of us bringing equipment into the scene. We could make them believe that we were coming in with an armored division.

Of course, you had to tend these dummies all the time. During the night, the gun turrets would sag, and that's a bad visual effect the next morning if the Germans are looking down there and seeing sagging gun barrels. It's amazing the fakery that we were able to perpetrate upon the enemy. And you've been listening to Rick Byer, the author of the Ghost Army of World War II. 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 from a few more veterans of the Ghost Army, including Stanley Nance, Jack Macy, John Jarvey, Mike Berry, Joe Spence, John Walker, and Bob Tompkins. And what a 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.

The story of the Ghost Army of World War II continues here on Our American Stories. Because the budget beach finder compares all-inclusive vacation packages across tons of destinations to show you the best deals possible. You can go to your favorite beaches like Mexico, Jamaica, or Punta Cana knowing you got the best value. Or explore someplace new if you find a deal you just can't pass up. And when you go all-inclusive with cheap Caribbean, it's all included. Pay one price for everything on your vacay. Food, drinks, flights, and hotel are all bundled together.

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Wear it like no one else. And we continue with our American stories and with Rick Beyer who is telling the story of the Ghost Army of World War II. 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 pick up where we last left off. So they come over to England they they train in England they arrive in France in late June early July 1944 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 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 that.

We did a very successful sonic imitation of the assembling of of tanks and and for some reason or other the commanding officer of this tank battalion sends his tanks right down the ravine that we had played for dummy's sake. Due to a command mistake 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. Those guys never reached the line of departure which is the point that they want to start their attack from they never even got that far. An American 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 were killed. They got decimated we had no way of knowing they were gonna kick off an attack and they had no way of knowing that we weren't gonna help them. A bunch of American tanks are destroyed a bunch of guys are killed you know and it makes you feel lousy and 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 and 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 to in September 1944 to Operation Bettenberg. Patton 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 25 mile gap in George Patton's line and the Ghost Army guys are rushed in to fill it that's a deception that lasted for eight days which is a huge amount of time to try to 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 Moselle river there in Luxembourg and parts of France. Infantrymen would see us and realize what we were doing with these dummy tanks setting ourselves up as targets that say things like you guys are crazy. We could position certain things so that they would be hidden but kind of hidden in plain sight so if a 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. In most cases like a German tank we could have it inflated and move within 15 or 20 minutes.

The artillery piece was good the jeep was good but that M4 tank that was the beauty that was a that was a piece of work it really was. It was a little bundle of stuff which a tank was in or compressed before you opened the bundle spread the the nozzles around and inflated it. Pulling this amorphic shape out of it and then watching it being filled with air and taking form you know like a monster. If things went very well there were air compressors.

If things went not so well there were bicycle pumps and if things went terribly badly there were our lungs. I was on guard duty and two frenchmen on bicycles got through the 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 40-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They looked at me and then they looked at the situation they were looking for answers and I finally said the Americans are very strong. It's an incredibly important deception because it's a very important deception because if the Germans had figured out that there was this hole in Patton's line they could have gone through and gotten behind Patton and wreaked 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 were doing.

The operations officer Clifford Simonson said this is where we really started to get good you know we finally started to put it together and figure out really how 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 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 1944 and they're carrying out this little 24-hour deception Operation Booz-en-Ville. They've taken some casualties over the preceding months you know the enemy's been firing at them because they think they're a real unit but here in this operation the enemy 88s really zeroed in and just as they were about to leave the area of carrying out the deception in Operation Booz-en-Ville they got hit with that very heavy artillery barrage. And there were people probably no more than 20-30 feet away from me that lost limbs because of shrapnel just falling all over. I was sitting in the truck with my truck driver and 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 do I tell them to get the hell out of here now and with that the signal came and we moved and it was just a case of luck luck is the paramount word. About 12 or 15 guys are wounded they have two men who are killed it's really one of their their deadliest days.

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. 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 know you wonder when you reach the point that that luck is going to run out and so it had started to feel that way for some of these guys and then two weeks later they head into their biggest operation of the war and we're listening to Rick Beyer author of Ghost Army of World War II and we're also hearing from actual Ghost Army veterans including Arthur Shillstone and these guys well what they did was simply astounding and they got really good at what they did filling the gap in Patton's line in September of 1944 and they did it for six days for the 6th Army Division six long days. When we come back more of the remarkable story of the Ghost Army of World War II here on Our American Stories. is my oyster and I'm the pearl extra just set your price range and get more sand for your dollar because the budget beach finder compares all-inclusive vacation packages across tons of destinations to show you the best deals possible you can go to your favorite beaches like Mexico, Jamaica or Punta Cana knowing you got the best value or explore someplace new if you find a deal you just can't pass up and when you go all-inclusive with cheap Caribbean it's all included pay one price for everything on your vacay food drinks flights and hotel are all bundled together spend less and get more when you book your next beach vacation with a budget beach finder at cheapcaribbean.com get 30% stronger in just eight weeks with GNC amp waybolic from America's number one protein powder brand for building strength waybolic increases strength and stamina with half the sets in the gym and delivers clinically proven results with 40 grams of ultra pure protein per serving before a workout after a workout even on days off amplify your results and enjoy amazing flavors grab GNC amp waybolic today at gnc.com or visit a GNC store near you do you love fashion do you love getting compliments on how well you're dressed are you always seeking the latest trends then we're talking to you bostonproper.com is your fashion destination and the only place to go for all those nods head turns and new styles no matter the day season or occasion boston proper has what you're looking for sophisticated confident clothing designed to flatter and get noticed so visit bostonproper.com now and start creating your perfect wardrobe boston proper wear it like no one else and we continue with our american stories and with rick beyer's story of the ghost army of world war ii let's pick up where we last left off later in march 1945 they head into their biggest operation of the war operation veerson they are now assigned to the ninth army the ninth army is 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 10 miles to the south and so for this 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 30th division and the 79th division they're doing sonic deception they have hundreds of inflatables set up within 10 miles of the Rhine river they are doing huge amounts of radio transmission they set up phony headquarters for these units they've got people impersonating generals driving around in jeeps we did a lot of ride through with two guys in the back of a truck to make it look like it was full if you're going to bring a division up you better have a headquarters somewhere and there better be a major general walking around and so we had to have a full general do this some sergeant would wear two stars for an operation 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 23rd headquarters special troops that had made that happen and general William Simpson 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 that official commendation is basically the only 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 it was the only unit commendation of any kind that they got during the war because this was so secret so everything they did was but basically the lid was kept on this for nearly 50 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 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and 80s and and and and beyond into the 90s and and so the story of world war ii 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 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 to george washington when he was a general so that kind of gives you an idea of the of the level that we're aiming at there now 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 means that before you can even you know 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 onto it well that's an incredibly high bar getting two-thirds of congress to agree on anything might be challenging so that was kind of the 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 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 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 uh and got a bigger group of lobbyists and slowly began to move things some of our most effective lobbyists were teenagers we had three teenagers who were so excited by this story that they wanted to help lobby you know 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 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 you know 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 they started 14 15 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 and i was so deeply impressed with this for me very inspiring to work with these young people and they they moved the needle i mean i'm not suggesting that oh they were involved and that was nice they they lobbied they convinced senators i mean they had 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 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 15 year old which i think is 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 and finally the he got a call from grassley's office saying that that senator grassley would talk to him so he's very excited and he and he did his whole pitch and basically before he even started senator grassley told him how impressed he was and that he was going to sign on and co-sponsor the bill but then caleb got an award from the u.s army for this national history day project he had done and senator grassley said well i'll come to your high school for this award ceremony so he came you know they have this big award ceremony in the gym of this tiny little school in nashua plainfield iowa 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 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 2021 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 2022 metal has been designed 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 100 last week i've got two other guys turning 100 in may there's only about eight left and and half of them are going to be 100 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 it would mean a lot not only to them but i think to a lot of the families to have a ceremony that happened while some of the guys were still here you know you saved lives you don't know how many you saved but you know you saved them they estimated that we saved between 15 and 30 000 lives with our maneuvers but you know even we don't want to save 15 or 30 it was worth it one mother or one new bride was spared the agony of putting a gold star in their front window that's what the 23rd headquarters was all about and you heard that right the ghost army of world war ii saved between 15 and 30 000 lives through their maneuvers and their courage that's what the 23rd 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 the ghost army for sharing their stories but to rick beyer the director of the ghost army legacy project author of the ghost army of world war ii and he also helped curate an exhibition about the ghost army for the national world war ii museum in new orleans the finest museum in this country the story of the ghost army of world war ii here on our american stories week after week xfinity flex unlocks access to premium networks and apps so you can try fresh entertainment for free each and every week catch the season premiere of outlander from stars journey through the sounds of black music month with pics from lifetime movie club and revolt celebrate pride month with stories from out tv and hear tv then kick back with nature scenes from music choice relax and jam all june with i heart radio's songs of the summer radio discover new shows and movies for free no strings attached say free this week into your xfinity voice remote for each person living with myasthenia gravis or mg their journey with this rare condition is unique that's why untold stories life with myasthenia gravis a new podcast from i heart 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