The Ghost Army (Plate of Peas Productions, PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 27) KPBS showed an 11-year-old documentary for Memorial Day called The Ghost Army, made in 2013 after the U.S. military finally declassified the secrets they’d been holding from the public since World War II about a special corps of the U.S. Army formed in 1944 and 1945. Its purpose was to fool the Germans in the European Theatre about Allied plans by creating fake units that would be stationed along the front – first in southern England to make the Germans think the Allied invasion of France would take place at the Pas de Calais (because it was the shortest possible route and the one the Germans would have taken if the positions had been reversed) instead of the actual site, Normandy; then along the French-German border once the Allies liberated France in August 1944. There were three branches of this unit, officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops: visual, sound and radio. The visual branch was set up to create fake tanks and artillery pieces; their original idea was to create false tank bodies and mount them to Jeeps so they could drive them around, but ultimately the replicas weren’t rugged enough to stand up to battle conditions. So they made their own model tanks out of rubber and inflated them the way life rafts are inflated, with automatic springs and pumps. One of their concerns was that the replica tanks might start losing air and their fake guns would start flapping downwards, giving the game away.

The sound branch was delegated to record the actual sounds of a unit getting ready to do battle, including construction noises to sound like pontoon bridges being assembled as well as the actual sounds made by tanks and other heavy military equipment. The sounds were recorded on 16-inch lacquer transcription discs – the high-fidelity kind used by radio stations to record shows for later broadcast – and also on wire recorders, the progenitors of tape recorders. Instead of recording on plastic ribbons coated with iron oxide, wire recorders used long spools of literally miles of iron wire the thickness of a human hair. (The documentary shows a wire recorder in operation.) Ironically, the Germans had already invented tape recorders, but the Allied countries didn’t have access to this advanced recording technology until the war ended, the German Magnetophon recorders were captured as war booty, and American and British companies started copying and improving on the Germans’ tape recorders. The radio branch was created to fool the enemy by recording and playing back carefully scripted conversations that sounded like real battlefield communications. It might have seemed to the volunteers assigned to the unit – many of whom came from art schools and other creative backgrounds – that it was a combat-free assignment, but it wasn’t. Indeed, if it fooled the Germans well enough they might actually get fired upon or attacked – as happened in March 1945 when two members of the unit were killed and several others wounded by an actual German attack on their dummy force.

A number of well-known artists actually got their start in the 23rd Headquarters division, including fashion designer Bill Blass (who drew pictures of fashionably dressed women in his sketchbook during the war and even designed the logo of his famous fashion house – a reverse-image “B” coupled with a normal one – while he was on duty with the 23rd) as well as painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and photographer Art Kane, who later took the iconic 1958 photo in Esquire of various major and semi-major jazz musicians in Harlem under the title A Great Day in Harlem, which itself became the subject of a major film. There are innumerable anecdotes throughout this film, including one artist who recalled drawing pictures of the female prostitutes that accosted the servicemembers during their leaves in Paris. One hooker offered him a freebie if he’d give her the drawing, but he decided to keep it for himself and turn down the offer of sex in exchange for the drawing. There was also the story of a real reconnaissance plane that tried to land in a fake air base the 23rd had constructed to fool the Germans into thinking the base was somewhere other than where it was, and the time a real tank battalion was sent through a location where the 23rd had created a fake one. Another member of the unit recalled them being awakened almost literally in the dead of night and given marching orders to relocate to the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgian border when the Nazis launched the Battle of the Bulge, their last-ditch attempt at a major counteroffensive that they hoped would change the course of the war.

The existence of the Ghost Army – which had its own patch, consisting of a drawing of a white Casper-like ghost on a black field, and also sometimes wore the patches of the real units they were impersonating – was kept secret until the 1990’s because almost as soon as World War II ended, the Cold War began and the U.S. military feared America might soon be in a war with the Soviet Union. The U.S. military wanted to maintain the potential for these deception operations in case the U.S. and Russia fought a land war and the U.S. forces needed to pull one or more of those deception strategies again. The release of this documentary in 2013 ironically led to the long-overdue recognition of the Ghost Army and its contributions to winning the real war: in 2022, after 6 ½ years of campaigning led by the film’s writer-director, Rick Beyer, Congress finally passed and President Biden signed a bill to create a special Congressional Gold Medal to honor the Ghost Army. The medal was finally awarded in a public ceremony on March 21, 2024, over two years after the official enactment of the bill authorizing it, which can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s417Sush4Aw. Three of the seven surviving members of the unit – 100-year old Bernard Bluestein of Hoffman Estates; 99-year old John Christman of Leesburg, New Jersey; and 100-year old Seymour Nussenbaum of Monroe Township, New Jersey – attended the commemoration and received the long-overdue medal.