When the United States Army needed someone to impersonate an armored division, it recruited artists.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was established in January 1944 with a mandate that had never existed in military history before: to deceive the German military about the size, location, and composition of Allied forces in Western Europe through theatrical means. The unit's 1,100 men were drawn from art schools, advertising agencies, theatrical companies, and film studios in New York and California.
Their tools were:
- Three hundred rubber inflatable tanks, half-tracks, artillery pieces, and trucks — good enough, at altitude, to fool German reconnaissance aircraft
- A collection of sound trucks that could broadcast the recorded sounds of an armored column — engines, clanking treads, voices, bivouac noise — loud enough to be heard miles away
- A dedicated signals unit trained to mimic the radio "fingerprints" of real American units, fooling German radio intelligence into tracking phantom formations
- And the soldiers themselves, instructed to dress as the unit they were impersonating, spread into local French and Belgian towns, and behave convincingly like soldiers of whatever formation the Germans needed to believe was in that position
The Campaigns
The Ghost Army ran twenty-one separate deception operations between D-Day and the end of the war. Their most consequential was Operation Viersen in March 1945, in which they impersonated two full divisions — 30,000 men — along the Rhine, convincing the Germans that the main Allied river crossing would occur at a different point than Patton's actual crossing location, which they had been designed to protect.
Their methods were sometimes audacious to the point of absurdity. Ghost Army soldiers in jeeps would drive into towns displaying the insignia of whichever unit they were pretending to be, chat with locals, make sure they were noticed, then drive away. Sound trucks parked in treelines played recordings of tank formations so convincing that German patrols reported armor where there was none.
The unit saved an estimated 30,000 American lives by drawing German fire and attention away from real operations. For fifty years, this story was known to virtually no one.
The Artists
Among the men of the 23rd were Bill Blass, who would go on to become one of America's most prominent fashion designers. Ellsworth Kelly, who would become one of the defining figures of postwar American abstract art. Arthur Singer, the wildlife illustrator. Sheppard Shelnit, a muralist.
In their off hours — of which, despite everything, they had some — these men sketched. They painted. They recorded what they saw with the eyes of artists rather than soldiers. The Ghost Army left behind a body of visual documentation of the liberation of France that is unlike anything produced by official war artists — direct, immediate, personal.
The official history of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was classified TOP SECRET and remained so until 1996, more than fifty years after the war ended. For half a century, the men of the Ghost Army came home and told no one what they had done. Many took the story to their graves still classified.
A documentary film released in 2013 brought the story to public attention. By then, fewer than a dozen of the original 1,100 men were still alive to see it.
Sources & Further Reading
Rick Beyer & Elizabeth Sayles, "The Ghost Army of World War II" (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015); National Archives, RG 407, 23rd Headquarters Special Troops records (declassified 1996).
