The Ghost Army of World War II

How One Top-Secret Unit Deceived the Enemy with Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and Other Audacious Fakery

Rick Beyer, Elizabeth Sayles

• Editorial: Princeton Architectural Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781616894528
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World War II

The Ghost Army of World War II describes a perfect example of a little-known, highly imaginative, and daring maneuver that helped open the way for the final drive to Germany. It is a riveting tale told through personal accounts and sketches along the way—ultimately, a story of success against great odds. I enjoyed it enormously. – Tom BrokawIn the summer of 1944, a handpicked group of young GIs—including such future luminaries as Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey—landed in France to conduct a secret mission. Armed with truckloads of inflatable tanks, a massive collection of sound-effects records, and more than a few tricks up their sleeves, their job was to create a traveling road show of deception on the battlefields of Europe, with the German Army as their audience.From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1, 100 men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Between missions the artists filled their duffel bags with drawings and paintings and dragged them across Europe. Every move they made was top secret and their story was hushed up for decades after the war's end. The Ghost Army of World War II is the first publication to tell the full story of how a traveling road show of artists wielding imagination, paint, and bravado saved thousands of American lives.

MY CON ARTISTS

The con-artist’s job is to hoodwink the enemy instead of slugging it out with him.

— Ralph Ingersoll

Every army practices deception. If they don’t, they can’t win, and they know it.

— General Wesley Clark, United States Army

Ralph Ingersoll had the perfect combination of attributes to be a deception planner. Not only was he a genuinely creative thinker, he was also a bold, confident dissembler. “I’ve never met anyone who was such a bright guy who was such a goddamned liar,” fellow deception planner Went Eldredge later told Ingersoll biographer Roy Hoopes. “He’d say anything to get what he wanted.” Ingersoll is the only person to have claimed credit for dreaming up the idea of the Ghost Army. Given his reputation, it is easy to be skeptical. But he was certainly there when it happened, and even if he didn’t think up the idea all on his own, he undoubtedly provided a good share of the creative spark.

Ralph Ingersoll

Before the war Ralph Ingersoll was a celebrity journalist and best-selling author—not to mention a man who attracted controversy as effortlessly as a starlet draws paparazzi. A product of Hotchkiss prep school and Yale University, he became managing editor of the New Yorker, publisher of Fortune, and general manager of Time Inc. He was one of the prime movers in the launching of Life magazine but made many enemies. He left Time to found his own innovative and left-leaning newspaper in New York, called PM. In a front-page editorial, Ingersoll wrote of PM, “We’re against people who push other people around.” The New York Times once described him as “a prodigiously energetic egotist with a talent for making magazines, covering a war, womanizing—and pushing other people around.” He acted as a star reporter for his own paper, met face-to-face with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, hung out at the White House with FDR, and made good copy for other reporters.

Ingersoll was in his forties when war broke out. After complaining vociferously when inducted by his local draft board (Ingersoll thought publishers should be exempt), he eventually gave in and joined up. Entering the army as a private, he quickly won a commission and became a staff officer. He served in North Africa, then came home and wrote a best-selling book, The Battle Is the Pay-Off. In the second half of 1943 Captain Ingersoll was stationed in the Operations branch of the army’s headquarters in London. He worked alongside British planners on various strategic deceptions so that American activities would dovetail with the overall British plan.

He took to deception like a duck to water. “For Ingersoll, it became love at first sight,” wrote Sefton Delmer, a British counterintelligence officer who authored the memoir The Counterfeit Spy. “He became one of the foremost American exponents of the art of deception.” He was full of ideas to meet any contingency. “Any problem, he would just think a bit and come out with something,” said Went Eldredge, who in civilian life taught at Dartmouth. “This was damn irritating for a college professor. He was always three moves ahead of you.”

One of the British deceptions Ingersoll worked on was Operation Fortitude, a massive effort designed to fool the Germans about where the D-Day landings would take place. Many means of deception—including inflatable landing craft, turned spies, and phony radio transmissions—were used to convince the Germans that an army under General George Patton was preparing to invade France at the Pas-de-Calais, when the real invasion would take place in Normandy.

In late 1943, according to an unpublished account Ingersoll wrote years later, this collaboration with British deceivers led him to the idea of creating a tactical deception unit flexible enough to create numerous different battlefield illusions. “My prescription was for a battalion that could imitate a whole corps of either armor or infantry…a super secret battalion of specialists in the art of manipulating our antagonists’ decisions.” He referred to the unit as “my con artists,” and said its creation was “my only original contribution to my country’s armed forces.” He went on to say: “When I first dreamed it up, I considered it one of my more improbable dreams, but damned if the Pentagon planners didn’t buy it whole.”

Ingersoll had a reputation for exaggerating his accomplishments. John Shaw Billings, who worked with him at Time, complained “he blew his own horn in the most outrageous way.” And he certainly didn’t conceive of the Ghost Army all on his own. One of his most important collaborators was his immediate superior, Colonel Billy Harris.

In many ways, Harris was the polar opposite of the flamboyant Ingersoll. He was a buttoned-up, straight-arrow West Point military man. He came from a family steeped in military tradition. His father was a general. His uncle was a general. Harris would himself eventually become a general. His mother, Lulu Harris, introduced Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a young army lieutenant, to his future wife, Mamie Doud, at Fort Sam Houston in 1916. Ingersoll called Harris a “cocky little man” and thought he had “more cheek than imagination.” Nevertheless, the two worked well together. While Ingersoll was full of wild, pie-in-the-sky ideas, Harris had the military training and discipline needed to implement deception in a way that could actually work.

Inflatable dummy tank

The plan they developed, with input from other military planners, was to create a unit of about eleven hundred men capable of impersonating one or two infantry or armored divisions—the equivalent of twenty to forty times their number. “It’s really simple,” Corporal Sebastian Messina explained to a reporter from the Worcester Daily Telegram shortly after the war was over. “Suppose the Umpteenth Division is holding a certain sector. Well, we move in, secretly of course, and they move out. We then faithfully ape the Umpteenth in everything…Then the Umpteenth, which the Boches [the Germans] think is in front of them, is suddenly kicking them in the pants ten miles to the rear.” Ralph Ingersoll thought that deception was the wrong word for what they did. “The right one should be manipulation—the art and practice of manipulating your enemies’ mental processes so that they come to a false conclusion about what you are up to.”

The inflatable personnel developed for deception purposes did not see much use because their lack of movement was such a giveaway.

Military deception—or manipulation—has a long history, going back to the Trojan Horse. “Every army practices deception,” says retired United States Army General Wesley Clark, former commander of NATO and a student of military history. “If they don’t, they can’t win, and they know it.” American generals have often used it to gain an advantage. Seemingly caught in a British trap in January 1777, General George Washington detailed a small number of men to tend bonfires and make digging noises to make it seem as if he were readying for battle in the morning, while in fact he was spiriting most of his troops away to attack the British rear. In 1862 Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston used log cannons to make his front line in northern Virginia appear to be bristling with guns and too strong for the Union to attack. Earlier in World War II, the British had made deft use of deception in North Africa.

But the Ghost Army wasn’t simply more of the same. It represented something unique in the history of war. George Rebh, who served in the unit as a captain and retired a major general, described it as nothing less than the first unit in the history of warfare that was dedicated solely to deception. “Now, you take Napoleon and Lee and Caesar,” said Rebh. “They would take part of their fighting force and use them for deception, but when they got through, they would come back as fighting force. In contrast, our sole mission was deception.”

The Ghost Army was different in two other ways. It was designed to project multimedia deceptions, using visual, sonic, and radio illusions together so that however the enemy was gathering information, everything would point to the same false picture. And it was mobile, capable of carrying out a deception for a few days in one place, packing it up, and moving on to someplace else to carry out a completely different deception. In effect, a commander could maneuver the Twenty-Third the same way he would a real unit.

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