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stake as well. If the Germans realized how thinly held the sector was,
they could break through and attack Patton from the rear.
In other words, it was just another day in the life for the men of
what became known as the Ghost Army.
This top-secret unit went into action in June 1944, a few weeks after
D-Day. For the next nine months they conducted deception missions
from Normandy to the Rhine River. Its complement was more
theatrical than military, noted the units official US Army history. It
was like a traveling road show that went up and down the front lines
impersonating the real fighting outfits.
What they did was so secret that few of their fellow American
soldiers even knew they were there. Yet they pulled off twenty-one
different deceptions and are credited with saving thousands of lives
through stagecraft and sleight of hand. Like actors in a repertory
theater, they would ask themselves: Who are we this time? Then
they would put on a multimedia show tailored to that particular
deception, often operating dangerously close to the front lines. They
threw themselves into their impersonations, sometimes setting up
phony command posts and masquerading as generals. They frequently
put themselves in danger, suffering casualties as a consequence. After
holding Pattons line along the Moselle, they barely escaped capture by
the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, and in March 1945 they
performed their most dazzling deception, misleading the Germans
about where two American divisions would cross the Rhine River.
Their mission bordered on the surreal. But that is only part of their
amazing story. The artists in the unit, recruited to handle visual
deception, used their spare time to chronicle the units adventures in
thousands of paintings and drawings, creating a unique and poignant
visual record of their war. After coming home many took up postwar
careers as painters, sculptors, designers, illustrators, or architects. A
surprising number went on to become famous, including fashion
designer Bill Blass, painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, and wildlife
artist Arthur Singer.
Thirty years after the war, when the details of their story were still
being kept secret, a United States Army analyst who studied their
missions came away deeply impressed with the impact of their
illusions. Rarely, if ever, has there been a group of such a few men
which had so great an influence on the outcome of a major military
campaign.
They were the Cecil B. DeMille Warriors, in the words of Ghost
Army veteran Dick Syracuse.
This is their story.
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 divisionsthe equivalent
of twenty to forty times their number. Its 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.
Military deceptionor manipulationhas 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 dont, they cant 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 wasnt 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.
Excerpt from The Ghost Army of World War II by Rick Beyer and
Elizabeth Sayles, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2015
http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?
isbn=9781616893187