In the summer of 1944, a group of artists, visual designers and sound engineers–all of them GIs–began a series of secret operations in occupied France. Their mission: to deceive German forces about the location and size of U.S. military units, using a combination of inflatable vehicles, sound recordings, and “actors” posing as officers.
The ranks of the “Ghost Army” included future stars of the worlds of art and design, including Ellsworth Kelly, Bill Blass, Arthur Singer, Victor Dowd, Art Kane, and Jack Masey. Journalist Rick Beyer has chronicled their ingenious exploits in a book and a documentary.
December marks the 80th anniversary of the order that created the unit, which remained secret for decades. Shane Harris talked with Beyer about its creation, its success, and the ghost army’s role in the storied history of intelligence deceptions.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
The Ghost Army bookhttps://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/ghost-army-of-world-war-ii
The Ghost Army documentary https://shop.pbs.org/WC3752.html
The Ghost Army Legacy Project https://ghostarmy.org/
Smithsonian magazine feature https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-ghost-army-of-wwii-used-art-to-deceive-the-nazis-180980336/
The National WWII Museum https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling-exhibits/ghost-army-combat-con-artists-world-war-ii
this is Chatter I’m Shane Harris this week filmmaker and author Rick buyer on the ghost Army of World War [Music] II this idea of of having a unit that’s dedicated to deception that’s mobile that’s multimedia can work on the battlefield I have never seen anything like it anywhere in history and I’ve talked to a lot of people any given deception probably starts with radio one of the soldiers called it the stage Setter cuz you can start radio 50 miles away and you can be sending all these phony Transmissions to make it seem to the Germans like a whole unit is coming you know every guy who I interviewed for that documentary film has passed away but I do feel that that what these guys did was incredibly important and unusual and really worth [Music] honoring Rick berer welcome to chatter thanks so much for joining us oh it’s great to be here thank you uh I’m really excited to talk with you about your book The Ghost Army of World War II one of the reasons I really was interested in speaking with you is I’ve covered intelligence for you know a couple of decades now and usually when we talk about intelligence and espionage operations people conjure up images of you know spies going in on daring missions to retrieve information or you know uh we think of electronic surveillance um we don’t often think about another really big part of intelligence which is deception and taking actions to make an adversary believe something that’s not true or to distract them from the truth and that’s really what’s at the core of this just tremendous story about this World War II outfit uh called the ghost on Army so we’re going to get into all of that um I wonder if you could start though by telling me how this kind of improbable outfit began we’re at the 80th anniversary this month in December of the order that created this group so tell us what its origin story is well it I I like to say that the ghost Army was born of a marriage of opposites because there are two US army officers who really came up with this idea and and shephered it through uh and they were very very different so major Ralph ingersol had been a civilian who was drafted into the army he was a famous publisher author journalist uh uh very left-wing he started a newspaper in New York called PM uh and he was uh uh he was also a guy with a kind of a um a tenuous relationship with the truth one person who worked with him said I never met such a bright guy who was such a goddamn liar um and uh and which is the perfect pedigree for a deception officer you’re smart and and you’re you’re good at lying so he ends up um he ends up being drafted but he becomes an officer he serves in North Africa and then he is in uh London working for the special plans Branch for the US army forces there in 1943 and they’re working on planning The Invasion and his boss there is Colonel Billy Harris and Billy Harris is the exact opposite of Ralph fersa he’s a a military you know Square cleancut West Point guy his father was a general his brother was a general everybody in his family generals he becomes a general later on um and the two of them together are the people who developed this idea and I think what’s happening is they are working with the British on a on a big deception plan for the D-Day invasion called Operation Fortitude to deceive where the invasion’s going to go it’s to say that it’s going to go to the P Cal when it really is aiming for Normandy right and uh and and and but they are also working on what can they develop for the American Army once it lands in Normandy what kind of capabilities can they develop and ingara when he’d been in North Africa he’d seen British tactical deceptions at the Battle of L alamain where they disguised tanks as trucks and they disguised trucks as tanks and they try to fool the Germans about where the the real troops were and so his idea was well we could create kind of a core that’s dedicated to this idea uh of deception and and he thought uh he called them my con artists and he he and uh Harris developed the idea and ingersol is kind of the pie in the sky let’s try this guy Harris’s the feet on the ground how do we make this work in the army guy and they come up with the idea of this deception unit that we now refer to as the ghost Army uh and the amazing thing to me Shane is that uh they passed this up the line to their boss and he passes it to his boss who’s General Jake de because this is before Eisenhower’s the commander there and they say yes I mean because the generals easily could have got that is way too weird wild yeah so we’re not gonna do that but they say yes and they developed this deception capability why did they say yes I think they said yes because they were going up against the Germans who in their minds were the very best Army on the planet and they knew that they were going to be able to put over I mean the original Invasion plan was to put three divisions in France on that first day it ended up being changed to five divisions but uh if the Germans uh figure out where they are and can MK their forces against them it’s going to be a very near thing this battle and so they want to have every capability they can have and one of the things about the ghost Army which and we’ll talk about the ways that they They carried out deception but they are 1100 men that’s a pretty small number of men but they can pretend to be 20,000 or 40,000 so this is a force multiplier and if you’re in in really concerned about about it’s going to be a close shot with the Enemy how do we beat them this seemed like a good bet how much experience had commanders in Warfare had with deception techniques like this I mean people are familiar with before the Normandy Landing there are the you know the fake tanks and the vehicles and the rubber tanks people have seen pictures of that are put out there to make the Germans think the invasion is coming one place and it’s really coming from another I mean deceptions been a part of War but had anyone tried anything at this scale with this kind of physicality to it before deception is as old as the Trojan Horse right and so um and and which worked great that first time but you never really hear about a second time that they use the Trojan Horse they only use it once yeah yeah so so that’s kind of a oneoff idea this idea of of having a a unit that’s dedicated to deception that’s mobile that’s multimedia can work on the battlefield to carry out tactical deceptions I have never seen anything like it anywhere in history and I’ve talked to a lot of people and said have you ever seen anything like this and there just doesn’t seem to be an example of it in general commanders would get an idea for a deception so they uh uh take some troops and they attach them and they see well you guys do the fooling here for you know two days or a week or two weeks uh and then they bring him back in but this idea of a dedicated unit for deception really appears to be something that was original to the American Army in 1943 and 1944 yeah and it goes roving around and we we’ll talk about that too because it seems like the the their mission really begins after the D-Day Landing doesn’t it right you know I go I do a lot of talks about the ghost Army and sometimes uh I will say at the beginning of a talk I say um how many of you guys have heard of Operation Fortitude the D-Day deception and a large number of people will raise their hands how many of you think that that’s what I’m going to talk about tonight and almost all those people will raise their hands and I said well I have good news and bad news the bad news is that that’s not what I’m gonna talk about and the good news is that what I’m gonna talk about is in many ways even more interesting yeah yeah yeah so well who let’s talk about before we get into the missions a part of the book that I find so fascinating and part of this is because you know I I’m a great lover of Art and of Hollywood and performance talk about the people who were recruited into this I mean some of these individuals went on to become renowned American artists and very important painters so who are the people that get recruited into the ghost Army well uh one of the ways that the ghost arm is going to fool the enemy is with Inflatables uh and I don’t think we’re giving away too much with that but inflatabl is to be viewed by any enemy aerial Recon and uh so to to to work with these Inflatables the Army assigns to this unit a camouflage unit that’s already been put together it’s a it’s a pre-existing unit the 603d camouflage engineers and about a third of the guys in that unit are artists they’re mostly art students or young artists um uh many of them came from Pratt Institute in New York we’ve identified about 30 people who came from Pratt Institute so they were really feeding right into this and this group of people includes a bunch of people who went on to become quite famous after World War II so Ellsworth Kelly who became a famous minimalist painter and sculptor uh Bill blast who became a very famous fashion designer he’s not so well known today but he was very big in the 80s and 90s yeah um Arthur Singer is a name that’s familiar to Wildlife artists uh Wildlife um um you know bird watchers Arthur Singer is a name that’s familiar with bird watchers uh he Illustrated the book birds of North America and he and his son created the famous birds and flowers of the 50 states uh postage stamp series but you had guys who did all sorts of stuff Arcane took the very famous photograph of 57 Jazz musicians on a stoop in Harlem which he did I think in like 1957 and and I love the thing about I love about that story it’s this iconic photograph that many people have seen it was literally his very first assignment as a professional photographer uh pretty you peek early right uh and so uh so all of those guys and we’ve identified all sorts of people who were comic book artists people who became um Architects a guy who worked on the Space Needle in Seattle one of the creators of the monsters was in this unit so it really I mean I I don’t know what it would have been like to listen to the conversations that are going on during the war but this was an extraordinary group of people but you also have uh some interesting people in the other units as well you have uh Engineers that have been recruited Telephone Company people um they there is a kind of a a lot of people think that they recruited from Hollywood and they do have some people from Hollywood but I think that they mostly went to Hollywood later so I don’t think that they recruited from Hollywood but they recruited people who were radio announcers all sorts of stuff to bring their skills in to carry off these deceptions and we should say too that these were not missions without risk I mean people shouldn’t have the impression that these are painters and artists and sound designers who kind of stayed in the background and then their their material was sent off to war they were out on the line sometimes behind the lines conducting real operations and putting themselves at Great risk to do it absolutely so this deception unit and we should say if I haven’t said it the official name of the unit is the 23rd head quarters Special Troops which is like the most boring name for way better fascinating unit but this unit uh carries out 22 different deception missions on the battlefields of Europe so they’re not 100 miles behind the lines sometimes they’re not even a mile behind the you know uh back of the liines they have missions where they’re out basically a quarter of a mile from the Germans uh and they take artillery fire on a number of occasions they lose uh three people killed uh during the course of the war and an really I I I think about 30 who were wounded and it’s a little confusing because not all of them received purple hearts but as you go through the records you realize that there’s a bunch of people who were wounded and I think because of I don’t know because of secrecy or because of whatever uh they didn’t receive purple hearts uh they were lucky they and they recognized they were lucky they could have had the Germans figured fig out what they were doing um and attacked in their area in force they could have been wiped out and that came close to happening at the Battle of the Bulge but they they they took casualties they were in danger but they were lucky there’s a great quote uh it begins the second chapter of your book from uh is Jack Massie or is Jack Massie or ma ja Macy ma Jack Macy who says of the people in this group we were looked on as kind of nutcases by the hardworking non-nonsense backbone of America the people that worked for a living and didn’t sketch uh I I just love and and to finish that quote he says they they thought we were we were kind of freaks and I think we were he says that’s great yeah but it really is I me it sort of underscores the degree to which you know we think of people as you know as artists like creatives and non-conformist and and they are people who often don’t fit in but they just boy did they ever fit into a mission uh here talk about some of the first operations that this this group was sent off on like when they when they when they when they are first standing up and you they mentioned there were 22 of them in a fairly short period of time I think but what was some of the first foras that they had so the very first part of the ghost army goes into uh Normandy the first deception operation happens about a week after D-Day and it’s very small scale it’s a task force Mason led by Bernie Mason who I got to interview uh goes in and they’re going to impersonate an artillery uh battery they’re going to put up false you know inflatable artillery pieces about a mile ahead of the real battery and then they’re going to have um flash canisters so they can make it seem like they’re firing at the same time the real battery is firing and they’re going to try to draw German artillery fire onto them instead of the real battery and so that is the very first operation they do um it lasts about a month and uh they manag to uh succeed they draw enemy fire but they’re dug in well well enough that they’re not uh uh injured by it um their first full-scale operation in Normandy is called operation elephant and that is uh not really terribly successful uh they’re they’re uh they’re just still kind of learning what they’re doing and then I think the first operation where they really use all their different types of deception together um uh is operation breast and that is uh the Germans are in the um they the the Germans have who have been on the Britany Peninsula have retreated into the city of breast and the Americans are attacking to try to to take the city to take the port uh and the ghost Army is brought in to pretend to be the sixth Armored Division uh attacking to the flanks uh well the real American attack is going to come from the center uh and so this is the first time that they are able to use all their forms of deception so they’ve got all their Inflatables they’ve got their sonic deception they’ve got their radio deception uh and they also for the first time in operation breast they use um a fourth type of deception that they had developed kind of came up from the enlisted guys and the junior officers that they called special effects which was uh hey if we’re going to pretend to be the sixth armor division we should have guys in sixth division patches in town and our we should be driving trucks through that say sixth Armored Division and you know anything to fool enemy spies been left behind so operation breast is where they first used all four kinds of deception in August 1944 and then in September Comes operation bettenburg where they’re now they’re on the Luxembourg uh Germany border uh and that’s really where they start to gel and really be able to carry it off and at that point they are they are literally this group of of 1100 Americans is holding 25 miles of George Patton’s line while Patton’s attacking the Fortress city of Mets and they’re doing it with inflatable tanks and sound effects and guys driving around in Jeeps uh you know wearing patches of the you know unit that they’re impersonating uh and and carrying off this extraordinary deception that you know manages to keep the Germans who are at that point are reorganizing and and trying to to Strike Back Against The Americans from realizing that they could get around behind patent through that so I think that is one of their that’s the it’s an early deception but one of their most amazing deceptions when they’re going in and taking these these Inflatables I mean are they I mean are they heavy Ian is there a lot of gear that they’re taking in to to put these things in the line and then actually to blow them up and how do they inflate them when they get there so the Inflatables weigh about 90 pounds the inflatable tanks and I think that’s the heaviest uh of the Inflatables that they had uh they fit in a large duffel bag it’s kind of like a the bag that you put your kids soccer balls in for the for the big soccer game or a hockey bag um they could they had trucks and they probably could fit about 20 of those into a truck uh they had um air compressors that they could use uh Jack mayy who you mentioned before and who was one of the funniest of the people I interviewed uh said uh in an interview that is in the film he said uh you know if we were lucky we had air compressors if we were not so lucky we had bicycle pumps and if things really went bad we had our lungs um but most of the time they’ve got uh air compressors and another Soldier John jarvey talked about you know it would be if you’re coming in someplace and you’re trying to set up the inflatables at night and you’re up there in the front line and then you fire up this gasoline Power air compressor he said it felt like the entire you know enemy front line was going to explode with uh with artillery fire at you but uh the guy said that it took um most of the Inflatables took about 15 to 20 minutes to inflate but inflating and inflatable is only the first part of the job because second of all you have to you have to camouflage the inflatable but do so badly on purpose H why uh so that the enemy will see it but not think that you wanted them to see it okay so good not too good yeah and then and then you have to watch to make sure if it’s a tank that the barrel doesn’t start to deflate and you know I have I have um I have worked with inflatable tanks for display purposes over the last 15 years and I can tell you that is a frequent problem that I’ve had and the soldiers many of whom made uh all manner of Viagra jokes about this sure uh it was a frequent problem that they had as well so you got to monitor the stuff that you’ve inflated and make sure that it’s still looking real and oh oh and one other thing you have to do if you’re working with Inflatables and if we were looking at a picture now of one of their operations and I said to you what makes it look real and you see all these inflatable tanks on the field you’d say oh the tank tracks because think about it we’re setting up an inflatable 90 pound tank that is not gonna leave much in the way of tank tracks but a 40 ton Sherman sure would so they had to have a a they had a combat engineering company and in that company they had three guys with bulldozers and they Ed the bulldozers to make the tank tracks when they’re setting up the Inflatables and if again think about you’re doing this at night if you miss one that could clue the enemy into the whole thing because they’d be like why ises that tank not have any tank tracks to it wait a minute we need to take a closer look at this so attention to detail is so important in every aspect of these deception and did they have to I’m wondering now with all of this activity you kind of alluded to this earlier with the air compressors how in the world they didn’t give themselves away to the Germans so did they have to come in knowing that the Germans would be nearby but not so close that they could see them setting up these props yeah so sometimes they’re coming in uh the closest that I can see that they’re that they’ve come to the Germans that they’re bringing the Inflatables as probably about a mile from the front line okay so the Sonic trunk trucks get closer the Sonic trucks have on some of the deceptions are playing sounds from a quarter of a mile from the front line the Inflatables are back so what they were doing is they’re moving in uh these tanks and and sort of making it seem like they’re threatening an attack in an area so not bringing them right up to the front but they’re bringing them in a in a place that they could organize their attack and and depart from from have a line of departure from that might be you know a mile behind and some deceptions they’re much further behind because they’re not pretending to be doing an attack but they’re pretending to be moving into Reserve or they’re pretending simply to be going from one location to another so it really depends on the on the deception that they’re doing but I think they’re always careful not to to be seen um setting these up they’re either going to be setting them up at night or there’s they’re setting them up at another time of day they’re going to they they’re must be in an area where they they know there’s no aerial reconnaissance uh or or something to prevent them from being seen yeah the image in my head is almost like uh you know actors in a performance who are getting everything ready before the house opens and the A and the curtain comes back and the audience suddenly sees everything in position so they have to get it ready and then you you kind of anticipated my next question is it it’s aerial surveillance and other kind of nearby surveillance that they’re then hoping will spot what they’ve done right yeah so so you know and maybe this is a time to step back and say the idea of this unit is that it’s a multimedia deception unit so any given deception probably starts with radio so they’ve got a bunch of radio guys who have radio trucks so if you’re pretending well let’s say we’re pretending to be the 75th Infantry Division moving up into the front line radio one of the so called it the stage Setter because you can start radio 50 miles away and you can be sending all these phony transmissions and bringing that up and all you need is the same number of radio operators that a real unit would have maybe even fewer uh to make it seem to the Germans like a whole unit is coming and then radio would be followed by the Sonic deception which is played out on these 500 pound speakers mounted on the back of half TRS so so we hear the radio and now we hear the sounds of a unit moving in and then that would be followed by the visual deception so that if that’s happening at night then by the next morning you have Inflatables but you don’t just have Inflatables you also have guys would put out lines have clothing on them you know uh if you’re setting up an artillery uh battery you put the shells around it you do all the things to make it look lived in and lots of people and lots of stuff going on and then the last really type of deception you’re bringing in is the special effects de ception which is the the phony the the bumper markings on the vehicles the shoulder patches they would set up phony headquarters if you have a phony headquarters you also need a phony General so they take their own officers and and put them in uh uh put General stars on them and have March them in and out and uh and doing various inspections I mean it sounds crazy but you have all these different types of deception and you don’t expect the enemy to get all of them right you expect them to get bits in pieces and then you’re depending on that German intelligence officer he’s got a somebody’s reported hearing this and the radio guys think they heard a little bit of this and maybe the the um the aerial reconnaissance saw something or a spy saw something you’re depending on him to take these all together and go aha I have figured out you know that the 75th Division is moving in here and he’s going to believe it because he believes that that it is something that he has put together that his Brilliance has figured that out from the clues he’s gotten when in fact it’s just not true at all yeah I think that’s that’s such a perceptive Insight that it’s it’s not necessarily about the totality of the scene but making somebody believe one or two pieces of it enough and making it compelling enough that they feel invested in it being true and one of the parts of that then means that the very first step in a deception is you have to say first of all what do I want the enemy to do what am I trying to manipulate them into doing uh and and Ralph ingersol one of the creators of this unit said he didn’t like the word deception he liked the word manipulation so what do I want the enemy to do and now what do I want to convince them of that’s going to make them want to do that and then you develop your story and the story is is the probably the most important thing because once you’ve got your story then you can feed it out to all these different channels visual Sonic radio special effects and they’re all playing the same story and if the enemy gets one piece or gets three pieces or five pieces at that hopefully they can put it together and uh yeah that’s that’s basically the the the way uh you make deception work because if you look honestly if you just showed them everything if we put a bunch of inflatable tanks out so you could see them and if uh and if if you know we we had radio transmissions in the clear that weren’t coded and if if uh you know if it was all too obvious they would they wouldn’t buy it so it there’s a certain amount of attention to detail and a certain amount of subtlety involved who was the one coming up with the stories or who who had to make the decision okay we want the enemy to do the following you know that is a great question and I I’m not sure that I have a solid answer on it I would say that it’s most likely uh the special uh plans Branch uh which initially is the special plans Branch under Eisenhower but then it becomes the special plans Branch under uh General Omar Bradley who’s the commander of the 12th US Army group and that’s um that’s Ralph ingersol and Billy Harris and went Eldridge and a few other officers and I think they are basically they are working with uh commanders talking to commanders getting the orders from Bradley there’s I know of one one deception where where Bradley basically turns to Ralph ingera and says can you guys do anything to help us with this you know paton’s moving on best own the Germans are going to see what’s happening what can you do to to fool the the the Germans about this so I think that that’s basically it comes from Bradley and the top officers and then somehow in that special plans Branch they develop the the story and the ideas that then go out to Colonel reer who’s the commander of the 23rd headquarters special troops and then eventually it gets down to the the four different types of deception and do we have any sense of how this landed with the Germans I mean obviously we we can measure success probably in different ways maybe they were manipulated into firing on a position that wasn’t real but do we have any accounts of you know the Germans even talking to themselves uh that show us how convincing these deceptions were yeah I don’t have a lot of accounts from the German side we do know that in their final deception operation Veron that the German Maps had marked the 79th division exactly where uh the ghost arming was portraying it along the Ry River uh we know of other deceptions where we can look at German documentation and German maps and say that they that they bought a deception but it’s not everyone and there’s sometimes there’s deceptions where they buy it for a day or two and then they kind of go oh maybe not and their Maps kind of that unit from the from the map but you know one of the things is that you don’t deception doesn’t have to work forever right if if you think of a football game and a receiver does a a a head fake and and and and he gets a half step advantage on the defender that may be all he needs and you know sometimes four hours or six hours of having the enemy believe one thing and holding off on sending reinforcements someplace or taking an action might be all you need to succeed I definitely think there is room for more research here on the German side of the equation and I would love to I I tried to do some and I had a couple of instances of working with people and it it ended up being a little frustrating and I didn’t really get what I wanted but I definitely think there’s more research that can be done here that where we could really try to figure out how many of these deceptions really really uh convince them I know operation bettenberg convinced them I know operation breast convinced them I know operation Veron convinced them and there’s a few others that I’m uh pretty convinced and then there’s a bunch that I’m just not sure of well even if it were four or five out of 22 that’s a pretty good ratio I would say well especially since they never get discovered right so so the enemy never figures out at least again according to what I’ve seen and all the research that I’ve done they never figure out that this deception unit is operating against them and that’s important because let’s imagine that the Germans realized that it was a fake unit in let’s say operation bburg September 1944 so then they could look for well what are the things that how did we figure that out and how can we keep an eye on that in the future and then every time the ghost Army did a deception the general the Germans would say okay there’s the ghost Army so we know the Americans don’t have anything there so they’re trying to to to hit us from someplace else so that is that never happened and so that’s important and they were successful on a number of occasions so yeah I think you have to count that as being very successful and their last deception operation Veron um in which they’re pretending they’re they’re literally the 1100 guys in this unit are impersonating two divisions which is 30 or 40,000 people with hundreds of tanks and trucks and vehicles of all kinds and they are um uh convinced the Germans that this crossing of the Ryan river is going to take place 10 miles or 15 miles away from where it really does um and that deception alone is believed to have saved thousands of lives so um that success all by itself would be enough to say this unit was worth setting up I’m curious about some the some of the visual artists who were were part of this uh group and Ellsworth Kelly maybe is one of the most famous you know people who went on to be a great painter but what were the specific skills that they brought I mean were they was Ellsworth Kelly painting camouflage onto inflatable tanks uh no although he he was he was making posters at one point because I have a picture of him uh you know in the screen shop screening out posters of some kind I think the idea was so the 603d camouflage Engineers was originally set up as a camouflage unit and and um you know camouflage is a form of artistry right how do we camouflage a factory to make it look like a village how do we camouflage you know guns to make it look like they’re not there and um many art schools at that time and especially Pratt Institute where a bunch of these guys came from had set up camouflage courses as part of their um educational you know offerings and so you had artists taking uh camouflage course and uh and then the Army you know kind of uh institutes the draft and people are being drafted up and so you you’ve got people um you let’s be honest here you got a certain number of people who simply don’t really want to be in the Infantry okay the Infantry is the the the point of the spear it’s going to be where the highest casualties are uh if I have a skill I’m I’m looking for a place to go and so I think the artists are looking to get into something else and perhaps in this case a camouflage unit so you have in the one hand the Army has a need for artists to go in a unit like this and you’ve got artists who are you know talking to their friends talking to their professors filling out forms doing what they can to get into a unit like that and I think that the irony here is one of the one of the guys and he’s still alive Bernie blin he’s a hundred years old and he says you know he says I I knew I didn’t want I wasn’t going to kill anybody I didn’t want to be in the INF I didn’t want to go to the front lines at all and I got myself into this nice camouflage unit and then and then suddenly we get a sign they were going to be in the deception Mission they were going to be out there in the front lines with nothing but you know like a like a small arms and an inflatable tank with the Enemy on the other side of the river he said is not what I was planning on getting into and I think a lot of the guys had that feeling that they were kind of in this camouflage unit and they thought they were going to be like they they had camouflaged a big aircraft Factory in Baltimore uh that made b-26s to make it look like a a village in case of course in case German bombers came I don’t know where they’re GNA come from although Hitler Hitler had been working on a bomber that could bomb from across the Atlantic um and they uh and they thought they were going to be spending their war in the US and I think uh it was quite a surprise um Gil seler said uh when we when we realized what we were assigned to we we thought we’d been put into a suicide outfit jez yeah so so they got kind of the shock of their lives that being put into put into action the way they were um and you’ve talked about the importance of sound and and these sound designers H how was sound used in these operations oh I think sound is a great uh it is is a fascinating topic so they had developed uh and it actually uh they were developing this Sonic deception unit even before the you know 80 years ago they they put together the orders for the 23rd headquar special troops and this unit was the 3132 signal Service Company special and so their mission is to use recorded sound to fool the enemy and what they did is they first of all they went down to the Army Proving Ground at Fort Knox and they worked with Engineers from Bell labs and they recorded all sorts of sound sounds of tanks on the Move trucks on the Move guys digging in at the front lines people assembling on Tomb Bridges just about anything that you could imagine that you would need and they recorded these on these 16inch glass transcription discs that were the same thing that they used in recording studios to like record Frank Sinatra and a hit song and then they made from this a collection of sound effects records right so they went to war with this collection of sound effects records now you’re not going to play sounds from a record and and of course the rec you’re going to need to mix the The Sounds together for any given deception to be convincing to to tell the enemy what you want them to hear so they mixed them from these records onto um uh magnet magnetized wire okay so this is before there’s audiotape which is magnetized tape there’s wire and it’s about the consistency of fishing wire uh and fishing line and about six feet of it is about 1 second of sound uh and so they would mix onto these wires the uh let’s say we’re trying to make it seem like uh a tank unit is moving in they’re moving up a hill they’re moving down a hill they’re crossing a bridge and then they’re digging in and so they would mix that onto the wire and then they would uh once they had created the wires they needed then the they would have the half tracks with the speakers on them and the playback equipment could be set up you know starting five m mil back right or however far you want it to be and they would start let’s say they start the show five miles back at 7 o’clock and then at 7:30 they start the one that’s two miles back and at 8 o’clock they start the one that’s that’s here the sound is moving right it’s coming closer it’s moving into where where you want it to be and and Sonic deception was I mean I mean radio deception was probably their most effective tool Sonic deception was a close second and it fooled a lot of people uh there’s all sorts of stories of other American units who are hearing the sounds moving in and like they’re like yeah I you know tanks are moving in and we hear it and we it’s going on uh and um and and the speakers on these half tracks had a range of 15 miles so you could start a long ways away but oftentimes in these deceptions the Sonic guys told me they ended up being way up near the front you know because we want to really make sure the enemy is hearing us so we’re going to put you you know a quarter mile half mile from the front lines and there’s really nobody between you and the Germans and good luck um so but sound is an amazing story and and I imagine they they’ve never done anything these designers sound designers if we can even think of them in the traditional sense as sound designers of this scale before I mean there’s no there’s no theatrical production that needs you to be able to project from 15 miles away and a film does everything on a Sound Stage or close into a camera I mean were they just making this up and kind of improvising as I really think they were I really think they were you know there’s not the the the record the paperwork is thin because it’s a secret unit and they weren’t like big into putting a lot of things on paper but I one gets the impression that this is uh improvisation all the way and and I think a lot of the credit has to go to the operations officer Colonel Clifford Simonson and this was a guy who had been been working in the Pentagon uh and and he’d had a stint there and they said what do you want to do he says oh I want to be a a command a paratroop unit so they send him to jump school he makes his first jump and then suddenly he gets orders to this crazy unit that he doesn’t know anything about he’s taking a train across the country and the whole time he’s thinking well who the hell did I piss off you know what did I do but he gets there to Camp forest in in North Carolina and he sort of takes stock of the situation and and and he he has a really good attitude about he’s like okay well we’re going to try to make this work and they literally he says he says in his in his very brief biographical materials that he left that um there were no manuals there were no doctrines that they had to develop it and make it up as they went along and I really think that it’s his initiative that manages to do that and that they develop ways to carry out all these deceptions and and did that Doctrine inform future deception operations or there things that the ghost Army did that become the basis for what the military and intelligence agencies will do in Generations hense uh so I you know the ghost Army story is classified after World War II and and you know people say why is it classified so well it’s classified because you know we thought it worked and we thought we might have another war against the Russians and we would need those skill but somehow in classifying it the AR the Army seemed to classify it from themselves as well and and uh it kind of got lost and it really wasn’t reintroduced until gosh I’m G to say the 90s um and you start to see maybe it’s late 80s and 90s and you start to see uh you know um Fred Fox who was an officer in the ghost Army has lunch with the Joint Chiefs of Staff um you know Bill blast is invited to the Pentagon uh and he’s talking to the CIA and so you really are getting a sense that that people are now going back and and looking at these techniques and saying this was really good we we should come back and adopt this and you know people say well yeah but it wouldn’t work today you know you couldn’t have inflatable tanks aren’t going to work in today’s Battlefield and it’s like well don’t tell the ukrainians because they’re using inflatable tanks and artillery and now they’re equipped with um radar transponders and uh and they’ve got you know heat generating elements to full thermal imaging and you know this stuff is is still going on so I do think that the that the the ghost Army has inspired the current day uh deception thinking that goes on in a lot of places but I do think it was kind of lost for a while by the US Army which is probably not the first time that that’s happened right I mean you you know more about that than I do but yeah well let’s talk about kind of how it gets Unearthed I mean you mentioned Fred Fox who is one of these characters I really loved reading about in your book who is I mean it just seems like you know somebody who is just wants to be a star and right he engages in a lot of these special effects kinds of operations where they’re going into Villages pretending to be generals to fool the you know leftover German spies and collaborators into thinking the Americans are moving in um you know when does the military start reaching out Generations later to guys like him and Bill Blast how do they how do they figure out first of all that this even happened well I think um a lot of the credit has to go to my friend Roy iorn who uh who was in my documentary film and he’s quoted in my book and he’s on the board of our ghost Army Legacy project and Roy Roy’s uh father his stepfather really George Martin was one of the ghost army soldiers but Roy ended up working for the US Army and working for the um gosh he had a bunch of different posts but he’s working at Fort belir in kind of a research and teaching uh uh position and he started to do research into the ghost Army and and initially found people in the US Army uh above him he’d ask them if they’ heard about it or and they they told him he was crazy nobody’s ever done anything like that you know what are you talking about but he he starts to track it down and then um and then once he does that he starts to kind of make introductions and put people uh together uh he brings ghost army veterans back to um to some uh seminars that are held uh with the US Army so that there can be a kind of a transferring of information and I think Roy is also very um Roy’s also very secrecy oriented so I’m sure there’s parts of that story that he hasn’t told me uh let’s just say still to this day yeah probably but I think that that that was part of it although although Fred Fox having lunch with the Joint Chiefs and taking place in the strategy conference that happens well earlier so I’m not exactly sure so Fred Fox is involved in this deception conference and I I’m gonna say I think it was in 77 but sometime around then and um and and and uh and Billy Harris is also involved in it Ralph R lingrell is not and um and it’s still secret I tried I it was called the strategy conference and there’s this TW volume transcription you know of everything that went on in this conference and it’s still secret so I’ve applied for a a a Freedom of Information Act request which has basically been ignored um and so I don’t have all the answers as to exactly how they figured it out but somebody put it together and brought these guys back and that sort of started it and then Roy’s work really built on that and and got it a lot further with the US Army and today I mean I think there’s I’ve spoken to a number of branches of the of the US military um including the scop soldiers at Fort Brag and and and I’ve been down at the um what is it the Special Operations in uh in Tampa and other places and you know there’s a lot of interest in the ghost Army and of course the US arm is not telling me everything that they’re doing but I do think that their deception capability today is probably much more robust than it was 2025 years ago and and obviously you know you find out about the story and you know you’ve made a film about this you you’ve co-authored a book about it you were really involved I think too in helping the ghost Army get recognition from Congress for the work that they did right and and an award from Congress do you want to talk about that oh I would love to talk about that you know at at length Shane at length L um yeah I uh I had uh the film came out in 2013 and the book that I wrote with Elizabeth sales originally came out in 2015 and then we just had an updated Edition that came out this year and um and I and I was thinking as this book was coming out that really it was time that this unit be honored because they really hadn’t been honored uh during World War II some of the guys had heard talk that they were going to be awarded a presidential un citation but it never happened and um and so I thought that the best way to honor them after I did some research would be a congressional gold medal which is the highest honor Congress can bestow and it is it has been used to to honor other World War II military units who were not honored at the time for various reasons like the Tuskegee Airmen or the doitt Raiders or the Wasps women Air Service service Pilots uh and so um I didn’t know Shane when I started how hard it would be to get Congress to pass a bill to do this and one of the things that I learned early on um is that gold medal is actually harder than just a regular Bill in Congress because a gold medal Bill requires that you get two-thirds of the house and two-thirds of the Senate to co-sponsor the bill so they literally you before it can even be considered you have to get you know I used to have these numbers right in my head but it’s like 350 congressmen or maybe it’s 26 whatever it’s a large number of congressmen and 67 Senators uh to to to sign their names on and say I am for this legislation oh and by the way every Congress when that Congress ends you start at zero again beginning the next Congress and and and of course you’re dealing with staff people and when you get to the next Congress that staff person might not be there anymore and there’s a new whole new people that you have to introduce so we started working on this it took us seven years four congresses we had a whole bunch of people who volunteered we had some great young people as young as 14 who were lobbying who were just tremendous um uh and and you know we just did it a little bit by a little bit and President Biden signed that legislation in February 2022 the medal has been designed it has been minted the duplicates have been minted and we are in discussions with the the speaker’s office right now about when the ceremony will be and I think it’s going to be this spring so um exciting yeah it is exciting and you know I mean it’s it’s it’s a bittersweet because you know every guy who I interviewed for that documentary film has passed away there are only I you know I probably talked to I mean I talked to 21 people for the film I’ve probably talked to 50 60 ghost army soldiers um there are only eight who are still alive and I don’t know that we’re going to get more than um two or three to come to this ceremony but I do feel that that what these guys did was incredibly important and and unusual and really worth honoring um and so in that sense I’m really excited and I’m excited for their families and you know some of these families you know were told about it a long time ago and some of them literally are like just discovering you know they’re they you know people go we have a website which is Ghost army.org and we have a project there we have every soldier who served in the ghost Army is is listed there and we’re trying to write bios for them and we’ve written about 400 bios so far and uh and people are email me I get an email every week a people going oh my God we just were on your website because we were searching our dad we knew he’s in the 23rd we didn’t know what that was we just looked it up and we’re we’re Gob smacked by this um so you’ve got all these people who are still finding out about this and and and so it’ll be great for them and you know it’ll be it’ll be great for the veterans who are able to make it and great for everybody who’s inspired by this unit and and and thinks they they’re really worth the recognition how did you find out about the story what was your first clue well I was a much younger man it’s been a long journey huh 19 years wow 19 years so back in 2005 January of 2005 I got an email from my buddy Mark Tomy zawa and he said I I’ve been serving on a board with this woman and her uncle was in this crazy unit in World War II and she thinks somebody should make a documentary film about it and would you be willing to meet with her and I I um you know I we talked about this earlier you know there’s always somebody who says oh you should make a film about ex uh and I would always say no you should you know uh because you’re passionate about it and it’s not that hard to make a film if I can do it anybody can do it and uh and so but I took this meeting and with this woman whose name is Martha Gavin and and her uncle is John jarvey who who if you’ve seen the film or read the book is a big character in our telling of the ghost Army story and I remember remember sitting in this coffee shop it was in early February of 2005 in Lexington Massachusetts where I lived at the time and she walked in with the armload of red three ring binders it was her uncle’s wartime scrapbooks and he was one of the artists in the unit so you had his art in there and you had ephemera and photographs and stuff and I’m leafing through these scrapbooks at this coffee shop in Lexington thinking yeah this could be kind of an interesting story now I had no idea Shane that I was signing over the rest of my life to it uh that I would spend 19 years working on it that it would become like the project that that I don’t I’ll never do something bigger I don’t think I mean I I can’t imagine um but but I was intrigued from the first moments and and that’s kind of how we got started uh telling that story and how did you get into the documentary uh film making profession what was your what was your start oh gosh so uh I had been working at an ad agency I was a co-owner of the Ad Agency in Boston called smash advertising uh and my friend Marco I mentioned was one of the other co-owners and um and we got a project to do a series of History minutes for the History Channel and it was 208 208 history minutes uh host hosted by Sam Waton called time lab 2000 it a huge project it was like a twoyear project we shot with Sam three one-week periods where we would we would knock out 60 of these things in a in a week uh and they were all kind of based on this idea of um of of of a story with with an aha ending right something that like how three cigars changed the course of the Civil War so there you go and um and and and doing this I realized that I could marry my love of history with something that made money and I hadn’t kind of put that together before being a little slow in the uptake so um I said to Arty Chef who was the marketing guy at the History Channel who’ hired me I said God can you introduce me to the people there who who um make documentaries I’d like to do that and he said well I can introduce you but they will never hire you I remember those were his exact words words so he was wrong they did hire me eventually and they I started making documentaries for the History Channel and most of the documentary work I’ve done has been for the History Channel little bit for National Geographic and the ghost Army the one the one film that I that every other film I’ve made was commissioned right so they said here’s $200,000 go make a film and the ghost Army was one that because nobody was interested in it nobody I pitched that everywhere nobody was interested and I said well you know it’s just too good a story I’ll raise the money myself how hard can it be and and you found out yeah I found out and we we raised money from 700 donors I learned a lot about fundraising and um a little bit about the ghost Army and film making as well we talked a little bit before we we we started the interview about you know whether Hollywood ever came calling on this story and you said there’s been there’s been interest in this I I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to make a story about you know basically people staging Productions on a battlefield but is that something it’s uh you know making a making a feature film I would imagine is even more uh of a of of a Gamble and and a slog perhaps than trying to get a documentary made there have been a lot of attempts to make a movie about this and I’ve actually done some research and and know I mean it actually started in the 1960s when it was still classified and there was a a movie screenplay written then by uh um oh gosh I’m trying to think of his name the guy who created the Dobby Gillis character in The the TV series uh um but he wrote a screenplay others were written in the 90s and then uh around the time that the book came out uh I was contacted by a Hollywood producer named Andrew Lazar and that started a whole long thing uh he optioned the film he sold it to Universal so they hired a guy named Henry gayon to write the screenplay then they hired a second guy named Nick pisel who created the series True Detective to rewrite the screenplay or write a new one I’m not sure because I haven’t read those screenplays and then they got originally they had Bradley Cooper attached to this and then they got Ben Affleck attached and they got Ben Affleck signed on he had a deal to direct and star in this movie I met with Ben Affleck and he’s like we’re g to make this movie and then uh as my understanding is that basically it it it didn’t happen because Universal Studios had one budget in mind and Ben Affleck had another budget in mind and the twain could not meet now there have been other uh expressions of Interest both before that there have been other since there’s a there’s a possible deal percolating now um you know I I think it I I think a couple of things first of all I think a movie will get made eventually because I just think it’s it’s too good a topic but I think it must be hard and maybe it’s hard because because the special effects are so much better now than the than the actual special effects that the ghost Army did that that it wouldn’t that they they worry about it being convincing or maybe it’s hard because they can’t figure out the tone you know whether it should be comedy or serious and nobody’s quite hit that or maybe it’s just Hollywood being nervous about um everything um but I do think a movie will get made whether it will be based on my book and documentary I don’t know whether I’ll still be alive when it happens I don’t know but I think a movie or series likely will happen at some point and I should say you know Shane I should In fairness say you know there were three other books written about the ghost Army before I started working on it so I am not um the great you notice I didn’t tell you this at the beginning oh now you tell me right right right I am not the great discoverer of the ghost Army uh my work has built on on what other people have done and I don’t know who’s contacted them about Possible movie deals I will say my book and my film are better I mean uh you know I think I think they’re the cream of the crop but they all have their advantages so it’s interesting you know if you hadn’t have told me Ben Affleck I might have imagined him as a natural person to make this movie because when I think of what this is like it’s kind of like Argo Argo meets the Nazis yeah it’s Argo me not there you go it’s AR that’s how Readers Digest described my documentary before long before Ben Affleck was even involved in this said it’s Argo meets de furer and that is kind that is kind of what it’s about yeah for for listeners don’t remember who might not remember Ben Affleck directed and St in Argo and I think one an Oscar for best director certainly one so he’s invested in these kind of stories well well as we wrap up I want to ask you just a couple more things about the ghost Army itself so obviously uh the war ends uh the Allies are victorious what happens to the ghost Army at the end of the war so um their last deception mission is in uh March 1945 and then after that it’s realized that they they just don’t need them anymore because the Germans are are on the run there uh they briefly are are guarding uh and working to supply um uh uh people in displaced person camps so these are slave laborers that the Nazis had brought into Germany uh there are millions of them this is actually a huge problem that will go on for years after the end of the war uh but these guys are guarding a bunch of displaced persons camps and having various Adventures trying to find food for people and and take care of them and then they’re brought back to the US and they are told to prepare to go to Japan because they are going to be sent for the invasion of Japan being led by Douglas MacArthur they are given a month off and during that month off the US drops the atomic bomb on Japan and when they come back uh MacArthur has said you know Japanese have surrendered MacArthur has said we don’t need the ghost Army uh and so now it’s uh it’s everybody’s on the point system and how quickly can they get out depends on how many points they have and Fred Fox uh who was uh uh started out as a lieutenant and he became a captain in the unit uh he is assigned to write the official history and he has enough points to leave the Army and they basically say when you’re done with the official history you can go and so his last line in the official history is something to the effect of and now I’ve completed this you know and I’m leaving the Army goodbye um I’m out and and so it kind of and then and then it goes um there are there are some articles about it in 1945 a long story but public you know secrecy is breached and publicity takes over for a bit but then the Pentagon hushes it up and it really you know stays pretty quiet except for one article in the 1980s it stays pretty quiet until the 1990s so it kind of goes underground and what happens to all of those inflatable tanks where where are they where are they now are they in a vault someplace are they thrown into a dump where are they and do you have I know I I I have a replica I have one that that I had I have several that I had made um I they burned the tanks that they had in Europe wow I’ve seen the pictures of that fire so I believe they burned everything they had I mean they would have been pretty beaten up by that time and they probably weren’t worth the um space sending home on ships they would have had other ones that they would have given them so what happens to them I know that there’s some pictures that are postwar uh where these tanks are in the pictures so they’re being used um as part of um War Games you know where the Army fights a a you know a they have a name for it I can’t think of it but they fight a force uh uh like a you you know you have a red team and a blue team and they use these in that in those kind of missions um and then I heard an intriguing story that I’ve never been able to track down that a whole bunch of these were sold to Israel really so my assignment to you Shane here we go there you go you know when you’re when you’re done with all the Cyber stuff and you’re done with everything else you can try to see if you can track down did these inflatable tanks actually go to Israel the thing that I think is still around but I haven’t been able to find it would be the sound effects ah okay because uh sound effects records they would have made multiple sets and and and it’s also possible it’s ghost army soldiers took some of them home I mean there’s a lot of places see and and the tanks probably wouldn’t lasted they were they were made out of a um a material that wasn’t like a longlasting material so they probably wouldn’t still be they’d be a just ball of rubber but uh but the sound effects should be around and you know if I ever get a time when I’m not busy doing interviews I will try to go search for those sound effects and see if I can find them track it down I can imagine playing them out in the field you know for a whole afternoon and letting them move closer to people so they can get the uh scare Dickens out of people yeah you really would put the word out that this is like this is not an advancing Army we’re doing a recreation here today you we we we we did a we had a the place in in in the UK where the ghost Army first worked with inflatable tanks it’s Walton Hall and it’s a hotel now when we do the ghost Army tour we stay at Walton Hall and one year we had an inflatable tank and we had sound effects playing out of a boom box with um uh a of Tanks going and and literally somebody walks around the corner of this building and thought there was a tank there right they were hit by the visual and the sound and they thought it was real and I thought man if we can do that and we’re not even really trying it must have been something during World War I must have been uh well Rick our tradition on chatter is that for the actual last question I reached into the chatter box which I have in front of me and I pre-select a question uh that’s been pre-written I selected random so we’re going to see what actual last question is now when when are these written when when are they we we wrote them when we started the show so it’s the same pool of 20 or so questions that we pluck out week oh this is a good one I like this one uh what’s a common misperception about your profession that really annoys you what do people often get wrong about what it is that that you do for a living so people think that because I’m a documentary filmmaker that I should be able to make all TV sets work it’s like it’s like you’re in a you’re in a presentation and you come in and they’re like I can’t do this but you can probably figure it out and I’m like uh you know I I don’t know but you know because there’s multiple remotes and a lot of buttons and cables and trying to figure it all out and it’s like that’s really not what I do if you actually think about what I do I’m really a writer who hires everybody else that they need to to be able to make a documentary film so um I have actually been forced to learn uh about projection systems in TVs so that you know when I do presentations I can do that but it still it sort of amazes me that people think well you’re a documentary filmmaker you should be able to figure that out you’re The Tech Guy right I know right exactly I’ll come over to your house and fix anything you need excellent I’ll remember that uh well Rick Byer the book is the ghost Army of World War II how one top secret unit deceived the enemy with inflatable tanks sound effects and other audacious fakery it’s a terrific story it’s a beautiful book uh and thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about it it’s just been a really great pleasure and lots of fun chatting with you so thank you so much for having [Music] me that was chatter a production of law fair and goat Rodeo please subscribe to the podcast and find us on Twitter at that was [Music] chatter [Music]