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Staging Deceptions as a War Strategy: The WWII Ghost Army

January 10, 2014 by Mariabruna Fabrizi 2 Comments

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Almost 1100 men fought World War II as members of the US “Ghost Army“, the result of an uncommon lateral thinking in war strategy. Created for “tactical deception”, this unit had the task to deceive and confuse the enemy on the entity of US divisions, their resources and their movements, through the employment of inflatable tanks, soundtracks, fake radio transmissions and further camouflages. In an effort between military strategy and acting, more than twenty battlefields were staged between 1944 and 1945, starting in Normandy and ending in the Rhine River Valley. The members recruited (known as ghost soldiers) were students from New York and Philadelphia art schools, architects, stage designers, advertisers and sound technicians.

 

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From a few weeks after D-Day the Ghost Army (whose insignia is pictured on the left) acted close to the front lines, playing a complex strategy which included the “Atmosphere” technique: confusing signs on the fields, driving trucks in loops to make the displacement of the troops impossible to decipher and simulating real units by the adoption of their divisional insignia. With the help of engineers from the Bell Labs, soundscapes were created mixing together previously recorded sounds of armored and infantry units. Even a “spoof radio”, with phony traffic nets, was transmitted on-air.

 

 

 

Maybe the most impressive resource of the division was played by the 603rd Camouflage Engineers which was equipped with a battery of pneumatic tanks, cannons, jeeps, and airplanes inflated through air compressors and so light they could be lifted by a few soldiers. The men created sets of fake vehicles to stage dummy airfields, troops bivouacs, and artillery fields which could be arranged in just a few hours.

 

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The existence of the Ghost Army was kept secret until 1996 as revealed by the documentary “The Ghost Army“, produced in 2013 for PBS. Several of the Ghost Army soldiers later became famous personalities in different creative fields, including fashion designer Bill Blass (pictured on the left) and painter Ellsworth Kelly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The official history of the Ghost Army, with the unit’s ghost emblem at the bottom

 

 

 

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A tank disguised as a simple truck

 

 

 

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Every vehicle in this 1944 convoy is an inflatable used by the Ghost Army

 

 

 

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Speakers mounted on jeeps broadcast phony troop movements

 

 

 

Related, on Socks:

Pneumatic War
Full Scale Urban Wars Diorama
A False Paris Outside Paris: A ‘City’ Created To Be Bombed

Further reading:

Ghost Army of inflatable decoys helped WWII effort
Ghost Army: The Inflatable Tanks That Fooled Hitler on The Atlantic

Images via:

The Retronaut
CBS News
ghostarmy.org

 

 

 

 

 

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Comments

  1. Adrian says

    November 17, 2014 at 7:38 pm

    this was helpful for a project.

  2. Harry Mandl says

    November 21, 2014 at 8:59 am

    Dear Sir!
    I was searching for a special US-Army WWII Patch.
    Maybe you can help me to find it.

    This is the inofficial Insignia of the

    23rd Headquarters Special Troop known as “Ghost-Army”

    The “Ghost Army” was a US-Army tactical deception unit during the World War II in the
    European Theatre. Pleases, see the Patch

    I was searching the Internet for a couple of times. I have some results, but no indication of
    ordering.
    Finally I found your shop. Maybe you have the connections to look for it.

    Thank you very much
    With best regards from Landshut; Bavaria / Germany
    Harry Mandl

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Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

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