The Ghost Army of World War II

by Rick Beyer

  In February 1944 Private Harold Dahl wrote home to his mother with a hint about their secret mission and where it might take them. “We have a special job to do and it can’t be done in our own back yard so we have to play in someone else’s.” Shortly before leaving Camp Forrest, Dahl wrote again to his sister Lucy in Towaco, New Jersey, emphasizing the need to keep quiet about what he was doing:

  Free doughnuts for the departing troops

  See to it, even if you have to explain it to whoever reports news from Towaco, that nothing gets in the paper if and. when we leave. And. you & Mother & the others must take it as part of your burden not to so much as tell anyone that I have gone until we get there and mail comes back to you. And then, if you get an idea where I am, don’t tell anyone, no matter who. This thing we are doing might be suspected if it gets out that the 603rd is gone - we must be simply forgotten - until after our Job is done. It really can be terribly important in the war and we have to be more than ordinarily careful. I’m sure you understand.

  Sergeant Victor Dowd, another member of the camouflage unit, took a different attitude as the journey to the war zone began. He and some of his platoon had a hard time taking the whole thing seriously—at least for the moment. “We didn’t really believe the big picture,” recalled Dowd. “Until we got fired at and shot. When reality struck.”

  On board the USS Henry Gibbons, from Victor Dowd’s 1944 sketchbook

  JOURNEY INTO

  THE UNKNOWN

  All of a sudden I see four guys, one on each end of a General Sherman tank, picking the thing up. And I practically collapsed, because I thought, “Gee, I could never pick up a tank.”

  — Private Joe Spence

  Most of the Ghost Army (not including the sonic unit) sailed from New York to England on May 2, 1944, aboard the USS Henry Gibbons. It was “one of the biggest convoys you could imagine,” according to Sergeant Bob Tompkins. “You [saw] ships all the way to the horizon on either side.” The men occupied themselves with nightly music and comedy shows, boxing matches, and endless craps games.

  Walton Hall

  They arrived in Bristol, England, on May 15.

  From there they traveled to stately Walton Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, where they would bivouac. The lush grounds included velvet lawns, tailored forests, and a swan lake. The enlisted men camped out in huts and tents, while the officers had more comfortable quarters inside Walton Hall, sometimes referred to as “Mouldy Manor.”

  Some men attended the superb plays staged by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, but most seemed to prefer the more realistic pleasures of Leamington Spa.

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  They readied themselves for their part in the upcoming invasion. The equipment—from dummies to radios—had arrived before them and had to be gathered from warehouses throughout southern England. Finally, the men of the 603rd had a chance to work with the equipment they would be taking to France. The mission suddenly seemed far more real than it had back in the States. “We knew we would now be really using this stuff,” recalled Corporal Jack Masey. “It was thrilling.”

  Convoy by Richard Morton, 1944

  Soldier in Life Jacket by Ellsworth Kelly, 1944

  © ELLSWORTH KELLY, PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

  On board the USS Henry Gibbons, from Victor Dowd’s 1944 sketchbook

  Gunner Onboard by Victor Dowd, 1944

  Convoy by Arthur Singer, 1944

  Inflating Tank at Night by Arthur Shilstone, 1985

  Private Joe Spence was a late addition to the camouflage battalion, joining it in England. He knew nothing about the deception mission. His first hint that this was going to be something out of the ordinary came when he arrived at Walton Hall and found it surrounded by a regiment of British paratroopers. The next shock came when “all of a sudden I see four guys, one on each end of a General Sherman tank, picking the thing up. And I practically collapsed, because I thought: ‘Gee, I could never pick up a tank.’”

  The dummies came in oversized canvas duffels. “It was a little bundle of stuff, which a tank was in,” said Jack Masey. The soldiers would open the bundle, spread it out, and inflate the tank through multiple nozzles. “[We would pull out] this amorphic shape,” remarked Private Ned Harris, “and then [watch] it being filled with air and taking form like a monster.” It took fifteen to twenty minutes to inflate a single tank. “And we all had a very grand time doing it,” recalled Masey, “joking and laughing as these things took shape.”

  From May 29 to June 3 they carried out three practice deceptions called Cabbage, Cheese, and SPAM in the Thetford Maneuver Area, about 110 miles east of Walton Hall. Roy Eichhorn, former director of research and development at the United States Army Combined Arms Center, points out that this is the same part of England where Operation Fortitude, the D-Day deception, was in full swing at the time. The goal of Fortitude was to convince the Germans that General George Patton was assembling an army that would land at the Pas-de-Calais, more than two hundred miles up the coast from Normandy. Eichhorn believes that the Ghost Army maneuvers may have been planned there to help enhance the D-Day deception.

  Once back at Walton Hall, the men of the Twenty-Third checked and rechecked their equipment, went on long training hikes, and let off steam at local pubs. The 406th Combat Engineers offered classes in demolition. On June 5 they heard the drone of airplanes all night long. “In the morning the sky was filled with airplanes headed to France,” recalled Private First Class William Anderson. “We knew this was D-Day.” A few days later, some of the men in the 406th heard the sounds of a bridge being built near their camp. When they went to investigate, they found a half-track with a speaker mounted on top. The sonic unit had arrived.

  Diagram for inflating M4 dummy tank

  Bristol, UK by William Sayles, 1944

  Mostly they spent their time waiting. Waiting to head to France. Waiting for the moment when it would be their turn to “meet the elephant” (the colorful Civil War phrase that alluded to entering combat for the first time). Waiting, anxiously waiting, to see how their carefully laid deception plans would work on the killing fields of Europe.

  Dummy sign created by some of the GIs while bivouacked in England.

  WHEN FIRST WE

  PRACTICE TO DECEIVE

  You have to see into the mind of your adversary.

  You have to create for him a misleading picture of the operation to come. And you have to sell it to him with confidence.

  — General Wesley Clark, United States Army

  A week after the invasion of D-Day I was with this nice girl, and I remember thinking: “What in the hell am I doing in the British countryside with a pretty girl, when there are guys my age being shot at and killed in Normandy?” And I remember kissing her goodnight and riding my bike back to our tent. And there was a light on in our tent, and somebody said, “Who’s there?” I said, “Sergeant Dowd,” and a voice said, “You better get in here.” And I said, “Let me park my bike.” And one of the wise-guy members of the platoon said, “You’re not going to need your bike anymore.” The next day we were on Omaha Beach in Normandy.

  — Sergeant Victor Dowd

  On June 6, 1944, the long-awaited Allied invasion exploded onto the beaches of Normandy. More than 150,000 soldiers stormed ashore from an armada of landing craft or parachuted from waves of airplanes overhead. In the days that followed, tens of thousands more followed them across the English Channel, expanding the beachhead and moving slowly into Hitler’s Fortress Europe. As the Ghost Army waited its turn, surprise orders came down for a fifteen-man platoon from the 603rd to head to Normandy with dummy artillery ahead of most of the rest of the unit. (A handful of radiomen went in on the morning after D-Day for a mission that was eventually aborted.) It was an experiment of sorts, designed to see if they could really fool the Germans and survive.

  Bernie Mason by Victor Dowd

  The Fourth Platoon of Compa
ny D was commanded by Bernie Mason, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant from Philadelphia. Mason was a high school graduate, with a flair for design, who had gone through Officer Candidate School and ended up in the 603rd. On June 13 he was drinking flag-wavers at a British pub when he got a message ordering him to report back to base immediately. A flag-waver, according to Mason, was a drink so named because it was composed of red amaretto and white gin, “and if you had enough of them you would be blue in the morning.”

  Mason and his men, including Victor Dowd, were issued ammunition, and they loaded their dummies onto a C-47 cargo plane. Mason still had a hangover when they took off the following morning for Normandy. Dowd was surprised to find that some of their fellow passengers were women. He asked what they were doing there. They told him they were nurses and that after the plane offloaded its cargo, they would be caring for the severely wounded men who were going to be loaded aboard and rushed back to England. It was a chilling foretaste of the scene that awaited them in France.

  American troops disembarking on Omaha Beach, Normandy

  They all found it a shock to be plunged so suddenly into a war zone. The plane landed on a metal mesh runway that engineers had just built behind Omaha Beach. Litters of wounded men waited alongside the runway, and the sounds of machine gun fire could be heard in the distance. One of the first things they saw was a sign that said “Beware of Mines.” Dowd was struck by “the wild difference between last night, when I was in the lovely, quiet, serene countryside, and the grim reality of today.” The bodies of many German soldiers lay unburied nearby. Dowd and Mason both gawked at a cow impaled upside down in a tree, more than thirty feet in the air, thrown there by the violence of an explosion. Private Irving Stempel leaned against a wheel of the airplane and dashed off a note to his family, letting them know he had made it safely into Europe. He gave it to the pilot to mail.

  Sketch by Victor Dowd

  Their first night ashore, they huddled in foxholes as an artillery barrage rained down on them. The only one not terrified by the bombardment was Dowd, who somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing. In a spare moment during those first days, he made a sketch of a German “potato-masher” hand grenade and helmet still lying on the ground.

  The assignment of “Task Force Mason” was to assist the 980th Artillery, the first heavy-artillery battalion to land in France. It was operating near the town of Sainte-Mère-Église. They set up dummy artillery emplacements about a mile ahead of its position, in order to draw fire away from the real battery. “It was kind of scary,” recalled Mason. They found their dummy 155mm howitzers heavy and cumbersome to deal with. After inflating the dummy guns, they covered them with camouflage netting in such a way that they would be enticingly visible to enemy aircraft. Mason’s platoon was accompanied by four men from the 406th Combat Engineers, who set off improvised flash canisters to make it look like the firing was coming from their dummies.

  Security was obviously critical. The soldiers guarded the perimeter, and people could only get into their emplacement through a narrow entrance. One day a photographer from Life showed up looking for a story. He couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him in to photograph what he obviously believed was real artillery and went away angry. It was not the last time that they would find themselves deceiving their fellow Americans.

  Dummy 155mm artillery piece under camouflage netting

  For twenty-eight days they followed the real 980th as it moved up into the Cherbourg Peninsula. The experiment proved a success. The Germans shelled their phony guns on multiple occasions, but the Ghost Army managed to avoid suffering any casualties. During one move Lieutenant Mason’s jeep ended up behind a truck that in the twilight appeared to be carrying a mass of jelly that jiggled with every bump. “And it turned out that they were the bodies of dead German soldiers. And the odor was so horrific that you can’t imagine.”

  A sketchbook series by Ned Harris, drawn while waiting to cross the channel to Normandy, June 23–26, 1944

  The remainder of the Twenty-Third (minus the sonic company, still training in England) came to France in two groups. The first, code-named Elephant, arrived in late June. The second, known as Residue (nicknamed “Garbage” by the men), came in early July. Aboard the landing ship, tank (LST) that would take them across the Channel, they waited day after monotonous day to get underway. “Boredom, and anticipating, and too much time to think,” recalled Private Ned Harris. “That’s when the sketchbooks come out.” Harris made many drawings while they waited, until he finally captured their departure in a vibrant sketch titled On Our Way.

  The first group anchored off Utah Beach on June 24. The men waited for their names to be called before clambering over the side of the ship and down the cargo nets into the landing boats that would take them to the beach. “We were loaded down with everything,” recalled Corporal Arthur Shilstone. “Rifles, ammunition, helmets, and so forth.” Despite his heavy load, Shilstone could not resist breaking out his pad and sketching the incredible scene before him: the vast armada of the invasion force, barrage balloons overhead, and “every imaginable ship as far as you could see.” Even in the moment he knew “this was really history in the making.”

  Landing in Normandy by Arthur Shilstone, 1944

  Ned Harris’s photo of Ghost Army soldiers preparing to climb into landing craft and land on Utah Beach

  They bivouacked three miles north of the Normandy village of Trévières. Harris recalls that after making camp, his platoon set up their dummies to make sure they were in working order. A German plane flew overhead that night, strafing American positions. One of the men, caught out of his foxhole, dived under a dummy truck as if it were a real one—much to the amusement of his fellow deceivers. When they awoke the following morning, they were greeted with quite a commotion. A French farmer had come at dawn to check his cows. “And he never saw, in all his years of farming, the sight he saw,” said Harris. “His cows were pushing an American tank around his property.” The farmer had to be restrained from running into the village to report what he’d witnessed.

  On another occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said, ‘The Americans are very strong.’”

  Such security breaches, humorous as they might be, were no laughing matter. They threatened the success of the mission, yet were difficult to avoid. In their first deception, Operation Elephant, the Twenty-Third took up the positions of the Second Armored Division as the real division moved to a new spot on the line. The mission involved visual and radio deception only, since the sonic unit was still in England. As each unit of the Second Armored moved out, the Twenty-Third attempted to replace real vehicles with dummies—tank for tank, gun for gun. In one farmer’s field, a real battery of four antiaircraft guns moved out at night. A few hours later, the dummy guns moved in. The French farmer saw the real guns leaving and was surprised and upset to see new guns in the morning. “Encore boom boom?” he complained to the soldiers, angry that there would be more loud firing from so near his house. He brought his fist down on the dummy gun and his hand came bouncing up. A smile spread across his face. “Boom boom ha ha!” he said. According to Lieutenant Gil Seltzer, that soon became a watchword for the 603rd. (And another French farmer had to be sworn to secrecy.)

  The Americans Are Very Strong! by Arthur Shilstone, 1985

  But working with dummies wasn’t all fun and games. The enemy was never very far away; their presence was keenly felt. It might be a few stray shells from a German 88mm cannon or the occasional strafing by a fighter plane. Corporal John Jarvie felt very vulnerable when he had to go out at one or two in the morning to inflate the dummies and turn on an air compressor that could be heard ten miles away.

  General Wesley Clark
argues that deception requires the highest form of creativity in the art of war. “You have to see into the mind of your adversary. You have to create for him a misleading picture of the operation to come. And you have to sell it to him with confidence.” Operation Elephant was, in essence, the Twenty-Third’s shakedown cruise, a chance to see if they could live up to that dictum. The operation was plagued with problems, including late orders, misunderstandings, and a lack of coordination with the unit the Twenty-Third was impersonating. But even if it wasn’t a rousing success, it offered the men an opportunity to hone their technique. Visual deception, for example, demanded an artist’s eye for detail. “We could position things so that they would be hidden, but kind of hidden in plain sight,” said Jarvie. When a reconnaissance plane came over, it might spot just the corner of one dummy, but that would be enough to signal that there were more they couldn’t see. Each tableau had to be carefully dressed. A cluster of tanks does not look believable from the air unless each vehicle has tracks leading up to it. So the men of the 406th Combat Engineers took turns operating a bulldozer to fill the fields with simulated tank tracks. If a dummy artillery piece was set up, it had to have empty shells strewn around it, just as a real one would.