by Rick Beyer
These lessons would come in handy for future operations. There was lots of room for improvement. A few days after Elephant was concluded, Lieutenant Fred Fox wrote a memo that eventually went out to the men of the unit under the name of Colonel Harry L. Reeder, the unit’s commander. It read, in part:
The attitude of the Twenty-third HQs towards their mission is lopsided. There is too much MILITARY and not enough SHOWMANSHIP.
Like it or not, the Twenty-third HQ must consider itself a traveling road show ready at a moment’s notice to present:
THE SECOND ARMORED DIVISION — by Brooks
THE NINTH INFANTRY DIVISION — by Eddy
THE SEVENTH CORPS — by Collins
The presentations must be done with the greatest accuracy and attention to detail. They will include the proper scenery, props, costumes, principals, extras, dialogue, and sound effects. We must remember that we are playing to a very critical and attentive radio, ground, and aerial audience. They must all be convinced.
After Elephant, the soldiers spent much of July waiting for the opportunity to put into use what they had learned. The men used the time to explore their new surroundings. Artists in the unit broke out their paints and pencils. “Any given opportunity, guys would draw,” said John Jarvie. “Guys would draw with a fountain pen and spit. You make the drawing, and you wet it, and it makes nice halftones.” Arthur Shilstone was another who felt the urge. “To be in the middle of this incredible adventure,” he said, “with a world at war, in a foreign country? I just had to put it down.”
They sketched and painted on whatever was handy: a notebook, an index card, an old receipt. They drew each other, French families, and bombed-out farmhouses. “We were sleeping in hedgerows and foxholes,” said Jarvie, “but nothing kept us away from going someplace to do a watercolor.”
Calvados, a powerful native stimulant, was sampled. Private contracts for laundry were made with local farmwomen who preferred candy, soap and cigarettes to francs. Towns were OFF LIMITS but some visiting was done on various pretexts. One scheme that worked for a long time was to tell the MPs you were looking for blue paint. No Army supply dump carried this color.
— Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops
German Defense Against Glider Invasion by Arthur Shilstone, 1944. These logs, called “Rommel’s asparagus,” were planted by the Germans to prevent American gliders from landing safely.
Normandy ’44 by Bill Sayles. This sketch depicts the town of Trévières.
Private Irving Mayer’s photo of homeless refugees
The soldiers also observed the miseries of war. “Poor people,” wrote Private Harold Dahl to his mother. “Imagine how you would feel if you suddenly found yourself with nothing in the world but a few blankets on a wheelbarrow and all your neighbors in the same boat.”
After seven weeks of difficult hedgerow fighting, the First Army punched a hole through German defenses in late July; Operation Cobra gave the Allies the breakthrough they had been fighting for. General Omar Bradley, commander of the Twelfth Army Group, activated General George Patton’s Third Army.
On August 9, 1944, Captain Ralph Ingersoll found himself in a jeep headed to a meeting with “Old Blood and Guts,” as the press had nicknamed Patton. The Twenty-Third had been given a new mission: Operation Brittany. They were to give the impression that the Americans were weakening their forces in front of the main battle position and turning west to clear the Brittany peninsula, when in fact General Patton was being unleashed to race east and surround the Germans.
Ingersoll, as one of the officers coordinating Ghost Army deceptions, was delegated to let Patton know what was going on. He found the general’s command trailer in an apple orchard. Patton was resplendent as ever, complete with ivory-handled pistols, polished boots, and sardonic mien. “I got the message you were coming to save me,” he said sarcastically. But then he waved the deception planner to a seat and listened closely, suggesting a change or two to make the plan more realistic. He even promised to detail some fighting troops to provide security for the deceivers.
“It was just then,” wrote Ingersoll years later in an unpublished memoir, “with my Top Secret mission accomplished, that I got a front row seat at a non-secret Georgie Patton performance. It was my single personal experience with the fabulous Patton.” As Ingersoll looked on, an armored vehicle pulled up and out popped a young American lieutenant colonel. He turned to help another officer climb out: a captive German general being brought to Patton for interrogation. Lieutenant General Karl Spang had been captured near Brest. The American officer was still assisting Spang when Patton unleashed a bellow: “Stop kissing that Kraut bastard’s ass! Who do you think he is? Jesus Christ? Kick his goddamn ass over here and kick it fast.”
Ingersoll stood with mouth agape. “By this time,” he wrote, “the quaking representative of the Third Reich was doing what he could to hold himself at attention. He was pale and visibly shaken (as was I).”
Then, as quickly as Patton had turned his anger on, he turned it off. “Patton’s whole personality seemed to change.” He shook hands with General Spang, invited him in to the trailer, and had a drink with him. “Sit down and rest a spell,” Ingersoll recalls Patton saying. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t make some comradely conversation before you have to go.” Ingersoll decided it was time to beat a hasty retreat.
General George Patton
In Army parlance, a “notional” unit is the fake force you are trying to get the enemy to believe in. The Twenty-Third assembled into four task forces slicing into Brittany. Each represented a notional combat team from a different division: the Thirty-Fifth, Eightieth, and Ninetieth Infantry Divisions, and the Second Armored Division. They moved west, away from the main German line and into Brittany. More than seventy inflatable tanks were used, but because they were moving away from where the enemy could see them, radio was a central part of their deception. They set up a powerful radio network that generated a stream of messages back and forth with Third Army Headquarters in the hopes that German signal intelligence officers were listening in.
Military historian Jonathan Gawne believes this might have been one of the Ghost Army’s most important deceptions. Operation Brittany may have helped fool the Germans long enough to let Patton’s real troops get around behind the German Seventh Army and destroy the main German force in France. This despite the fact that Patton never came through with the infantry he said he would supply for security. Ingersoll got in touch with an officer at Third Army HQ to find out what happened to the promised troops and received this word back: “The General says to tell Ingersoll that his boy scouts would have learned more of what a real war is like if they had been shot at.”
In truth, though, despite Patton’s reputation and his more than occasional posturing, he could grasp the value of deception far better than most generals in that war. Ingersoll and his boss, Colonel Billy Harris, found Patton easy to work with. “He was the greatest team player that we ran into over there,” said Harris. “He would do anything you asked him to do in the interest of the overall picture.” Perhaps that’s why so many Ghost Army deceptions in the coming months would involve the Third Army.
Letter home from Sergeant Joseph Mack
By mid-August, the Allies had scored a striking victory. Massive German forces had been encircled by American, British, Canadian, and Polish forces that linked up near the Normandy town of Falaise. Ten thousand Germans were killed and another fifty thousand captured in what became known as the Falaise Pocket. The rest were disorganized and on the run. The way to Paris and the German border suddenly seemed wide open for the Allies.
While the 23rd does not hold itself responsible for the destruction of the German SEVENTH ARMY, there is always a possibility that its ruse helped becloud the German estimate of the situation.
— Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops
The deceivers were starting to hit their stride. What’s more, during
Operation Brittany, the Ghost Army had unveiled a new type of deception that would become an increasingly essential part of their toolkit over the course of the war. This method, born of their experiences on the ground in France, would soon turn every last one of them into full-fledged thespians.
GALLERY
A Church in Trévières
In early July 1944 Ghost Army artists made their way into the Normandy village of Trévières to sketch and paint the bombed-out church off the town square. The village children came and gazed over their shoulders. Some of the children fished out pieces of stained glass from the rubble, which they traded for chocolate. John Jarvie had a stained-glass lamp made with the fragments he brought home.
The church is visible in the upper right corner of the aerial photo. It has since been completely restored, along with the rest of the town.
Paul Hornthal and Edward Boccia sketching in the church
Trévières Church, Interior by Arthur Singer, 1944
Trévières Church, Exterior by Arthur Singer, 1944
Paul Gravey by John Hapgood, 1944, depicts one of the children who traded stained-glass fragments for chocolates.
Church Steeple, 1944 by Bob Tompkins
Two GIs stencil fake markings on a jeep.
SPECIAL EFFECTS
We were turned loose in town [and told to] go to the pub, order some omelets, order some cider, and talk loose.
— John Jarvie
Three United States Army jeeps roared through the small Luxembourg village, just a few miles from the front lines near the German border. It was early September 1944, three months after D-Day. The vehicles in front and back bristled with guards and machine guns. The one in the middle bore the distinctive red license plate of a major general. In the backseat sat a ramrod figure sporting a magnificent military moustache and general’s stars. All three jeeps were clearly identifiable by their markings as belonging to the Sixth Armored Division.
The convoy pulled up to a tavern run by a suspected Nazi collaborator. The general and his bespectacled aide strode inside. With the help of their bodyguards, they liberated six cases of fine wine, loading them onto the general’s jeep. The little convoy then took off, leaving the seething proprietor plenty of incentive to get word to the Germans about what he had just witnessed: the American Sixth Armored was moving into what was otherwise a thinly held area.
In fact, the whole bit was a carefully choreographed flimflam. The Sixth Armored was far away. The commanding presence in the back seat was no general but a mustachioed major playing king for a day. The performance he and the other soldiers put on that day was a particularly dramatic example of a deception technique concocted on the ground by the men of the Ghost Army. It became known as “atmosphere” or “special effects.”
The Ghost Army came to France prepared to conduct a multimedia show using three kinds of deception: visual, radio, and sonic. Moving through the French villages so recently occupied by the Germans, where spies and collaborators no doubt remained, the men in the unit saw an opportunity to improvise yet another way of deceiving the enemy, one that hadn’t been planned in advance but might pay big dividends. Unlike many ideas in the military, it began with the enlisted men and worked its way upward. Perhaps its strongest advocate was a charismatic young lieutenant (eventually promoted to captain) named Fred Fox.
Café de l’Est by William Sayles, 1944
Fox was a 1939 graduate of Princeton who fancied himself the next Jimmy Stewart (Princeton ’32). He went out to Hollywood to seek his fame and fortune but ended up writing baby-food commercials for NBC Radio. After the war broke out he enlisted and eventually ended up in the Ghost Army. Fox found himself right at home in this off-off-Broadway show. “He was very innovative and creative,” recalled Sergeant Spike Berry.
Fred Fox’s ID badge
Fox’s stage training led him to argue passionately for taking a more theatrical approach to their deceptions. If they were portraying the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division, he reasoned, they should wear Seventy-Fifth Division patches on their uniforms, put Seventy-Fifth markings on their trucks, and drive back and forth through towns. Men should be versed in the details of the Seventy-Fifth so they could talk about it to civilians. There should be a phony headquarters bustling with officers. “Road signs, sentry posts, bumper markings, and the host of small details which betray the presence of a unit should be reconnoitered and duplicated with special teams of the 23rd,” he wrote in a memo.
Bob Tompkins (left), Bill Blass (second from right), and buddies at a French cafe
The idea was quickly adopted. “So we began to put on [other divisions’] patches and put their bumper markings on, and we physically assumed the role,” said Lieutenant Dick Syracuse, “only for every hundred of them, there might be ten of us.” Soldiers wearing the patches of the unit being impersonated would show up at local cafes, spinning their phony stories for whatever spies lurked in the shadows. “We were turned loose in town,” remembered Corporal John Jarvie, and told to “go to the pub, order some omelets, order some cider, and talk loose.”
A Small Cognac by Edward Boccia, 1945
“Behind every operation was a touch of Fred Fox,” said Berry. Fox took on the role of scriptwriter and director. “Members of the decoy unit were trained to spill phony stories at the local bars and brothels,” Fox recalled, “which didn’t require much training.” Berry remembered that Fox would coach the men before each deception. “He’d get us in a huddle and say, ‘This is what’s going to happen, and this is what we want you to say, and just be natural.’ For example, guys went to the bakery, got some rolls, and said, ‘We got to get an extra supply because we’re moving out tonight,’ that kind of thing.”
Roy Eichhorn, former director of research and development at the United States Army Combined Arms Center, whose stepfather, George Martin, served in the unit, says that in some cases the men would layer the phony patches on their uniforms, with the largest on top and the smallest underneath, so they could impersonate multiple units. “OK, we’re done being this unit, everybody rip, go into the next town, raise hell and tear up the next bar, and move on.” Corporal Jack Masey recalled that his shirts were wrecked because he sewed so many patches onto them.
A few of the patches the Ghost Army soldiers wore during their “special effects” missions. These are for the Seventy-Fifth, Ninety-Fifth, and Sixty-Ninth Infantry Divisions.
The men embraced their deceptions with enthusiasm. “We’d find out if a division or a special unit had a particular song that they liked to sing,” remembered Syracuse. “We’d get blitzed and then sing their song!” The soldiers in the 406th Combat Engineers became expert at impersonating military policemen (MPs) and frequently operated traffic-control checkpoints that many real units passed through, not realizing they were brushing up against a secret unit. During Operation Brittany, Captain Oscar Seale and Private Charles Gorman hit upon a handy means to carry out their deception. They went into more than a dozen bars in Rennes in the guise of Eightieth Infantry Division MPs. Each time, they announced loudly to any GIs within that the bar was now off limits and ordered them to finish their drinks and scram. Seale and Gorman made sure to have a drink or two in each one, spreading the word of the Eightieth’s arrival. By the end of the evening, everybody in town “knew” the Eightieth was moving in.
Fox was adamant that the soldiers in the unit needed to be free to impersonate generals. “Nothing gives away the location of an important unit quicker than a silver-starred jeep,” he wrote in a memo. The fact that such an impersonation was a court-martial offense carried no sway with him. “Is not the whole idea of ‘impersonation’ contrary to (army regulations)?” he wrote. “Remember we are in the theater business. Impersonation is our racket. If we can’t do a complete job we might as well give up. You can’t portray a woman if bosoms are forbidden.” He got himself all wound up arguing in favor of such impersonations to Lieutenant Colonel Clifford Simenson, who let Fox go on and on for quite a while
before telling him with a chuckle that the idea had already been approved. Ghost Army lieutenants and captains frequently found themselves impersonating colonels and generals. Fox himself played the general’s aide in the operation directed against the tavern keeper who was collaborating with the Nazis. Fox’s only fear was that their convoy would run into a real general and they would have to explain themselves.
Sewing Patches by Arthur Shilstone, 1985
The men did everything they could to mimic the behavior of the troops they were imitating. “If the division used to send a patrol up to the lines at dawn, the special troops did the same,” according to Corporal Sebastian Messina. “If the division was prone to play softball in off-duty moments, softball was the game of the day.”
The need for secrecy frequently created odd situations. “Not only did we have to deceive the enemy,” said retired Major General George Rebh, who as a captain commanded the 406th Combat Engineers, “but we also had to deceive our own people, so they wouldn’t spread the word.” They wanted to avoid anything that might inadvertently clue the enemy to the fact that there was a deception unit operating against them.