The Ghost Army of World War II

by Rick Beyer

  In the back of his German phrase book, Sergeant Stanley Nance kept a list of operations and units impersonated. On the right-hand side is a cheat sheet noting what information was required for each radio deception.

  For the next few months they lived disjointed lives, shuttling back and forth from dangerous operations near the front to the relative calm of Luxembourg City. They racked up the miles, traveling north as far as Malmedy, Belgium, and south as far as Metz, France. Sometimes they were in all three countries in one day. “Man, we used a lot of fuel,” recalled Corporal Al Albrecht. “We traveled more across Europe than any other army unit.” Much of the travel was done at night to avoid notice by spies. They drove with covers on their headlights that left only a tiny sliver of light: “cat’s eyes,” they were called. “We were getting to sleep at two or three o’clock in the morning,” recalled Private First Class Bill Blass, “often in a tent or mud hut flooded with rain.”

  Luxembourg Bivouac by Victor Dowd, 1944

  Drying Gear by Arthur Singer, 1944

  The autumn rains had come, making a miserable mess of roads and fields. “It was very wet and very cold,” said Corporal Arthur Shilstone, “and the trucks were just constantly stuck in the mud, and they’d have to be winched out.” Deception operations, having already lost their novelty, now became grueling and exhausting. Sergeant Bob Tompkins summed it up in his diary: “It’s muddy as shit, by the way, and very cold.”

  In any given deception, a soldier rarely had any idea what was going on beyond his specific job. The radio men didn’t know what the camoufleurs were doing, and all that either of those units knew about the sonic company’s efforts was what they heard at night. Lieutenant Gil Seltzer, a platoon leader in the 603rd, recalled being told that if any men approached one of the sonic trucks without permission, they risked being shot. Lieutenant Bernie Mason just focused on whatever task he was given. “We never did have the big picture.… All we did was what we were told to do.” Enlisted men like Bob Tompkins were even more in the dark. “One part of our unit might be in a field three hundred yards this way and somebody else over here. And we never knew what we were doing or why we were doing it.”

  Bob Tompkins (at the wheel) and George Martin stuck in Metz mud

  Map of operations, bivouacs, and displaced persons camps in and around Luxembourg, 1945

  Danger was ever present. They frequently drew artillery fire while carrying out their deceptions. “We made sure that we had our foxholes deep, and we kept ourselves as safe as we could,” said Mason. “One slip might have meant our necks,” Corporal Sebastian Messina recalled after the war. Corporal Albrecht never forgot how frightening it was. “Yes, we were scared. We didn’t know whether we would come back the next day or not. It was possible that [each] mission was going to be our last mission. While we weren’t firing guns or defending ourselves or shooting somebody, we were still vulnerable to attack by the German army.”

  Back in Luxembourg, between missions, everything seemed different. Private Ned Harris thought life was pretty good. “The town was not destroyed and even had art supplies stores!” They wandered down into the scenic Grund, the lower part of the city that the men referred to as “the Gulch.” The artists made frequent trips there to sketch and paint its quaint and beautiful environs.

  Harris had acquired a German grenade case, which he used to carry around his painting supplies. “And then my finished drawings went in there. So it was a receptacle for death, and I was bringing these lively drawings to fill it up.”

  Ned Harris with the grenade case he used to carry his art supplies and drawings

  Bob Tompkins drawing in the Grund, Luxembourg City, 1944

  Lux ’44 by William Sayles, 1944

  Luxembourg City by George Vander Sluis, 1944

  City of Luxembourg by Belisario Contreras, 1944

  Luxembourg by Bob Tompkins, 1944

  Aline in Luxembourg by Victor Dowd, 1944

  Luxembourg by Bruce Zillmer, 1944

  They filled up their sketchbooks, visited with Luxembourg families, gathered souvenirs, and marked time until they had to head into the field once again. Luxembourgers viewed them as liberators and gave them a warm welcome. A woman named Anny Dondelinger wrote a letter to the father of Sergeant Stanley Wright in which she explained why she had invited Wright and a friend to visit her house. “I wanted to give them the thing they yearned for most—a warm friendship and the ‘home’ they have missed for so long.” Many soldiers acquired girlfriends, and at least one, Private Thomas Cuffari, married a young woman from Luxembourg and brought her back to the United States.

  Even while awaiting their next assignment, their time was not always their own. They had frequent inspections, physical training hikes, and lectures to attend. Lieutenant Bernie Mason was one of many who could never forget the day Colonel Reeder gathered them all in Luxembourg City’s Schobermesse Square—a very public space—to give them a speech on secrecy! “He gave us a lecture on how secretive we had to be…where everybody could hear what he was saying. Obviously, it was almost comical, and it didn’t make too much sense.” Private Walter Arnett, no fan of Reeder, captured the scene in a devastating cartoon. Arnett was not the only one getting fed up with military life. “Would like to shit on every damn officer in this damned company,” Bob Tompkins furiously scribbled in his diary.

  Col. Reeder Addressing the Troops by Walter Arnett, 1944

  Two cartoons by Walter Arnett

  While at Fort Meade, Walter Arnett and Richard Morton became the camp cartoonists. Walter recalls: “The fellows loved our cartoons, and the officers encouraged us on since it did give the boys something to think about and get their minds off bitching about the Army.… One big skinny boy [Ziebe] from Jacksonville, Fla, offered much material [for the cartoonists].… He didn’t like them much and became quite angry a few times.… The bulletin board…became the gathering place for the fellows to see who ‘made’ the board that week.…” Many of the subjects of their lampoons were officers, who were less than thrilled. In this memo Colonel Otis Fitz and Major William D. Hooper tried to end the cartooning careers of Arnett and Morton. Fortunately for them, General Eisenhower issued an order against the suppression of cartoons.

  A popular way to pass the time was watching movies. Someone had liberated a 16mm projector, and Lieutenant Fred Fox recruited Sergeant Spike Berry to start what became known as the Blarney Theatre (Blarney being the somewhat revealing code name of the Twenty-Third). Different army corps maintained their own film depots, and Berry borrowed movies from them to show to the Twenty-Third. He found it tough sledding, since no one had ever heard of the unit and he couldn’t reveal very much about it. On top of that, because it was relatively small, the unit was always at the bottom of the priority list.

  One day, at a film depot, he noticed a bunch of projectors up on a shelf. When he asked about them he was told they were all “dead in the water” because their exciter lamps had burned out. The exciter lamp was a tiny component that played the soundtrack. It seemed silly to Berry that something so small should be sidelining those projectors. He wrote to General Electric, getting their address off a nameplate on a projector, and asked if they could spare some exciter lamps. About a month later he received a box full of them. He suddenly became a popular figure at the film depots and could get any film he wanted. Berry recalled that they always had to return them by 11:00 a.m. the following day to stay in the good graces of the film depot. “That might mean getting up at three or four in the morning and driving, but we got those films back on time.”

  The irrepressible Sgt Berry helped save the nights with his BLARNEY Theatre. This wasn’t the first or last location in which he set up his 16mm “gun,” as he called it. He estimates that he shot [projected] 2,741,523 feet of film…during his tour of the ETO.… Berry maintained his Blarney Theatre in eight different CPs across Europe and toward the end of the war he also had a “mobile unit” which played anywhere.

  — Official Histo
ry of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  Sergeant Spike Berry

  Even in Luxembourg City, however, the war was never too far away. On October 21, 1944, Sergeant Bob Tompkins saw his first V-1 pilotless buzz bomb, or “robomb,” as the soldiers called them, fly overhead. “The first time we saw [one], we didn’t know what the hell it was. And it was on its way to England, to London.” He saw another one a few days later. He heard the motor cut off and seconds later the explosion, which he estimated was ten miles away. Soon the sight and sound of them were commonplace. And there were other grim reminders of war as well.

  November 15, 1944

  Luxembourg becoming a living hell at night. Last week 5 GIs were found dead in the gulch. Shooting every night. Boys arriving from Front for rest. Get drunk and spray street with machine guns. Five civilians killed the other night, still many collaborators working under the cover of darkness.

  — Diary of Sergeant Bob Tompkins

  After a mission in early November, weeks went by without another operation. Those old enough to vote filled out absentee ballots in the presidential election, where Republican Thomas E. Dewey was trying to prevent President Franklin D. Roosevelt from capturing a fourth term. Bob Tompkins was hoping for and expecting a change at the top. “It would be great to know that Dewey had won,” he wrote on election day. “However, have my doubts. Probably won’t know until at least the end of the week.” Tompkins, of course, was to be disappointed.

  Onstage at the seminary: Vaudeville skits in the “Blarney Breakdown” and a performance by Marlene Dietrich

  In late October the men put on a talent show at the seminary. Artists from the 603rd decorated the stage, and the “Blarney Breakdown” operated for three straight nights. Another welcome diversion came on November 20, 1944, when Marlene Dietrich came to the seminary and performed in the chapel where the Blarney Breakdown had taken place. The German-born Hollywood actress and singer, who became a United States citizen in 1939, was strongly anti-Nazi. She tirelessly entertained American troops during World War II, often giving concerts very close to the front lines. This was obviously very risky, since as a prominent German native, she would have been dealt with harshly had she fallen into the hands of the Nazis. When asked why she was willing to risk her life this way, she said simply, “Aus anstand” (out of decency).

  Dietrich sang the soldiers’ favorite, “Lili Marlene,” and even played the saw. She wore a full-length dress, but, according to Private Richard Morton, “You could still see enough to tell she had a good pair of legs.” The room was packed, not only with soldiers from the Ghost Army but also with American officers from other units in Luxembourg. One of those attending was a rear-echelon captain making a tour of the front. Like many of the men in the unit, he too was an artist. Before the war he had worked with Major Ralph Ingersoll, which is probably how he wrangled an invitation to the concert. His name was Theodore Geisel, and he would one day become world famous under the pen name he was already using: Dr. Seuss.

  Sak as Sophie Tucker by George Vander Sluis, 1944

  Several Ghost Army soldiers cherish memories of seeing Dietrich close up. Bob Tompkins nearly knocked her down rushing through the hallway to get to the concert. Bernie Mason recalled introducing her to the crowd. Private William Sayles chuckled at the thought of her entourage. “She was surrounded by all these officer guys who were escorting her wherever she had to go. And she was the queen of the day, let me tell you. She was the queen.”

  A few days later, many of the deceivers sat down for a Thanksgiving dinner in the same room. “Real honest to goodness turkey!” Private Harold Dahl enthused in a letter home. But it wasn’t enough to drive away the weary homesickness. “I’d rather have cold lamb there than turkey here, believe you me,” he wrote his mother. Around the same time, one soldier in the camouflage unit had too much to drink and accidentally shot and wounded one of his compatriots. Everyone was getting edgy, wondering when the wretched war might come to an end. Several weeks earlier, Dahl had summed up the mood in a letter home:

  October 15, 1944

  What keeps those Germans going is beyond us — they’ve lost almost everything in the way of sources of supply, army after army, and still they prolong what must inevitably end in their complete surrender. All they are doing in causing more men to die, more women & children, German this time, to go homeless for a dead cause. Surely there must be some in Germany who see clearly what they are up against or must we beat it into every skull individually? Let’s hope it will soon clear up.

  GALLERY

  You on K.P.!

  Corporal Jack Masey decided to use the time between missions to caricature the men of his company. “I’m going to capture every one of these crazies,” he told himself. He put them all together in a book called You on K.P.! (KP, or Kitchen Patrol, was a dreaded duty that often was given out as a punishment; it involved such tasks as peeling potatoes or washing dishes.) He collected money from his buddies and found a printer in Luxembourg City who ran off a copy for every soldier in Company B of the 603rd. They autographed one another’s books and saved them as souvenirs. These are from Private William Sayles’s copy.

  Ghost Army soldiers in the snow in Luxembourg, 1944

  ALL THEIR

  HEAVY HITTERS

  Victory looks like it’s in sight. The Allies are pushing like crazy. Then, whammo! Out of nowhere: “Pack up. We’re going. The Germans are coming.” It was a very depressing moment.

  — Corporal Jack Masey

  In December 1944 the Ghost Army headed out on what seemed like just another mission, their sixth since arriving in Luxembourg. There had been heavy fighting up north, as the Allies captured the German city of Aachen and then launched a bloody attack through the Hürtgen Forest. But farther south, a ninety-mile section of the front along the rugged Ardennes Forest was thinly held by just four American divisions.

  The Twenty-Third was brought in to help bolster the line. Their mission was to impersonate the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division moving into the area northeast of Luxembourg City. The hope was to prevent Germans from transferring troops out of that area and perhaps force them to take troops away from the fight in Hürtgen Forest to deal with the perceived threat of the Seventy-Fifth.

  Colonel Billy Harris, chief of the Twelfth Army Group’s Special Plans branch, was against the deception. He thought the situation had changed too much for plans worked out weeks earlier to be effective. But Colonel Harry L. Reeder was anxious to keep his men busy, since they had not carried out a deception in nearly a month. And VIII Corps Commander General Troy Middleton, overseeing that section of the front, was happy to have some reinforcements, even if it was a “rubber duck” division, as he called it. So Operation Koblenz was commenced—“without a real hope on anybody’s part for success,” according to Harris.

  The Ghost Army played all its usual tricks. Phony Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division convoys moved along the roads to villages east and northeast of Luxembourg City, while the radio and sonic units made it seem as if triple that number of vehicles were moving in. Phony command posts were set up, and phony MPs directed traffic. Colonel Reeder put on general’s stars and visited each of the fake headquarters, impersonating Seventy-Fifth Division commander General Fay Prickett. Private Harold Dahl found it amusing that because the Seventy-Fifth was supposed to be new to the area, “We had to listen politely while being told all about Luxembourg City and give the impression of ignorance when actually we had left there the day before.”

  One goal of the deception was to convince the Germans that the Seventy-Fifth was about to attack across the Sauer River. Lieutenant Colonel Otis Fitz, Commander of the 603rd, and Captain George Rebh, commander of the 406th, led a two-jeep patrol to a forward position near the town of Girsterklaus, as if they were making a reconnaissance of where the crossing might take place. They parked their jeeps behind a building and started making their way down to some trees by the river. “Shortly after we entered the tree line, bullets st
arted flying over our head. You could hear them hitting the leaves in the trees,” recalled Rebh. A firefight broke out, most likely with a German patrol that had crossed to the Allied side of the river to nab some prisoners. Rebh knew it would be disastrous for them to be taken, so he ordered a hasty withdrawal.

  The discovery of an aggressive German patrol was, perhaps, an indication that this sector wasn’t nearly as quiet as it seemed. The Ghost Army was about to get caught up in one of the biggest battles that American troops fought during World War II: the Battle of the Bulge. “The Germans were coming in, getting ready for the Bulge,” recalled Corporal John Jarvie. “They were putting all their heavy hitters in there, and we didn’t know it.”

  While the 23rd thought they were waving a red flag at a suckling calf, a Nazi bull was preparing to charge. Instead of Luxembourg being the dullest sector with school troops and resting veterans, it soon hit the headlines of the world when two raging Panzer Armies drove into the “Bulge.”