The Ghost Army of World War II

by Rick Beyer

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  German intelligence noted the possible presence of the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division on their maps for a few days and then decided that it wasn’t really there. But it made little difference. Hitler had been planning the massive surprise attack for months, as a last-ditch attempt to win the war. In the early morning hours of December 16, three German armies launched a massive counterattack in the Ardennes. Dazed American units along the front barely knew what hit them, and soon the retreat was on.

  Corporal John Jarvie

  The attack came as the men of the Twenty-Third were wrapping up the first stage of Operation Koblenz and were preparing to undertake the second stage. Their deception was directly in the path of the German onslaught. On Sunday, December 17, Corporal Jarvie and Company C of the 603rd were in Hoscheid, Luxembourg, about five miles behind the front. They were preparing for the next day’s scheduled arrival of a larger contingent of Ghost Army soldiers who would commence the second part of the deception. Jarvie had spent the night in the parish house and, with some other soldiers, attended Mass in the morning. Shortly afterward, the men were alerted that German infantry had broken through and was headed their way. They quickly packed up and pulled back to Luxembourg City, all too aware that capture would expose their deception operation.

  Other Ghost Army units also beat a hasty retreat. “We ran like hell,” said Private Irving Stempel. “At least, Company D did.” Fortunately, most of the men carrying out the first part of Operation Koblenz finished their work before the Germans attacked. “Somebody in their wisdom decided to pull us out,” recalled Ed Biow, adding that if they had stayed there, they would have been wiped out. “There’d be no Twenty-Third.” Soldiers in nearby American units overwhelmed by the German attack were angry that the Seventy-Fifth Infantry Division, which they thought was right next to them in line, was suddenly nowhere to be found.

  In an evacuation hospital a few days after the German counteroffensive began, a soldier from the 4th Infantry was heard to remark: “I’d like to get my hands on those elusive bastards of the Seventy-fifth.”

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  Sergeant Spike Berry found out about the attack while making one of his routine runs to return a movie screened for some of the men in Luxembourg the night before. He drove into the town where the VIII Corps movie library was located. “Film library was closed. Gone, nobody there. I thought, ‘Hell, what’s going on here?’” Berry went to a square in the middle of the town and saw a military policeman. “I said, ‘What’s going on here?’ He said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I’m returning a movie film.’ He said, ‘You’re returning what?’ I said, ‘I’m returning a movie film.’” The vexed MP advised him to ready the gun normally stowed in the leather holster on the side of the jeep. “‘And then you and your driver get the hell out of town.’” The town was Bastogne, Belgium, surrounded shortly afterward by the Germans and soon to earn a place in history for the stand made there by the 101st Airborne Division.

  Units from the Twenty-Third prepare to retreat during the Battle of the Bulge

  Refugees fleeing the Belgian town of Bastogne

  At the seminary in Luxembourg City, less than twenty miles from the attacking Germans, word of the offensive arrived on the afternoon of Sunday, December 17. Sergeant Bob Tompkins was already in a state of high anxiety. His wife was expecting a baby back in the States. Her due date was near, and still he had received no word. “Only a matter of days,” he had written in his diary on December 1. “Terribly fidgety,” he scrawled a few days later. Now there was a frightening new worry:

  December 17, 1944

  Suddenly alerted about 4 o’clock. Germans reported counter attacking heavily. Reports say Three German divisions on this side of the river. Supposedly only 8 Km out of Luxembourg … loading all special equipment in case we must pull out. Worried and really low tonight. No word yet. Nothing seems right. Shit!

  — Diary of Sergeant Bob Tompkins

  Corporal Jack Masey was one of many who found themselves in a state of disbelief. “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. What’s happened? Where did these Germans get this sudden eleventh-hour energy?”

  Ghost Army gunners manned machine guns atop the seminary and blazed away at attacking Luftwaffe planes. For most, it was the only time during the war they actually had a chance to fire at the enemy. Trucks were loaded with gear in anticipation of the unit’s withdrawal. Lieutenant Bernie Mason, trained in demolition, was given orders to set charges on all the vehicles carrying dummies and other secret equipment to prevent them from being discovered if the enemy overran the city before they could retreat.

  The sense of panic was real. But the United States Army held the Twenty-Third in Luxembourg City for a few days in case it would be needed. Finally, word came down on December 21. Most of the Ghost Army would withdraw and head west the next day, away from the front. The radio men, however, along with some of the combat engineers from the 406th, were to go in a different direction. General George Patton’s Third Army was on its way to relieve the 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne, and the radio deceivers were going to lend a hand.

  Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered Patton to execute a complicated pivot and advance two divisions north to break through to Bastogne. With his genius for propelling himself into the center of the action, Major Ralph Ingersoll wrangled an invitation to a meeting in Verdun, at which Twelfth Army Group Commander Omar Bradley, General Patton, and other high-ranking officers were planning the move. Ingersoll recalled that the meeting was “intense.” Just after he arrived, a “telephone call came through from Bastogne itself. Bradley had the besieged commander there on the line to ask him if he felt he could not hold out until we could reach through to him.”

  By a bizarre coincidence, this communication with General Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the 101st, and ranking officer in Bastogne, seems to have been patched through by a Ghost Army signalman stuck behind enemy lines. Private First Class William Anderson was in a bombed-out building in Luxembourg, tapping into a “mass of telephone wires” that ran through the building. He and another signalman were so busy monitoring communications and relaying messages that they got left behind when the Twenty-Third retreated. One day, according to Anderson, “the phone rang, and a man asked if we could get through to General Bradley.” He told Anderson he was the commanding general in Bastogne, and his troops were surrounded, low on ammunition, and almost out of food. Anderson got Bradley on the line, but had to relay the message because the connection was so weak. Anderson recalled that the general asked Bradley if he should surrender or fight it out. General Bradley told Anderson to pass along the message that whatever the general decided, Bradley would understand and not hold it against him. General McAuliffe decided he would hold on, and Bradley wished him luck. Anderson was able to rejoin the Twenty-Third a few days later.

  Map created in 1945 depicting Operation Kodak. It was known as Kodak because it was a “double exposure” operation, showing units to be in two places at once to confuse the Germans.

  Back at the meeting in Verdun, Ingersoll recalled Patton “striding up and down the room, not the cocky man I remembered, but one with lines of grim concern etched on his face.” Bradley was concerned that Patton’s movement would be difficult to disguise, and suddenly he turned to Ingersoll. He wanted to know if there was anything the Ghost Army could do to fool the Germans about where Patton would strike. Ingersoll, aware that everyone in the room was looking at him, replied, “Yes, we can do . . .” and then paused because he didn’t know exactly what they could do.

  “. . . something,” he added lamely.

  “Then do it,” Bradley replied.

  Ingersoll and other officers concocted an id
ea for a hasty radio-only deception that would last just twenty-four hours. While two real divisions, the Fourth and the Eightieth, set out for Bastogne, the Ghost Army would imitate the same divisions going into reserve. The idea was that the German radio operators listening in wouldn’t know which were the real divisions and which were the fakes. Twenty-nine Ghost Army radio sets went on the air December 22. Since they were giving the Germans a confusing “double exposure,” the mission was called Operation Kodak. Military historians are unsure about its effectiveness, but Ingersoll never had any doubts. “This bit of trickery I do know did work—exactly as conceived,” wrote Ingersoll years later. “When the first Third Army Troops hit the flanks of the Bastogne besiegers, the German command was completely confused about where the others might be about to attack.” Patton’s Third Army broke through the German ring around Bastogne and linked up with the 101st Airborne on December 26.

  A Ghost Army radio operator

  At the same time, the rest of the Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops headed away from the fighting. Private Ed Biow couldn’t believe how hard it was snowing. Driving out of Luxembourg, several soldiers spotted panicky Luxembourgers replacing American flags on their houses with swastikas or white flags, in anticipation of the Germans reoccupying the area. “It said something about Europe,” recalled Jack Masey. “They were victim to these hordes coming in all directions, and they had to be prepared to survive.” Masey said it taught him something about survival. “I probably would have done the same thing, had I been a Luxembourg family.”

  Private Irving Mayer in Verdun. Behind him is the Douaumont Ossuary, holding the remains of soldiers who died during the World War I battle.

  Christmas 1944. These are soldiers from Company A of the 603rd. Front row center (on bench) is Art Kane, and directly behind him is Ed Biow.

  They spent Christmas in the French town of Doncourt-lès-Longuyon. “Still no word from Babe,” Bob Tompkins wrote in his diary, waiting for news of the delivery. Then they continued on to Verdun, which Lieutenant Bob Conrad thought “still smelled of World War I.” Verdun was the site of the biggest battle in that war, a gruesome set piece in which more than half a million soldiers died. Lieutenant Fred Fox thought it “a depressing city filled with a million ghosts of other unhappy soldiers. That makes it much too crowded.” It was in the cold, wet World War I fortifications that they grimly camped out to await their next move.

  Some of the men cut Christmas trees. They had to improvise decorations. “One way was to inflate condoms and hang them on there like balloons,” recalled Ed Biow. “And the other method was to take tin cans and cut stars out of the tin cans.” To bring some joy to their cheerless Christmas, they threw a party for some refugee children.

  GI Double Dutch

  Belle of the Ball by Cleo Hovel, 1944

  He Never Smiled and The Sisters, Polish by Victor Dowd, 1944

  Christmas card made by a soldier in the 603rd, 1944

  December 24, 1944

  Dear Mom & Lou,

  Well, we’ve made a bit of Christmas to start the tears in our eyes. We managed to fix a tree decorated with garlands of Christmas paper, imitation candy canes, cards, and ornaments made out of the bits of metallic paper that is used to confuse things in air attacks.…

  Then we collected a huge amount of candy, gum, rations & cigarettes, made up several dozen boxes for kids and a lot for families. We then arranged to have a lot of kids of Nazi-deported families from eastern Europe come in after supper and each get a box of exciting things to carry home. Then we went out with the family boxes and took one to each of the kids’ homes.… Several of those here tonight had both their parents killed off before that bunch of supermen shipped the kids over here.

  You will know that I’ll be thinking of you on Christmas and wishing that next year will find me at home.

  Love —

  Harold [Dahl]

  Sergeant Victor Dowd was struck by the sad eyes of two Polish sisters, ages seven and three, and a little boy that no person or present could cheer up. “I can remember it so vividly. He had had this box, and it was open. But he was so forlorn looking, and nobody could get this little boy to smile. God knows what he’d been through.”

  When New Year’s Eve did come it wasn’t particularly gay. It is hard to celebrate in dreary, cold, unlighted barracks, especially when neither liquor, victory, home, nor girls are available.

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  One Ghost Army soldier was in a mood to celebrate. On December 29, Bob Tompkins opened up Stars and Stripes, the newspaper published by the army for GIs, and saw the piece of news he had been waiting for. “JUST READ IN STARS AND STRIPES. IT’S A BOY. DECEMBER 18. WOW!!!” he wrote in his diary. But for the rest, it was a holiday largely bereft of good cheer, replaced instead by anxiety.

  In many ways 1944 had seemed a heady year. They had crossed the ocean to England, crossed the channel to France, and crossed France to the German border. They had proved they could put on a show that would fool the enemy and stay alive in the process. Then, just when victory seemed within easy reach, they had been forced to retreat to Verdun. Now, amid the cold and snow and a million ghosts, they wondered just what fate awaited them in 1945.

  Ned Harris ink sketch and Arthur Singer watercolor of the same scene outside their gloomy Verdun barracks, part of Fort de Vaux. “It brought up the whole issue that war is about life and death,” recalled Harris. “And we were right in the middle of it.”

  GALLERY

  Mail Call

  During World War II, tons of mail were sent back and forth across the ocean between soldiers and their loved ones in the States. Some of the artists in the Ghost Army illustrated their notes back home. Others chose instead to sketch their buddies absorbed in reading and writing. And quite a few letters were sent from Europeans to the American families of GIs they had befriended.

  One popular way to send mail was via V-Mail (V for Victory). The original V-Mail was reduced onto microfilm, then printed back in the United States and mailed to the recipient, saving shipping space on transatlantic voyages.

  Sunday Letter by Cleo Hovel, 1945

  Letter from Sergeant Joseph Mack

  Chris by Tony Young, 1944

  A Letter from His Fox Hole by Victor Dowd, 1944

  The Letter by Walter Arnett, 1945

  Soldier Reading by Paul Seckel

  Be My Valentine by Bernie Mason

  France Has Some Pretty Sites by William Sayles

  Post-War Plan by Joseph Mack

  This letter was written by a young woman named Anny, whose family had befriended Stanley Wright and his group while they were stationed in Luxembourg during the late stages of the war.

  The letter is to Wright’s father. It was written shortly after V-E Day, on May 20, 1945.

  Wright is third from the left in this photo taken on V-E Day.

  A Ghost Army convoy stops for a break.

  THE COLDEST WINTER

  IN FORTY YEARS

  There were days it seemed to me that we didn’t get any sleep. I would just have loved to have gotten up in one of those tanks, those soft tanks, and gone to sleep.

  — Corporal Arthur Shilstone

  One thing stuck in Private Ed Biow’s memory about the winter of 1944–45. He went forty-three days without taking a bath or shower. The number remained lodged in his brain: forty-three. He was constantly on the move, and “it was so damn cold you didn’t care.” Forty-three days during which the best he could do was wash his face and hands every once in a while.

  By January 1945 the German attack had been blunted and the Allies were back on the offensive. The Ghost Army was called on to conduct a series of deceptions to mask where each new blow would fall. A flurry of missions with names such as Lochinvar, L’Eglise, and Steinsel kept the men of the Twenty-Third in near-constant action.

  Once again they were ranging up and down the front for their deception missions. They portrayed
the Ninetieth Division, the Fourth Division, and the Ninety-Fifth Division in quick succession. One operation blurred into the next. “There were days it seemed to me that we didn’t get any sleep,” remembered Corporal Arthur Shilstone. He longed for a comfortable place to get some rest. “I would just have loved to have gotten up in one of those tanks, those soft tanks, and gone to sleep.” He chuckled as he went on. “Of course, that would be a court-martial offense.”

  Ghost Army soldiers in Briey

  It was all happening in the harshest of conditions. “They said it was the coldest winter in forty years in France, and I believe them,” remarked Biow. “It was misery.” Private Ned Harris acquired a potbellied stove that he installed in the back of his truck. It kept him and his buddies warm until an angry officer told them it was against regulations and forced them to get rid of it: “We went back to our cold feet.” Lieutenant Bob Conrad recalled frequently being “on the ground, in snow, without a tent, and with mud around us. But we were still a hell of a lot luckier than the infantry. When we were moving in our vehicles, seeing our infantrymen slogging through on their feet, with the rain and snow coming down and walking in the mud, it made me thank whatever gods there may be that I had a vehicle.”