The Ghost Army of World War II

by Rick Beyer

  Briey by Arthur Singer, 1945. Singer glued six pieces of paper together to create this panoramic view of snowy fields.

  Premonition by Irving Mayer, 1945

  My Sleeping Bag by Walter Arnett, 1944

  In between their forays to the front, they were billeted in a gloomy old military barracks in Briey, France. The artists in the 603rd created an attic gallery to display the best of their work. They put on shows with titles like Spontaneous Expressions and On Our Own Time. It was both a diversion from the war and a way to share work normally hidden away in sketchbooks and backpacks.

  Certain artists just naturally stood out. Private Arthur Singer’s work with watercolors deeply impressed his fellow officers. Harris stood in awe of his technique: “I couldn’t get a better teacher than Arthur.” If they were in a billet for a week or more, Corporal John Jarvie recalled, Singer would decorate the walls by his bunk with birds and animals, “and he never penciled it in. He just took his brushes and painted it.” Sergeant Keith Williams was admired for his etchings, Private First Class Belisario Contreras for his work with pen and ink. Contreras “was a master at the art of taking lines, putting them together, and making visual sense out of them,” said Ned Harris. Sergeant George Vander Sluis was another artist deeply respected by his peers. “Very urbane, very elegant,” recalled Corporal Jack Masey. Private Harold Dahl actually dug into his pocket to buy some of Vander Sluis’s work. In letters home he also raved about the sketches and paintings done by his friend Private First Class Cleo Hovel.

  Art exhibits at the attic gallery in Briey, France

  To My Friend Belisario, Who Should Have Known Better by Keith Williams, 1945

  Self-Portrait by Arthur Singer, 1945

  Bill Blass in his jeep

  One of the most memorable Ghost Army artists was Private First Class Bill Blass. Originally from Indiana, Blass moved to New York at age seventeen to pursue a career in fashion design. His fellow soldiers took to him immediately. “A fine fellow in every sense of the word,” wrote Harold Dahl in a letter home. “Very flamboyant, very outgoing, very cheerful,” said Sergeant Bob Tompkins, who was close friends with Blass during the war. “He would never shirk a duty,” recalled Private William Sayles. “If it was cleaning trash cans, he was right there with a smile and beautiful teeth.” In his autobiography, Bare Blass, written with New York Times fashion reporter Cathy Horyn, Blass admitted he was in a “bubble of delight” during the war. “For me, the three and a half years that I spent in the army represented absolute freedom. I was truly on my own for the first time in my life. So, naturally, in that exuberant state of mind, I didn’t always notice how bad things were.”

  The cover and one page from one of Bill Blass’s wartime sketchbooks

  Jack Masey remembered Blass reading Vogue in his foxhole. “The rest of us are a bunch of slobs, but not Blass—he’s always dressed to the nines. We all had the same uniforms, but leave it to Blass to have his pressed or something.” Certainly, outside of his army duties, his focus was almost entirely on fashion. He filled his notebooks with ideas for women’s clothing. In Paris, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, when he saw an outfit he liked, it went down in the notebook. On the cover of one notebook he drew the mirror image Bs that would become the logo for his fashion-design house.

  No matter how cold or how depressing things got, the soldiers found stolen moments to gain some relief through “the wonder of art,” as Ned Harris called it. “Sit down and immerse yourself in creating images, and you really go into another space. And it was that space that I think really helped us all.”

  Sentry by George Vander Sluis, 1945

  Habay-la-Vieille by John Jarvie, 1945

  John Jarvie recalled one night on guard duty in the Belgian town of Habay-la-Vieille. It was bitter cold, and as he huddled for warmth, he saw his buddy Keith Williams standing on guard some distance away, with his hands cupped in front of him. Jarvie asked him later what he had been doing, and Williams told him he had been painting a watercolor. “With what?” Jarvie asked, incredulous that he would take out a set of paints on guard duty. “He took out his watch, and he had a watch fob. The watch fob was made up of three little watercolor buttons. And his brush was the ferrule end of a watercolor brush with just the hairs. He did a beautiful watercolor with those three colors.” Jarvie went back the next day and painted the same scene.

  Waiting Their Turn by Ned Harris, 1945

  On another occasion, Harris and Jarvie made their way into the crowded brothel in nearby Homécourt. “It was a mob scene,” remembered Harris. “The cruddiest-looking place you could imagine: filthy, noisy, and the absolute opposite from amour.” Rather than go upstairs with one of the French girls, the two artists set about capturing the scene in their sketchbooks. Combat engineers from the 406th, visiting the brothel with a different goal in mind, couldn’t quite believe it. “They said, ‘What are you doing here, sketching pictures?’”

  One of Jarvie’s sketches shows a soldier propositioning the madam. “But he couldn’t afford her.” Another captures a soldier combing his hair so he’ll look his best. There’s humor in the drawings, tinged with a sense of desperation. For many of the women, prostitution was the only way to feed their families as winter settled on war-ravaged France. “When they left at night,” said Jarvie, “their husbands would wait outside the door for them and take them home.”

  January 26, 1945

  I’ve seen some pretty miserable guys and also people who in this weather are forced to evacuate their homes with what they can carry on their backs, leaving their homes to be at the mercy of cold-hearted armies to whom a house is just a place where an enemy can hide. These people around here will wash all your laundry for an unbelievably small speck of food and walk 6 kilometers to deliver it.

  — Letter written by Harold Dahl

  In later years, many Ghost Army veterans would emphasize how easy they had it compared to the frontline soldiers who were, in the military parlance, “at the sharp end of the stick.” An incident in early March 1945 brought that home with stunning force. Trucks and drivers from the Twenty-Third were pressed into temporary service to ferry replacement troops to the front, near the German city of Saarlautern (now Saarlouis). Private Ellsworth Kelly was assigned to be one of the drivers. So was Ed Biow. “We picked up this division,” he recalled. “Raw troops. Had never been in combat. Hadn’t even had barely time to zero in their rifles.” Some of the soldiers told Private Irving Stempel they had been in New York City just two weeks before. Biow remembered jamming them in so he could close the strap that went over the tailgate: “They were scared to pieces.”

  Young Soldiers Being Transported to the Front, Remagen, Courtyard, Chateau de Divonne, France by Ellsworth Kelly, 1945

  © ELLSWORTH KELLY, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

  They brought the men up at night, under fire. “We sat there, bumper to bumper, and the Germans are firing what they called ‘screaming meemies,’ which were essentially rockets but designed to make a horrible screaming noise. And there you are, sitting there in the dark, bumper to bumper, no place to go, no way to hide, while these suckers are swinging over your head and making this awful noise.” Machine guns chattered nearby. The young draftees, some sick to their stomach with fear, arrived at the front just in time to be thrown into a dawn attack across pontoon bridges.

  What happened next remained seared into their memories. “They started over the bridges, the flares go off, and the Germans wipe them out,” recalled Ed Biow. “One minute, there’s a live guy in the back of your truck, and the next minute, he’s laying dead out on a pontoon bridge somewhere.” Both Kelly and Shilstone made haunting sketches of the untrained soldiers headed to their deaths. All of the Ghost Army soldiers involved were angered and distressed at the senseless deaths. “These young kids were just cannon fodder,” said Bob Tompkins, more than sixty-five years later. “And that really upset a lot of us.”

  They knew, of course, that the same could happen to them. Increasi
ngly, their missions were putting them in harm’s way. Each action seemed to draw more and more artillery and mortar fire. So far they had taken few casualties, but the longer the war went on, the less the chance they could escape unscathed. And they could not shake the thought that the peculiar nature of their unit left them especially vulnerable. “If the Germans had known who we were and what we did, they could have just walked through,” remarked Arthur Shilstone. “We had nothing really to protect ourselves. We had fifty-caliber machine guns on some of the trucks, our own personal arms, and that was it.”

  On March 12, 1945, the odds finally caught up with them.

  The mission was called Operation Bouzonville. They were impersonating the Eightieth Infantry Division, pretending to prepare for an attack near Saarlautern in order to decoy Germans away from a real attack being planned farther north. By this time, they had it down to a science. Dummy artillery emplacements went up overnight. Sonic and radio played their shows. This was one of their shortest deceptions of the war, just thirty-three hours, and it went off without a hitch until the final moments.

  As the deceivers were getting ready to move out, German artillery opened up on them. Private Harold Laynor was standing by one of the trucks when there was “a shattering, smashing, blinding series of explosions around us.” The ground shook and heaved under their feet. Sergeant Victor Dowd was sitting in a truck full of soldiers with his driver when “a shell landed in front of us, and then a shell flew over our heads and hit the truck behind us. And I was thinking, ‘Do I tell them to get the hell out of here now?’ And with that, the signal came, and we moved. And it was just a case of luck,” Dowd recalled years later. “Luck is the paramount word. If you’re in the wrong place, you can be dead. If you’re in the right place, you can live to be as old as I am.”

  Not Me Please by Harold Laynor, 1947

  Sergeant George Peddle, a six-foot collegian from Philadelphia serving in the radio company, was riddled with shrapnel when his truck was hit. Private First Class William Anderson recalled that men went to help, but Peddle told them “Don’t bother, I’m going to die,” which he did, shortly thereafter. Fifteen more men were wounded, some quite severely. Private Joe Spence saw “people no more than twenty or thirty feet away from me who lost limbs because of shrapnel just falling all over.” Captain Thomas Wells of the headquarters company was killed not far away when his jeep was caught in a different artillery barrage. It was the Ghost Army’s deadliest operation. “This has really been a hell of a blow to us all,” wrote Bob Tompkins in his diary. Like many soldiers in similar circumstances, he said a little prayer giving thanks that he was not one of those whose number had been called that day.

  Medics and soldiers near Briey

  Harold Laynor, who said a similar prayer in the moment before the shells came down—Not me, Lord—was thrown against one of the trucks by the force of the explosion, a hunk of shrapnel embedded in his back. It soon became infected. Flown back to Paris for treatment, he was recuperating in a Paris hospital when painter Pablo Picasso visited the ward. Struck by Laynor’s interest in his work, Picasso invited the young artist to visit him in his studio. “I found Picasso wonderful and it’s not difficult to see why he is the top figure in the art world today,” wrote Laynor to his wife, Gloria. “My visit to his studio and working with him greatly inspires me to continue with my painting.” Laynor later said that Picasso exerted a major influence on his painting style. He was one soldier for whom the terrible day in March had a silver lining.

  They knew they had been fortunate, that their losses had been light. “That kind of thing could have happened many more times than it did,” remarked Dowd. But he and the others were sobered by it. Deception could be just as deadly as any other occupation in the war. “We could no longer say, ‘What in the hell are we doing here? Nobody’s shooting at us.’”

  Just two weeks later, the men of the Ghost Army set out on what was to be their last and most important mission of the war.

  GALLERY

  Briey

  In 1940 the French village of Briey was annexed by Germany, along with the rest of the Alsace-Lorraine region, and its resources were exploited for the German war machine. After Briey’s liberation, the Ghost Army was based in a caserne (army barracks) there for a couple of months in early 1945.

  Briey, March ’45 by Bob Tompkins, 1945

  Briey, 1945 by Ellsworth Kelly, 1945

  © ELLSWORTH KELLY, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

  Briey by Arthur Singer, 1945

  George Martin by Paul Seckel, 1945

  George Martin in his room in Briey

  Briey, France ’45 by Joseph Spence, 1945

  A bombed street in Germany, photographed by Ghost Army soldier Irving Mayer, 1945

  ONE LAST GRAND

  DECEPTION

  Eleven hundred men, with help from a few regular army units, would try to convince the enemy that they were thirty thousand soldiers bristling for an all-out charge across the Rhine.

  The 23rd’s last deceptive effort of the War was fortunately the best.

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  After nine months of bitter fighting, the war in Europe was nearly over. But there remained one last barrier for the Allied forces to cross: the Rhine River, the western boundary of Germany’s industrial heartland. It was here that Allied generals expected the battered remnants of Hitler’s once-proud army to mount their final defense of the fatherland.

  Dülken, Germany, 1945

  On March 7, 1945, even before Operation Bouzonville, American soldiers had captured a bridge near the German town of Remagen and advanced some forces across the river. But plans drawn up by General Dwight D. Eisenhower called for the Twenty-First Army Group, under British General Bernard Law Montgomery, to make the major thrust across the Rhine. Two infantry divisions of the American Ninth Army, the Thirtieth and the Seventy-Ninth, would lead one wing of the attack, scheduled for March 24.

  For Operation Viersen, the Ghost Army would work to fool the Germans into thinking that those two divisions were going to attack ten miles to the south. Pulling off this final performance would require them to operate on a bigger scale than ever, with potentially thousands of lives depending on them. “We moved on up to this last grand deception,” as Private Ed Biow put it. The detailed plan was largely the work of Lieutenant Colonel Merrick Truly, one of the Twenty-Third’s staff officers. Eleven hundred men, with help from a few regular army units, would try to convince the enemy that they were thirty thousand soldiers bristling for an all-out charge across the Rhine. No effort would be spared.

  Map created in 1945 depicting Operation Viersen

  Deceptive radio script used during Operation Viersen

  The beauty of this operation lay in three facts. (1) The contribution of the Twenty-third was only a part of a giant spectacle involving practically all of the real NINTH ARMY; (2) the Twenty-third had reached its highest state of efficiency and all of its deceptive strength was employed; (3) From all evidences, the operation was a success.

  — Official History of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

  Stanley Nance named his radio jeep Kilowatt Kommand and flew this pennant from the antenna.

  As the real divisions were moving into the north, their radio operators went off the air at a preassigned moment. Ghost Army radio operators began imitating them, creating the illusion that the troops were traveling to the point of the fake attack. Sergeant Stanley Nance transmitted thirty messages from eight different locations to simulate the movement toward the front. He took pains to match the power of his transmitter to the power of the one he was replacing. Lacking sophisticated measuring equipment, he used a simple expedient: he held a pencil close to the antenna of the division’s powerful radio set to see how big a spark he could generate between the pencil and the antenna. Then he dialed up his own power to achieve the same spark.

  Tony Young’s notebook shows the standard plan for the bivouac of an arm
ored division. This was used to make the deceptions more accurate.

  Camoufleurs laid down smoke screens at the Rhine, near the town of Krefeld, as if they were trying to hide a build-up there. They set up fake supply dumps and staffed phony headquarters. This close to the Rhine, the Germans were putting up every airplane they could to spot what the Americans were doing. The Twenty-Third responded by inflating more than two hundred decoy vehicles around the towns of Anrath and Dülken to create the illusion of a massive military presence a few miles west of the river. Dummy trucks and tanks were parked in forests, courtyards, and open fields. Real armored vehicles and infantry were used to enhance the illusion. A handful of antiaircraft gun emplacements were beefed up with eighty dummy guns.

  Dummy tanks, phony command post, and fake supply depot set up for Operation Viersen