99% Invisible - 161- Show of Force

Episode Date: April 22, 2015

During World War II, a massive recruitment effort targeted students from the top art schools across the country. These young designers, artists, and makers were being asked to help execute a wild��idea that came out of one the nation’s most conservative organizations: the United … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the 1940s there were, as there are today, a lot of great art and design schools in New York City, Pratt, Cooper Union, Parsons. And there were then, as there are today, a lot of young talented artists and designers that those schools would go on to have great careers. But in the 1940s there was something else that some of those artists and designers had

to do first. That's our own Katie Mingle. There was a war going on, World War II, and the Army needed artists because, well, they had kind of a crazy idea. And it was a crazy idea that came out of one of the most conservative organizations you can imagine, the United States Army. That's Rick Byer, more about Rick in a minute. And it had to go up the line to high-ranking generals up as high as Eisenhower himself

to get approval. The crazy idea was this. The United States Army would design a deception unit, a unit that would appear to the enemy to be a large armor division. Thousands of soldiers, tanks, trucks, guns, only this unit would actually be equipped with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake guns, and manned by just a handful of soldiers. And it really is something unusual. Rick Byer has a forthcoming book about all of this and also made a film about it called The Ghost Army.

People say to me, well, did the Germans have something like this? Did the Japanese have something like this? And what I've said is, the Germans and Japanese did deceptions, but I haven't found anybody ever who had a unit quite like this one. D-Day, June 6, 1944, marked the start of the most critical period of War II. The Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy and began to liberate France from the Germans who had occupied it for four years at that point. They were ultimately marching toward Berlin. And the success of the

Normandy landings on Dede was due in part to deception. Using a variety of techniques, the Allies tricked the Germans into thinking the invasion would happen at a different time and place. But a couple of US Armymen, Ralph Ingersoll and Billy Harris wanted to take deception to a whole new level. They wanted to create a mobile deception unit. And we're going to put that on the battlefield and give that to the generals to use for whatever set of circumstances come up. So what were the circumstances in which a unit like this would be needed? Well, let's say American forces are guarding a border, but there's a hole in one spot. And if the Germans

realize there's an unguarded spot, they could use it to break the line. But the Americans don't have any troops to fill that hole. Sometimes they can't send the real troops because the real troops are needed someplace else. And sometimes they can't send them because they just don't have enough or they can't get them there in time. That's where the ghost army came in. This top secret unit was officially called the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops

and nicknamed the ghost army after the war. The so-called ghost army would impersonate a larger armored division. Might be the Six Armored Division or some other one, it changed. But a division that was made up of, say, 15 or 20,000 soldiers. When they, the Ghost Army, were actually only about a thousand men. You want to make it seem like something is there that isn't there. And if you want people to do that, you're going to want artists. The army was interested in recruiting people with art, with an art background.

We were going to do installations of sorts. That's Jack Macy. I'm Jack Macy during World War II. I served in the Ghost Army. Before the Army, Jack was just a kid in high school, a pretty famous high school in New York City called the High School of Music and Art. It's now called LaGuardia High School.

I was an art major. So young Jack is shipped off to Europe to join the camouflage unit, where he discovers that a lot of the other guys in his unit are also artists. A good 50% will say. And one of the things all of those artists had been working on was designing fake tanks and trucks. By the time Jack got to Europe, they'd done all their R&D and decided rubber was the

best material to use. And so that's when I discovered my first inflatable tank. Inflatable rubber tanks were a crucial part of the visual deception unit. You could inflate one to see something rise like a souffle and about a half hour from nothing to a full tank was rather quite interesting, okay? But the visual deception unit had more than just tanks.

It's tanks and trucks and artillery and jeeps and all sorts of vehicles, virtually every kind of vehicle the Army has, the ghost Army had inflatable versions of. Basically anything to make themselves appear to be the full-sized, armored division that they were pretending to be. This stuff was all meant to be believable from a distance for planes flying overhead or maybe people looking through binoculars. And at a distance, the inflatables were super realistic, but you had to be careful about certain details.

Sometimes the barrels of the know, of the tanks, were not that inflated and they sagged. Well, of course, that was a mess. Flacid gun barrels, never a good thing, but there were other details to consider. A real tank weighs 40 tons, and when it drives across the field, it leaves a set of tank tracks that are really obvious to aerial reconnaissance. So the deception unit would actually use a bulldozer to make fake tracks around the fake tanks. But there was one cardinal rule, Jack says, about working with inflatables.

Never under any circumstances were you ever to carry an inflatable across the road. Obviously, two dudes carrying a 40-ton tank would look wrong. You weren't supposed to casually pick up and move an inflatable vehicle in a place where you could be seen. When the artist's soldiers weren't busy with their dummy tanks, Jack says they did what artists do. Spent their time sketching local people, local architecture, churches, all through Normandy, across France, and into Germany.

During their travels through Europe, when they weren't sketching local architecture, the ghost army was often acting. And they call it special effects, and I call it play acting, because that's really what it was. And the idea was first to go into town and sit down at a cafe, so that anybody watching us...

Remember, the Germans had occupied France for four years at this point. So yeah, there were spies everywhere. We wanted them to think that not only did we have actual tanks, which of course we didn't, but that we actually were members of the Second Alma Division, which in fact rewarned. They stenciled fake unit numbers on their trucks, they made fake patches to put on their sleeves. Sometimes they seem to be having a little too much fun with this part of the job. Like the time they stole a bunch of cases of expensive cognac from a tavern

just to piss off the tavern owner, and they knew to be a German collaborator. They are hoping that he is then going to be so angry at them that he's going to go to the Germans and tell them, well not only do I know that the Sixth Armored Division is here, but their general was at my tavern today. The whole point of the Ghost Army was to make sure their presence was known. The Ghost Army needed to be seen and heard and perceived by the Germans as being real. On turntable 1 goes the recording of truck moving in, which brings us to the deception unit that I probably would have been drafted into, sonic deception. So they would record the sounds of tanks going down roads

or the sounds of trucks of men reaching a certain point and all the men jumping out. And then be able to play them back in such a way as to make the enemy think that those things are really happening. This was all so new and strange that the army made a top secret film which explained how sound could be used to deceive the enemy.

In it, actors, badly portray a group of German officers Army made a top secret film which explained how sound could be used to deceive the enemy. In it, actors, badly portray a group of German officers who are the midst of being punked by the Sonic deception unit. Did you say tanks? What are these nonsense about tanks? Our OP here reports definite sounds of tanks moving into assembly about there. The movie goes on to explain that the Germans in that scene were fooled. A summit company had convinced them that an armored division undercover of darkness had

moved along the river across from them. The enemy committed his tank destroyers and reserves to this bridge head up here. They moved into position and waited, and they waited. And we crossed down here where they weren't. The film goes into great detail about the process of recording and playing back sounds. The best loudspeakers for the military requirements have been developed.

The speakers could project sound as far as 15 miles, and there was a huge library of sounds to choose from. For example, engines make different sounds depending on the terrain, and they had all of those different kinds of sounds. At the little hill, this one projected the sound of tanks going up. This one projected tanks going down. They would look at what they're trying to simulate, what are we trying to make people think is happening, and then they would take all the appropriate sounds and mix them together to create a sonic story.

People who heard this say that it was unbelievably eerie, that it was so realistic that you started seeing vehicles that weren't there. The third component of the Ghost Army were the radio operators. It was well known that the Germans listened in on radio communications of allied troops, so if the Ghost Army was trying to impersonate a real armored division, they'd have to send the right kinds of transmissions. They bring in trained radio operators from all sorts of other units to have the very best

operators to be part of the radio deception unit. All of the units paid incredible attention to detail, but the radio operators had to be part of the radio deception unit. All of the units paid incredible attention to detail, but the radio operators had to be perfect mimics. They had to learn the exact keystrokes of an individual Morse code operator in the unit they were impersonating. The way a radio operator in the fourth armored division always starts his messages with four dots, you know,

da da da da, because that's just what they do. And if you don't do that, the German intercept person listening is going to think, well, wait a minute, is that really from the fourth armored division? So you have three different units, visual, sonic, and radio, and they're operating separately, but they're all organized by the same people, so they're very carefully working on different components of the same plan. The three separate units might only be vaguely aware of what one another were up to, and everything was kept completely secret from the rest of the military. If the fact of their mere existence ever leaked to the Germans,

the whole deception, as well as the safety of the Ghost Army could be compromised. The Ghost Army carried out 21 different deception missions between June 1944 and March 1945. Pretty much the entire time the US Army was operating in Europe. Rick says one of their most important missions was Operation Bedembourg, which took place near the border between France and Germany. So picture this. There's a river near the German border, the Mozel River. In German troops from one side and American troops from the other, they're part of a front

that's hundreds of miles long. And then General George Patton realizes that there is a 75 mile gap in his line, an unguarded 75 miles that the Germans could use to break across the border if they knew about it. So they bring in the ghost army. So they arrived in about middle of the night. It's in September 44. And they're using all three units, the visual unit with the inflatable tanks, the radio guys, but especially the sonic deception unit. Because most of the Germans are on the other side

of the Mozel River. They're within earshot, in other words. And so it's a great opportunity to use sound, to build it up and make it seem like so many tanks are moving in and so many tanks are moving in and so many troops are moving in. The deception goes on for seven days. Seven days is a long time to fool anybody.

The ghost army soldiers are getting nervous. They've never done a deception for this long before. And even General Patton is nervous. He wrote a letter to his wife and he says, One bad spot in my line, but I don't think the Huns know about it yet. We're holding on to it by the grace of God. We'll have it plugged by tomorrow. And the next day, the 83rd division moves in and takes over for the Ghost Army.

And the Germans never caught on to the Ghost Army during that operation or any other. Over the course of the war, the Ghost Army lost three soldiers and had several dozen wounded. But overall, it was one of the safer assignments of War War II. Being in the camouflage unit, I always felt I was kind of lucky.

That's Jack Macy again. The camouflage unit was just another name for the visual deception unit. Because I had friends, you know, who were in the infantry, several were killed, several were wounded. But being assigned to the camouflage corps kept me away from the front lines. It's true that the ghost army suffered far fewer casualties than other units. That's partly because they were really good at their jobs. If their deception was ever uncovered by the Germans. It would be catastrophic for the men in the ghost army.

They're operating without any heavy weapons. They don't have any real tanks. They don't have any real artillery. So they're kind of putting on this show of force in a very vulnerable place. Still, Jack remembers the army extremely fondly. He got to see Paris. To see Paris, the great cafes and the bistros

was a completely fabulous experience for me. After Jack Macy left the ghost army, he went to Yale. School of Art and Architecture, G.I. Bill of Rights. Thank God. After Yale, he went on to design some amazing things. He designed the kitchen used in the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, with a famous debate between Nixon and Khrushchev took place. He worked with Buckminster Fuller on a geodesic dome for the 1967 World Expo in Montreal.

And Jack Macy wasn't the only artist in the ghost army to have a great career. Remember all those artists that were constantly sketching around Europe? Well, some of them became pretty famous after the war. Elzworth Kelly, the minimalist painter and sculptor, was in this unit. Arthur Singer, a wildlife artist who illustrated birds of North America and many other books Bill Blass, the fashion designer. Jack Macy and Bill Blass were good friends in the army and Jack likes to say that Bill Blass was the only soldier that read Vogue in his foxhole.

Not only read Vogue in his foxhole, but he made sketches of fashion sketches wherever he went. He was forever working away, getting ready for the great moment when he was leaving the army. The government officially kept the Ghost Army a secret until the 1980s because they were hoping to be able to use some of the deception tactics in future conflicts. Some units were told not to talk about their experience ever to anyone, but apparently not everyone got the same directives on this. I was in company B and we were never told that we were not supposed to talk about it. So

I was blabbing about the ghost army the second I left it and everybody I had everybody reduced to gigantic laughs and amusement. I mean, the idea of a fake unit, pretty amusing thing. It is amusing, but beyond amusing, it's strange and amazing that they tried this and that they actually pulled it off. Not every operation was successful, but there's a number of operations where it's really clear that the Germans believed what they were

trying to sell them and that it had an effect on the war. So it did help to save lives, it did help to win the war. In the story of the Trojan horse after a grueling 10-year war, the Greeks win the war. In the story of the Trojan horse, after a grueling 10-year war, the Greeks pretend to give up and sail away, leaving behind a giant wooden horse which the Trojans drag back into their city as a victory trophy. At night, an elite force of Greek fighters which has been hiding inside the horse creeps out and is able to capture the city of Troy.

Victory, my deception. That deception wouldn't have worked very well in World War II. When the Ghost Army's techniques probably wouldn't be very useful in today's conflicts. For obvious reasons, Rick couldn't get the army to tell him what kinds of deceptions they're doing these days. But you can be sure they're doing something, because, well, here, I'll let this guy say it. Deception of the enemy is, of course, as old as war itself. 99% of visible was produced this week by Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars.

Special thanks to Jim Mingle, yes that's Katie's dad, for his help editing in fact checking this week. Rick Byer and co-author Elizabeth Sales' forthcoming book is called The Ghost Army of World War II. It's full of amazing images and so many more details about specific operations performed by The Ghost Army. It'll be out on April 28th. We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign, an architecture and interior's firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show in like the show on Facebook, we're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram,

and Spotify, but the ghost army is haunting the pages of 99% of the book at 99pi.I. dot org. Radio TIPI. From P.R.X.