On the night of March 22, 1945, a small American unit of about 1,100 soldiers, on the west bank of the Rhine, set up hundreds of inflatable rubber tanks and artillery pieces, broadcast tank noise from speakers loud enough to be heard 15 miles away, and sent radio traffic in the call signs of two infantry divisions that were not actually there. They were trying to convince German commanders that the U.S. 9th Army would cross the Rhine at Viersen.
The 9th Army crossed miles to the north, lightly opposed. The deception worked. Three days later, the unit moved out and went on with the war. They had been doing this since June 1944. Their existence would remain classified for the next 50 years.
The unit was the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, formed in early 1944 and recruited largely from art schools, advertising agencies, and design firms because the work required visual creativity above all else. Among its 1,100 men were a 22-year-old fashion-school graduate named Bill Blass, a 21-year-old painter named Ellsworth Kelly, the wildlife illustrator Arthur Singer, and dozens of others who came home to careers as artists, set designers, photographers, and ad men. Their work in the war was classified, even from their own families, until the mid-1990s. They were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022. The historian leading this tour is Rick Beyer, who made the PBS documentary and co-wrote the book that finally told their story.
This tour is 14 days long, across England, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, following the 23rd through nine months of deception operations from June 1944 to March 1945. Along the way, you will:
- Stay at Walton Hall, the 16th-century manor house in Warwickshire where the Ghost Army bivouacked while training in spring 1944. On the same grounds where the men of the 23rd practiced setting up rubber tanks under blackout conditions, you will inflate a dummy tank yourself.
- Tour Bletchley Park, the Buckinghamshire country house where Alan Turing and 10,000 Allied codebreakers cracked the German Enigma cipher — work that, in the estimate of some historians, shortened the war by two years. The Ghost Army’s deception campaign was the audible counterpart to this silent one: both were Allied secret weapons, both stayed classified for decades.
- Cross the English Channel by ferry to Normandy, as the Ghost Army did in late June 1944, after touring Eisenhower’s pre-D-Day headquarters at Southwick House outside Portsmouth, where the 22-foot wall map of the invasion is preserved exactly as it stood on June 6, 1944.
- Stop in the Norman village of Trévières, the Ghost Army’s first base in Europe, a small farming village inland from Omaha Beach where the men of the 23rd set up their tents in late June 1944, and where the artists among them sketched and painted the village church in the town square. Many of those wartime drawings survive.
- Walk Utah Beach, where most of the Ghost Army landed in early July 1944, not as combat troops, but with crates of inflatable rubber tanks, sound recordings, and radios, on a beach the 4th Infantry Division had taken a few weeks before.
- Drive through the Cerisy Forest in Normandy, the site of the Ghost Army’s first full-scale deception operation. In these woods in early July 1944, the men of the 23rd impersonated armored units to draw German attention away from real American formations preparing the breakout from the bocage.
- Walk the farm fields outside Brest, where in August 1944 the Ghost Army conducted its first deception, combining all four methods: visual, sonic, radio, and atmospherics. They impersonated the U.S. 6th Armored Division to inflate the apparent size of the American force besieging the Brittany port. Their sonic trucks broadcast tank noise from a quarter-mile of the German lines.
- Visit Verdun, the WWI battlefield where the French and Germans fought one of the costliest battles in human history in 1916. During the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the Ghost Army withdrew from the front and bivouacked in the dank, abandoned WWI fortifications around Verdun. Tour the cemetery, the Ossuary, and the trenches where the 23rd waited out the German offensive.
- Walk the Grund quarter of Luxembourg City, the picturesque district sketched and painted by Ghost Army artists during the unit’s long stay there in the autumn of 1944. Pause at the world’s first Ghost Army historical marker, dedicated in 2018 at the site of Operation Bettembourg, a six-day deception in late September 1944 in which 1,100 men impersonated two armored divisions guarding a 70-mile gap on Patton’s flank.
- Pay your respects at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm. Visit the grave of Gen. George S. Patton, who is buried among 5,076 American war dead. And nearby, visit the grave of Sgt. George Peddle of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was killed in action while deploying with his unit in the Battle of the Bulge.
- Drive to Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne held the crossroads against five German divisions for eight days in the Battle of the Bulge. Stand in McAuliffe’s basement headquarters where he answered the German surrender ultimatum with the word “NUTS”; walk the foxholes Easy Company dug in the Bois Jacques; and learn about the Ghost Army deception that supported Patton’s drive to relieve the city.
- Walk the dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line and continue to Trier, Germany’s oldest city, where the Ghost Army spent the war’s final weeks guarding displaced-persons camps. Many of the unit’s artists made watercolor sketches of the bombed Roman city in the spring of 1945. The deceivers had become custodians.
Most American war stories are stories of arms. This one is a story of art. The men of the Ghost Army went to the front with rubber tanks, recorded sound, and a willingness to wear someone else’s uniform. The U.S. Army’s own postwar assessment said of them: “Rarely, if ever, has there been a group of such a few men which had so great an influence on the outcome of a major military campaign.” They came home to careers as fashion designers and abstract painters and stamp illustrators and ad executives, and they could not say what they had done. The Congressional Gold Medal that finally acknowledged them was awarded in 2022. Most of the men were no longer alive to receive it.
By the end of these 14 days, you will know names you did not know before: Bill Blass before he was a fashion designer, Ellsworth Kelly before he was a painter, Arthur Singer before his postage stamps, and the hundreds of others whose work was hidden from their own families.
You will know what “deception” meant to a 1944 American army, what it cost the Germans, and what the men who did it could and could not tell anyone about it. You will look at a photograph of an inflatable Sherman tank in a French hedgerow differently than you did before. And the next time someone tells you the war was won by the men with guns, you will know about the men with paintbrushes who helped.
