World War 2 was done in an era of astonishingly advanced military technology. Guns were made to be more effective, tanks were engineered to go in water, the sheer volume of sophisticated planes that American produced was unprecedented, not to mention the invention and use of the atomic bomb. However this war was not just a war of machinery. It was also a war of deception. Perhaps the most ingenious example being the Ghost Army of America.
During the war, there was a special unit completely dedicated to creating and perpetuating the illusion of their existence. This unit was called the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and their only job was to deceive Axis powers. As The Atlantic put in their article, Ghost Army: The Inflatable Tanks that Fooled Hitler, “the 23rd were, essentially, the Trojan horse builders of World War II.” However, instead of a wooden horse filled with soldiers this unit had inflatable tanks and rubber planes. Not to mention false radio codes and pre recorded notices that would blast false information into France’s forests.
The “unit” was active from 1944 to 1945 and roughly 1,100 men in it, however German believed it was a force of over 30,000 men. Many of these deceptions took place on the front lines and they would create a feeling within the German army of an omnipresent US military force.
Unsurprisingly, the men in this force were not your average soldier. They were recruited from art schools, they were advertisers, salesmen. They were recruited from occupations that required them to think creatively, to stay on their toes in the ways they deceived the enemy.
Some of their famous deceptions included:
Radio deceptions
By broadcasting false orders and movements over the air, but mimicking the style of real units and even using real units, they would confuse the enemy into moving their troops into the wrong area. Then the real units would come in and take care of the rest
“Atmosphere”: This consisted of making the enemy think that the troops were in a specific location by using dummy tanks and painting them with the insignia of known units. They would confuse the Germans into thinking that a huge unit was rolling in, when in reality it would be as little as two troops in a dummy tank.
Sound Deception: A special unit was recruited to pre-record sounds to trick the Germans into thinking there was a huge force nearing. The sounds of men and tanks would be pre recorded in many different settings (to fit the environment of where they were) and played on repeat. They would then be mounted and amplified so loud that they could be heard more than 15 miles away.
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I found your post very interesting! I was really surprised to learn that the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops performed their tactical deceptions within a few hundred yards of the frontline. I would’ve thought that the Germans would have figured out that the tanks were fake at that short of a distance, but their rubber inflatables seemed to have really tricked them. I decided to look a little more into the specific missions the Ghost Army were sent on. Throughout their career, they staged more than 20 deceptions, but one of their most crucial and largest operations was Operation Viersen. The Ghost Army had to create a deception that would draw the Germans away from the real crossing by the 9th US Army. The 1,100 men in the Ghost Army managed to deceive the Germans into thinking there were two divisions (more than 40,000 men) crossing at their location. When the Germans advanced on what they thought were the real troops, they were met with inflated rubber tanks, only to find out that the real troops had already crossed a few miles away. Operations like these helped save thousands of American lives solely through the power of deception.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ghostarmylegacyproject.org/overview1.html
https://blog.strazcenter.org/tag/operation-viersen/