The U.S. Army Unit That Fought With Sound and Rubber

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops landed at Omaha Beach in late June 1944 with inflatable Sherman tanks, 500-pound speakers mounted on half-tracks, and a roster recruited from art schools, advertising agencies, and Broadway sound crews. Their job was to be a fake army — to convince German intelligence that American divisions were where they were not, so that real divisions could move undetected somewhere else.

Fashion illustrator Bill Blass was on the roster. So was painter Ellsworth Kelly. Photographer Art Kane. The unit's commander, Colonel Harry Reeder, ran what was effectively a traveling theater company with combat clearance.

The deceptions had three layers. Visual: rubber tanks, jeeps, and artillery pieces inflated by air compressors and arranged in tracks designed to be photographed by German reconnaissance flights. Sonic: 250-pound wire recorders playing battlefield audio — engines, voices, treads — across loudspeakers that could throw sound 15 miles in still air. Radio: bogus traffic from fake division headquarters, complete with the personal sending styles of specific operators the Germans had been tracking for months.

Across 1944 and 1945 the unit ran 21 separate operations, the largest being Operation Viersen in March 1945. Two real divisions slipped north along the Rhine while the Ghost Army impersonated them in their old positions, complete with sound stage explosions and inflated artillery parks. The Germans concentrated their reserves opposite the impersonation. The actual crossing met light resistance.

The whole operation was classified after the war. The men were told not to discuss what they had done, and most of them didn't, even with their families. The unit was finally declassified in 1996. Congress awarded the surviving members a Congressional Gold Medal in 2022, three years before the last one died.