A US unit made up of hundreds of artists who misled the Wehrmacht with inflatable tanks and tape noises: The existence of the “Ghost Army” was secret for a long time. Now the veterans are being honored.
Bernie Bluestein was an artist, not a soldier. He didn’t want to fight, but he did want to do something for his country. That’s what the young art student from Cleveland, Ohio, wanted to do. In 1943, he came across a note from the US Army on his university’s bulletin board. “They wanted to recruit young artists like me for a new unit that would produce camouflage,” says the now 100-year-old war veteran. Combat missions were expressly excluded – and so he signed in the spring of 1943.
Today, Bluestein is one of the last people who can tell about a long-held US military secret. Because the then 19-year-old had – without any idea – joined the “Ghost Army”, the phantom unit of the US military.
Just watched on D-Day
“The Ghost Army was a deception unit,” says Rick Beyer, a filmmaker who unearthed and popularized the story. Their mission was to mislead the Germans about the size and location of other US units.
The unit was recruited from artists, engineers, professional soldiers and conscripts. In the months before their deployment, they developed inflatable tanks, planes and weapons and built massive loudspeakers to broadcast audio of rolling tanks and marching troops for miles.
When Allied troops landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944 to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, the 1,100 men of the Ghost Army watched from England. They only crossed over a few days later, when the situation had calmed down somewhat.
Karen and Debra are proud of Al Albrecht – even if they were amazed at their relative’s war experiences when he was alive.
Run away when the Wehrmacht comes
Al Albrecht from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was just 17 years old and one of the youngest soldiers at the time, was there. Later he always said that he drove the biggest boombox of all time, says daughter Karen about her now deceased father. With the noise and the inflatable tanks, the “Ghost Army” was intended to attract the attention of the Germans. As soon as the Wehrmacht actually arrived, they had to deflate everything and run away as quickly as possible, as Albrecht later described it to his daughters.
John Jarvie from New Jersey was one of the many artists responsible for the optical illusions in the “Ghost Army” and painted and drew tirelessly in his free time. His niece Martha Gavin remembers all the watercolors of destroyed church steeples that her Uncle John brought back from the war. “I asked: Why does Uncle John always paint broken churches, why doesn’t he paint whole churches?”
US Congressional Gold Medal
But her Uncle John didn’t talk about the war – because he wasn’t allowed to. For 50 years, the operation of the “Ghost Army” remained classified as a military secret. It wasn’t until 1995 that it became known that the “Ghost Army” had been deployed more than 20 times by the end of the war – and how successful it was: for example, that it distracted the Germans when the legendary US General Patton wanted to conquer the Metz fortress in France. And that in 1945 she deceived the Nazis on the Rhine so that the US Army could safely cross the river elsewhere.
Filmmaker Beyer believes the Phantom Army was very effective and saved thousands of lives. US politicians now believe this too: In March, Congress awarded the “Ghost Army” its gold medal. Too late for the vast majority: of the 1,100 soldiers, only seven are still alive.
Katrin Brand, ARD Washington, tagesschau, May 8, 2024 9:25 a.m