high key can u give me a rundown of ur fav wacky wwii shenanigans
Okay friends today we are gonna learnabout the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually anarmy made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for theGhost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII sofucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow weinvented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted tosee how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dudeto fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room forshenanigans
so the normal method of dealing withaerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Sayyou’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombsdropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount ofnetting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an emptyfield from the air
there’s a building under that weirdlump
that’s cool! That’sreally cool! But not cool enough
At some pointsomebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead ofdisguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields asunits”
the British hadused a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked upin tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during OperationBertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a specialunit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US militarydecides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out andrecruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makesthem into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THEGHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’sjob was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and thenbasically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unitsneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expectingthem
okay time to getinto the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost armyfaked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLETANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army hada stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflagenetting so from the air it looked like someone had just done areal shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiersthat they would set up to make the scene look populated, since theghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of30,000 men
what’s really coolis that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuffitself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then alsohad to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake trackthat a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks arereally hard on your landscaping
the last couple ofdays before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghostarmy would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- somepeople would take longer to type out certain letters or would havepauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to theradio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radiooperators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghostarmy operators would move in and basically listen to all the realunit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fistso it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to makethis section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making alot of noise
the ghost army hadspecial trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole libraryof stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unitinflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination ofsound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and thenplayed everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mixtape
step 4: fuckinpartying!!!
see the thing aboutimpersonating your own units is that other allied units would knowabout it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators couldhear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had tofool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fakemateriel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sewthe unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they weredressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost armydudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actualfighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying thingslike “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVERDIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway thisbunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptionsbetween 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germansso successfully that they actually got shelled
I'mma leave youwith this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” byRick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actualmember of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier thananything I could ever write:
On anotheroccasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the securityperimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they hadseen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was fourGIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. Theylooked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
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