The Ultimate Prank
We all love to do pranks, in school, colleges, and almost daily with our friends. If you type “Prank Videos” on YouTube, you will get hundreds of recommendations. Movies and TV shows with deception themes gaining huge popularity and making a lot of money. But have you heard anything like winning a war by pranking a bit? Alright, everybody knows the story of the large wooden horse that fooled the Trojans, but much fewer people know about the ‘Ghost Army’ that helped the Allied troops win the Second World War. Yes, you heard it right, in WORLD WAR II, the US government used a GHOST ARMY to fool Hitler and win the war.
And here I am to tell you about this Ultimate Prank which even The Führer couldn’t have anticipated.
On Christmas Eve 1943, a memo was sent from London to Washington requesting the creation of a top-secret filed deception unit, in time for the upcoming invasion. The Ghost Army, formerly known as the ‘23rd Headquarters Special Troops’, was an elite force in the U.S. Army that operated between 1944 and 1945. Their top-secret mission was to fool the enemy about the strength and location of the American units while using inflatable tanks, rubber airplanes and sound effects, fake radio transmissions.
The soldiers in this army were not the trained personals, they were specially recruited from art schools and ad agencies. They were sought for their acting skills. They were selected for their creativity. They were soldiers whose most effective weapon was artistry.
The unit created phony convoys, phantom divisions, and fake headquarters, to confuse the German legion and to lure the enemy away from the locations of the real combat units. Although the unit consisted out of only 1100 soldiers, they impersonated to make the Germans think it was upwards of a two-division 30,000-man force.
Visual Deception:
The visual deception arm of the Ghost Army was the Camouflage Engineers. It was equipped with inflatable tanks, cannons, jeeps, trucks, and airplanes that the men would inflate with air compressors, and then camouflage imperfectly so that enemy aerial reconnaissance could see them. They could create laundry hanging on clotheslines, and take formation every few hours. They also created mobile rubber tanks, just to show artillery movement in the vicinity.
Sonic Deception:
They record sounds of armored and infantry units onto a series of sound effects records that they brought to Europe. For each deception, sounds (hammer, tanks, shooting, marching, chatting, etc.) could be “mixed” to match the scenario they wanted the enemy to believe. This program was recorded on a state-of-the-art wire recorder (the predecessor to the tape recorder) and then played back with 500 pounds speakers mounted on half-tracks with a range of 24 km.
Radio Deception:
Germans army gathered either 75% of information from their radio intercept. To fool the Germans more than 100 radio operators were plucked around the country. Their job was to replicate the action of the army unit they were supposed to impersonate. Different code operators each have their own individual style of sending; the Signal Company operators mimicked a departed operator’s style so that the enemy would not detect that the real unit and its radio operator were long gone.
The Ghost Army staged more than 20 battlefield deceptions in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Often operating very close to the front lines. It’s estimated that the Ghost Army’s deceptions saved tens of thousands of soldiers' lives.
Their story was kept secret for more than 40 years after the war because US Government was convinced soon they will be going on a war with Russia and they didn’t want to give away their master weaponry. The story was declassified in 1996.
