Europe's Best Ears Heard Every Word — The GHOST ARMY Fooled Them With A Morse Key And A PENCIL!

March 1945. German reconnaissance photographs American tanks gathering on the west bank of the Rhine, and at night German listening posts log the rumble of their engines. The tanks are rubber. The engines are loudspeakers. And the American radio operators the Germans have followed for weeks, message by message and hand by hand, are working from a script. The German army had learned to listen at Tannenberg in 1914, and by the Second World War its radio intelligence was the most respected in Europe. Its linguists, traffic analysts and direction finders could read an army's shape from the patterns of its traffic, and trained interceptors knew individual American operators by their "fist", the rhythm of a hand on the Morse key. Before D-Day the Allies gave that ear an army group that barely existed, with George Patton's name attached to it. For seven weeks after the landings, the German 15th Army stayed near Calais, guarding empty sand. Then the forgery crossed the Channel. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, 82 officers and 1,023 men, painters, set designers, sound engineers and radio operators among them, went to war with four weapons, and none of them was designed to fire. Its Signal Company Special, about 300 operators, learned to forge other men's fists, took over real divisions' radio traffic in the middle of the night, and matched even the strength of a signal with a spark at the tip of a pencil. At Bettembourg in Luxembourg, a few hundred men played the 6th Armored Division for eight days, and the German listeners even gave it a nickname: the Phantom Division. In March 1945, at Viersen, 1,100 men of the 23rd impersonated two divisions, 30,000 soldiers, while the real crossing went in dark and quiet to the north. German artillery pounded the rubber. The Ninth Army's assault crossing of the Rhine cost roughly 30 casualties, and a captured German map did not show the 30th Infantry Division, all 15,000 men of it, anywhere. For fifty years the men who did it could not tell anyone. This is the story of the Ghost Army, the radio men who forged whole divisions for the enemy's ears, and of the best listeners in Europe, who believed every word. CHAPTERS 00:00 West Bank of the Rhine, March 1945 02:41 The Ear 06:22 A Broadcast Army 10:31 The Players 15:34 Forging a Hand 19:39 Running Time 23:59 The Willing Audience 28:29 The Bill 30:13 The Rhine 36:17 Fifty Years of Silence If someone in your family served in the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, the 3132nd Signal Service Company or the Signal Company Special, put their name in the comments. For half a century they could not say it aloud. SOURCES AND CREDITS Archival film and photographs in the public domain: U.S. National Archives (U.S. Army Signal Corps films and photographs; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maps; U.S. Army Air Forces, U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard photographs, including work by Robert F. Sargent; Office of War Information), U.S. Army Center of Military History, U.S. Army Institute of Heraldry, Library of Congress (HQ Twelfth Army Group situation maps; Historic American Engineering Record), Imperial War Museums and the UK Security Service (Crown copyright expired), Swiss Federal Archives, NASA, Architect of the Capitol. U.S. Army training film "Radio Operator Training: The Technique of Hand Sending" (1944), via Internet Archive (FedFlix). War Department technical manuals TM 11-862 (1943) and TM 11-487 (1944). Further photographs via Wikimedia Commons, public domain or CC0, including the Escher Tageblatt of 13 September 1944, the Ghost Army dummy tank at the International Spy Museum (ArtemisiaGentileschiFan) and the Ghost Army Congressional Gold Medal (Bedelstein). German radio stations: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-343-0652-03 / Dreesen; Bild 146-2007-0047 / Kindt; Bild 101I-220-0634-16 / Scheffler; Bild 101I-267-0148-04 and Bild 101I-268-0158-13 / Utecht; all CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Thumbnail portrait: General George S. Patton, 1945, by Robert F. Cranston, Lee Elkins and Harry Warnecke, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (CC0). Technical drawings and animation: Design Under Fire. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. #WW2 #GhostArmy #Documentary