The Ghost Army Artists

What if an army could win a battle without firing the weapons it pretended to have?During the final year of World War II, a secret American unit went to war with an arsenal that looked more like an artist's studio, theater company, and sound laboratory than a military formation.They carried inflatable tanks. They created fake radio traffic. They blasted recordings of armored columns across the countryside. They painted, sketched, acted, impersonated soldiers, and constructed elaborate illusions designed to convince German forces that entire Allied divisions were somewhere they were not.They were the Ghost Army.Officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, this extraordinary unit brought together soldiers, engineers, artists, designers, radio operators, and sound specialists. Among its ranks were men who would later become celebrated figures in the worlds of painting, photography, and fashion. Their mission was deadly serious: manipulate what the enemy saw, heard, and believed.From Normandy to the Rhine, the Ghost Army repeatedly transformed empty fields into phantom military bases and handfuls of men into apparently massive formations. Their greatest operation helped disguise the location of the Ninth Army's Rhine crossing, while their strange methods demonstrated how imagination could become a weapon.The Ghost Army Artists explores the real people, strange technology, daring deceptions, and battlefield improvisations behind one of World War II's most unusual military stories.Because sometimes the most dangerous army is the one that exists only in the enemy's mind.