What do set design, sound effects, and showmanship have to do with
winning World War II? Meet the Ghost Army that played a surprising role
in helping to deceive -- and defeat -- the Nazis.
In his third book about deception during war, Paul B. Janeczko focuses
his lens on World War II and the operations carried out by the
Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army. This
remarkable unit included actors, camouflage experts, sound engineers,
painters, and set designers who used their skills to secretly and
systematically replace fighting units -- fooling the Nazi army into
believing what their eyes and ears told them, even though the sights and
sounds of tanks and war machines and troops were entirely fabricated.
Follow the Twenty-Third into Europe as they play a dangerous game of
enticing the German army into making battlefield mistakes by using sonic
deceptions, inflatable tanks, pyrotechnics, and camouflage in more than
twenty operations. From the Normandy invasion to the crossing of the
Rhine River, the men of the Ghost Army -- several of whom went on to
become famous artists and designers after the war -- played an
improbable role in the Allied victory.