[Battlefield noises] NARRATOR: March, 1945.

After nine months of bitter fighting, the Allies have driven the Germans across Europe to the Rhine River, the last natural barrier to the German heartland.

It is here that Allied generals expect the battered remnants of Hitler's once-proud army to mount their final defense of the fatherland.

Because the Germans had said, "The Rhine River is going to run red with American blood."

And they meant it.

NARRATOR: German reconnaissance planes take to the sky to pinpoint where the Allies will attack.

Across the river from Dusseldorf, the view from the air reveals hundreds of American vehicles.

Intercepted Allied radio transmissions confirm the presence of two American divisions.

German observation posts hear them moving in across the river.

All signs suggest the attack will come here.

But the tanks spotted from the air are 93-pound inflatable dummies.

The sounds come from loudspeakers, the radio transmissions from a script.

It's amazing, the fakery that we were able to perpetrate upon the enemy.

NARRATOR: A group of handpicked soldiers waging a secret war of deception was now trying to pull off one last grand illusion, with thousands of American lives hanging in the balance-- including their own.

DICK SYRACUSE: I used to refer to us as the Cecil B. DeMille Warriors.

NARRATOR: These artists of deception were also known as the Ghost Army.

[A ship's horn blows] NARRATOR: In the fall of 1943, American GIs were pouring into Great Britain for the upcoming invasion of France, and a handful of U.S. Army planners in London was exploring how to use deception to give those soldiers an extra edge when they came face to face with the full fury of Hitler's Wehrmacht.

WESLEY CLARK: To win on the battlefield, you would like every advantage.

One of the key advantages in warfare is surprise.

Deception is intended to create surprise in the enemy.

NARRATOR: On Christmas Eve, 1943, a memo was sent from London to Washington, requesting the creation of a top-secret "field deception unit" in time for the upcoming invasion.

The mission was to try to be able to take a thousand men and put 'em in so that 15,000 men could move somewhere else and not be detected.

We were going to be in show business, where we set up one-night stands and, like ghosts, disappear.

NARRATOR: Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower ordered that the new unit, officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, be given the highest possible priority.

Eisenhower believed that deception could prove to be one of his most potent weapons.

CLARK: When people think of war, they think of the infantryman with the bayonet.

They think of the tank, the artilleryman pulling the lanyard and the flash and roar of the cannon.

But the essence of winning is the defeat of the enemy's plan and the imposition of your will upon the enemy.

And to do that requires creativity and deception.

NARRATOR: The 23rd would employ three types of deception to con the Germans: visual, sonic, and radio.

To carry out visual deception, the Army selected a 350-man camouflage battalion heavily loaded with artists.

JOHN JARVIE: We want somebody to tell us what something is going to look like from up in the air, and we're down here, we need artists who are pretty good at concept.

They can imagine it.

And they imagine it pretty well.

NARRATOR: The Army drew heavily from New York and Philadelphia art schools to create the 603rd Camouflage Engineers.

JARVIE: And I had to write to this unit because I knew they were open, but you had to write to them and they had to accept you.

It had nothing to do with the Army draft at all.

NARRATOR: In early 1942, they began exploring the ins and outs of tricking the eye.

One of their most ambitious projects was to camouflage the plant in Baltimore where B-26 bombers were made, to protect against the possibility of German air raids.

Our outfit was responsible for disguising that and covering it, so from the air it looked like it was the countryside.

NARRATOR: In stolen moments and off hours, the artists in the unit painted and sketched.

The 603rd became an incubator for young artists.

DOWD: I did hundreds of drawings.

It isn't as though we weren't busy.

But you have to realize, no matter how busy a soldier is, there's always down time.

Soldiers are playing cards, they're shooting craps.

And I drew.

I just developed the habit, and I don't think it's ever left me.

NARRATOR: Fewer than half the soldiers in the 603rd were artists.

The rest came from all walks of life.

One art student from Brooklyn, Jack Masey, was so dazzled by the diversity of the men in his company, he set out to caricature every one of them.

They were either cops, they were shoe salesmen.

There were bartenders, there were students.

It was a wild array of all kinds of people.

I'd only known Brooklynites or Manhattanites.

Now, suddenly, I was thrown into another world.

I was intrigued by this world.

And we were looked on as kind of nutcases by the hardworking, no-nonsense, backbone of America, the people that worked for a living and didn't sketch.

We were looked upon as slightly freakish, I think.

And I think we probably were.

NARRATOR: In early 1944, these camouflage artists were selected to be part of the Ghost Army.

Instead of trying to hide things, they were now going to be in the risky business of drawing attention to themselves.

GIL SELTZER: At which point somebody said, "You mean we're asking for the enemy to fire on us?"

The answer was yes.

At that point we all came to the conclusion that this was a suicide outfit.

NARRATOR: Their new assignment was to use decoy tanks and artillery to conjure up make-believe battalions.

The concept was so out-of-the- box that the Army had no "book" for them to go by, and, at first, no decoys to work with.

They improvised, fabricating dummy tanks out of wood and canvas, and teaching themselves to be deceivers.

Meantime, in the California desert, the Army was testing different kinds of decoys for possible Ghost Army use.

One type consisted of a collapsible metal frame covered in fabric.

When mounted on a jeep, it could become a mobile decoy.

Despite this advantage, the frames proved heavy, difficult to set up, and prone to breakage.

The Army decided instead to go with inflatable dummies made out of rubber.

MASEY: It was a little bundle of stuff-- which a tank was in-- all compressed before you opened the bundle, spread the nozzles around, and inflated it.

HARRIS: Pulling this amorphic shape out of it, and then watching it being filled with air and taking form, you know, like a monster.

MASEY: If things went very well, there were air compressors.

If things went not so well, there were bicycle pumps.

And, if things went terribly badly, there were our lungs.

JOE SPENCE: In most cases, like a Sherman tank, we could have it inflated and moved within 15 or 20 minutes.

SPIKE BERRY: The artillery piece was good, the jeep was good.

But that M4 tank, that was a beauty.

That was a piece of work, really was.

NARRATOR: As the camoufleurs came to grips with their strange new job, another unit picked for the Ghost Army was learning about a brand new kind of warfare: sonic warfare.

JACK McGLYNN: I was interviewed for a top-secret organization, which was involved in psychological warfare and something to do with sound.

I thought, sound, we were going to zap all the Germans.

We'd end the war and that would be it.

But it was more psychology than zapping.

NARRATOR: Using sound to fool the enemy was a new idea in World War II, made possible by technology that didn't exist a few years earlier.

The Army set up its sonic warfare program under another officer who had been a prominent personality before the war: Hilton Howell Railey.

McGLYNN: He was the father of the whole sonic project.

He had been a newspaper man, then he became a military man.

NARRATOR: Most notably, Railey was the PR man who recruited Amelia Earhart to become the first woman to fly the Atlantic, launching her to international fame.

SYRACUSE: I can remember so well his greeting to me was, "Lieutenant, the mission of your company will be to draw enemy fire."

I suggested that as a kid from the Bronx, I said, "I certainly respect the role that we have to play, "but I reserve the right to kick a little ass myself if I get the opportunity."

And he roared.

NARRATOR: In early 1944, Railey sent a team with a portable audio studio down to the Army proving ground at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Working with experts from Bell Labs, they spent three weeks recording sounds onto 16-inch transcription disks, the same kind used to make hit records.

SYRACUSE: The recordings were brilliant.

I mean, if there was a road leading up, the music had to be described-- (making rumbling sounds) The changing gears, tanks going up, tanks going down, tanks assembling.

McGLYNN: Then we would go to anther spot where trucks were just flying through on the highway.

HAROLD FLINN: They had recordings of building a pontoon bridge or any type of bridge, and you could hear 'em hammering away and swearing.

NARRATOR: Different sounds could then be cued up on different turntables and mixed together to create whatever scenario was required-- one of the earliest known uses of multitrack recording.

And this is all recorded on a wire.

Remember, back there, there was no tape.

NARRATOR: The wire recorder was advanced technology in the 1940s.

A single spool contained two miles of magnetized wire, enough for 30 minutes of sound.

And unlike a record, it was never going to skip.

The recordings were played over 500-pound speakers with a range of 15 miles.

ALBRECHT: Back of my half-track, I tell my children, was the biggest boom box you ever saw, but it played sounds of tanks and activity.

NARRATOR: Rounding out the corps of deceivers were the radio operators of the Signal Company Special.

Now when you think of the 23rd Special Troops, you think of the inflatable tank, or the sound guys, and they're great.

But they have to have a stage on which to perform.

And we provided that stage.

NARRATOR: By some estimates, German army units gathered as much as 75% of their intelligence from radio intercepts.

Convincing radio transmissions could attract enemy attention the way a red flag attracts a bull.

JON GAWNE: The British had captured an entire German radio interception unit.

And they were able to see that the Germans could very precisely pinpoint Allied units from their radio transmissions.

And they were actually quite stunned at how good the Germans were at this.

NARRATOR: To fool the Germans, more than 100 skilled radio operators were plucked from units around the country.

Stan Nance was on desert maneuvers with the 11th Armored when a stranger in a jeep came looking for him.

He said, "Get your equipment and come with me."

And I just said, "Where are you going?"

And he said, "All I can tell you "is that I'm not supposed to tell you anything, and for you to shut up."

NARRATOR: Their mission was to replicate the radio transmissions of the units they were impersonating.

GAWNE: It's an art of knowing just how many and what type of messages to send.

And this is one of the things that the 23rd did, was it studied its own army's transmissions so they knew if they were simulating an infantry regiment moving across an area how many times a day would the regiments send messages to battalion, would battalion send messages to regiments.

We painted a picture in the German intelligence as to what was going on.

NARRATOR: These three distinct units-- the 603rd with its dummy tanks, the sonic company with its audio equipment, and the signal company with its radios-- became the deception core of the Ghost Army.

In May 1944, they headed for Europe, filled with excitement and uncertainty.

IRVING STEMPEL: You couldn't really believe that what we were going to do would be effective.

How could we come along with rubber dummies and blow it up and make it look real?

DOWD: None of us took it that seriously.

We did what we were supposed to do.

We didn't really believe the big picture.

Until we got fired at and shot-- when reality struck.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Allied naval forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

DOWD: A week after the invasion of D-Day, I was with this nice girl, and I remember thinking, "What in the hell am I doing in the British countryside "with a pretty girl when there are guys my age being shot at and killed in Normandy?"

And I remember kissing her goodnight and riding my bike back to our tent.

And there was a light on in our tent, and somebody said, "Who's there?"

And I said, "Sgt.

Dowd."

And a voice said, "You'd better get in here."

And I said, "Well, let me park my bike."

And one of the wise guy members of the platoon said, "You're not going to need your bike anymore."

The next day we were on Omaha Beach in Normandy.

NARRATOR: Surprise orders had come down for a 15-man platoon to head to Normandy with dummy artillery ahead of the rest of the Ghost Army.

The time had come to see whether they could really fool the Germans and survive.

BERNIE MASON: Before we knew it, we were on this C-47.

Landed on a metal mesh landing strip on Omaha Beach on the morning of June 14, which was eight days after D-Day.

NARRATOR: The platoon was under the command of Lt. Bernie Mason.

MASON: My assignment was to report to the commander of the 980th Artillery Battalion, and our objective was to set up dummy artillery emplacements about a mile ahead of his actual position to try to draw the enemy's fire into our position, and have his not touched.

NARRATOR: Victor Dowd was a sergeant in Mason's platoon.

DOWD: And I can remember the wild difference between last night, when I was in the lovely, quiet, serene countryside, and the grim reality of today, where I could still hear machine gun fire.

So the fighting was within earshot, certainly, and there were dead German soldiers all over the ground.

I did a sketch of a German helmet and a potato masher hand grenade.

So this, to me, symbolized war.

NARRATOR: Task Force Mason worked with the 980th Artillery for 28 days.

Their deception proved successful.

They tricked the Germans into shelling their phony guns, but managed to avoid suffering any casualties.

Two weeks after D-Day, the rest of the Ghost Army-- minus the sonic company, still training in England-- packed its gear and shipped out for France.

SHILSTONE: We were anchored off of Normandy, and we were going to disembark.

And we were loaded down with everything-- rifles, ammunition, helmets, and so forth.

We were waiting for our names to be called so we would go over the side on the cargo nets into the landing boats onto the beach.

And I looked out and I saw this incredible scene, something that I would... felt I would never, ever see again in my life.

This was really history in the making.

So I did this sketch, which is very rough, but it gives you an idea of what it looked like, with the barrage balloons and every imaginable kind of ship as far as you could see.

NARRATOR: Once ashore in Normandy, the men set up their dummies to make sure everything was in working order.

SHILSTONE: I was on guard duty, and two Frenchmen on bicycles got through the perimeter.

And I halted them.

And they weren't looking at me, they were looking at something over my shoulder.

And what they thought they saw was four GIs picking up what was a 40-ton Sherman tank and turning it around.

They looked at me, and then they looked at the situation.

They were looking for answers.

And I finally said, "The Americans are very strong."

NARRATOR: In July and August, the Ghost Army conducted its first large-scale deceptions using visual and radio only.

With each performance, they learned how to make themselves more convincing.

CLARK: At every level, the art of war requires intelligent and creative thought.

And probably no more so than in the practice of deception.

Because there you have to see into the mind of your adversary.

And you have to create for him a misleading picture of the operation to come.

And you have to sell it to him with confidence.

It's the highest kind of creativity in the art of war.

NARRATOR: Deception demanded an artist's eye for detail.

JARVIE: We could position certain things so that they would be hidden, but kind of hidden in plain sight.

So if reconnaissance planes came over, maybe they would just see the corner of something sticking out.

And they know if they can see one or two sticking out, there must be more that they can't.

We wanted to create the natural debris that goes with faking something.

NARRATOR: A company of Ghost Army combat engineers used bulldozers to create phony tank tracks.

JARVIE: We did similar things with artillery-- lay phony artillery shells around and make it look as if they had been firing.

NARRATOR: Moving through the French villages so recently occupied by the Germans, they saw an opportunity to improvise yet another way to sell their deceptions-- targeting enemy spies that might have stayed behind.

They called it "Special Effects."

Why don't we put a stencil of the name of the unit that we were simulating right on the trucks?

And why don't we start a counterfeit shoulder patch factory where they would see we're the 75th Division, one of the divisions we did.

NARRATOR: Sometimes they used actual patches from the unit they were impersonating.

Other times, they had to hand- paint their own knockoffs.

SYRACUSE: So we began to put on their patches and put their bumper markings on.

And we physically assumed the role.

Only for every hundred of them, there might be ten of us.

JARVIE: Our job was to go in with our phony markings and phony stories that we were pretending to be officers and soldiers from another organization.

And we were turned loose in town-- go to the pub, order some omelets, and talk loose.

BERRY: A lot of the guys went to the bakery, got rolls and stuff, and said, "We've got to get an extra supply because we're moving out tonight"-- that kind of thing.

It was almost kind of silly, really.

But I think what really confirmed the fact that there was effectiveness was sitting in a café and seeing a door open up gradually and somebody was taking pictures.

We'd find out if, like, a division or a special unit had a particular song that they liked to sing.

We'd get blitzed and then sing their song.

NARRATOR: As the Ghost Army made its way through France, the artists in the 603rd broke out their sketchbooks.

To be in the middle of this incredible adventure with the world at war in a foreign country, I just had to put it down.

JARVIE: Any given opportunity, the guys would draw.

Guys would draw with a fountain pen and spit.

You make the drawing and then you wet it, and it makes nice halftones in there.

NARRATOR: A few miles from the Ghost Army's first bivouac was the Normandy village of Trévières.

The artists were drawn to a bombed-out church off the town square.

These were some of the first sketches I did-- they were not too long after the invasion-- in the remains of this church.

We might have had three or four guys in there sketching.

We were sleeping in hedgerows and foxholes, but nothing kept us away from going someplace to do a watercolor.

DOWD: I was not the only soldier with a sketchbook.

I'd have sketched whether I was the only soldier or not, but to be quite honest with you, I think it helped keep me in balance.

I think it kept my sanity.

NARRATOR: In mid-August, Allied armies broke out of Normandy and raced across France.

The Ghost Army was on the move as well.

Their destination was the port city of Brest, under siege by the Allies but still tenaciously held by the Germans.

JARVIE: Brest was a hard nut to crack.

It was a seaport that the Germans wanted to defend, and we wanted it because we needed a port.

NARRATOR: The sonic unit had just arrived in Europe, so Operation Brest became the Ghost Army's first chance to use all its means of deception at the same time.

Their mission was to inflate the apparent size of the American forces attacking Brest by impersonating the Sixth Armored Division.

They sought to draw German reserves to the flanks, clearing the way for an attack in the center.

Sound trucks pulled to within a few hundred yards of German lines.

WALKER: Crank the speakers up out of the back of a halftrack and play a program to the enemy all night of us bringing equipment into the scene.

We could make them believe that we were coming in with an armored division.

NARRATOR: They painted 6th Armored markings on their trucks and drove them back and forth through nearby towns.

We did a lot of ride-through with two guys in the back of a truck to make it look like it was full.

NARRATOR: Radio operators mimicked a tank battalion coming into the line.

More than 50 dummy tanks were set up, along with dummy artillery.

They were so close to the front that shells frequently screamed down around them.

BOB THOMPKINS: We could see the church tower where they're observing us.

And, of course, you had to tend these dummies all the time.

During the night, the gun turrets would sag, and that's a bad visual effect the next morning if the Germans are looking down there and seeing sagging gun barrels.

SHILSTONE: To see a gun like that would be quite a giveaway.

We didn't have any guns that shot into the ground like that.

NARRATOR: Captured German officers revealed to interrogators that they were convinced the 6th Armored was really there.

But in the minds of many veterans, that success was overshadowed by the deadly consequences of an American attack mistakenly launched right where the Ghost Army was attracting German attention.

We did a very successful sonic imitation of the assembling of tanks, and for some reason or other, the commanding officer of this tank battalion sends his tanks right down the ravine that we had played for dummies' sake.

NARRATOR: German anti-tank weapons drawn by the deception opened fire on the American tanks.

JARVIE: Those guys never reached the line of departure, which is the point that they want to start their attack from.

They never even got that far; they got decimated.

We had no way of knowing they were going to kick off an attack, and they had no way of knowing that we weren't going to help them.

And it makes you feel lousy.

("La Marseillaise" playing) NARRATOR: On August 25, 1944, the city of Paris was liberated from more than four years of German occupation.

Parisians were still celebrating as the Ghost Army pulled into a nearby town to await their next operation.

For one wonderful week, they would savor the pleasures of a Paris still giddy with euphoria.

"Paris was put off limits and on limits so often," recalled one Ghost Army officer, "that everyone, in confusion, visited it whenever possible.

"It was a great town.

"The girls looked like delightful dolls, "especially when they whizzed past on bicycles "with billowing skirts.

The Parisians were very happy to see us."

SHILSTONE: We got in every night.

And came back pretty drunk, and then started the next day and then the next night in Paris, and so forth.

We went to a café, which was a brothel.

And the ladies would come... be downstairs in their scanty costumes, and again it was a great opportunity for me to draw.

I'm not Toulouse-Lautrec, but here were these women in their underwear.

A woman named Doris sat on my table.

She had a glass of wine in her hand and a cigarette in the other hand, high heels and practically no clothes on.

And she was trying to entice me to go upstairs.

And I wouldn't have had to pay anything if I gave her the drawing.

But I wasn't particularly anxious to go upstairs with Doris, and I decided to keep the drawing.

NARRATOR: All too soon, the pleasant interlude in Paris came to an abrupt halt.

The Ghost Army was ordered to make a mad dash across France to lend a hand to General George Patton's Third Army.

In Patton's haste to capture the fortress city of Metz, near the German border, a yawning gap had opened up to the north.

GAWNE: If the Germans realized that there were effectively no troops in the 70-mile-wide stretch, they could have broken through easily.

And if they could have gotten some of their mechanized units there, they could have surrounded Patton at Metz to the south.

This was a very, very severe risk.

In other words, there was nothing between the German army and Paris but a bunch of rubber tanks.

NARRATOR: German troops were incredibly close, just across the Moselle River, making sonic deception particularly crucial.

Sonic trucks operated for four straight nights.

DOWD: Enormous sounds of tracks racing through the forest, sounded like a whole division was amassing.

Sergeants' voices yelling, "Put out that damn cigarette now!"

It was fakery, it was all a big act.

NARRATOR: The Ghost Army held the position day after perilous day, aware that every passing hour increased the odds that the Germans might see through their deception.

CONRAD: And there was nothing between us but our hopes and prayers that separated us from the Panzer division.

NARRATOR: Even Patton himself was feeling the pressure.

"There is one rather bad spot in my line," he wrote to his wife, "but I don't think the Huns know it.

Holding it now by the grace of God and a lot of guts."

After seven days of high-stakes play-acting, the U.S. 83rd Division arrived to fill the hole for real.

Patton's line had held, and the Ghost Army faded away.

In September, the Ghost Army relocated to Luxembourg City.

For the next three months, it served as their base for deception missions up and down the front.

HARRIS: So if we went out on missions, we came back to Luxembourg.

And we were in an old seminary building, and we were living pretty good.

And the town was not destroyed, and it even had art supplies stores.

NARRATOR: Between missions, some of the artists in the unit sought to capture the beauty of Luxembourg's old city.

NARRATOR: One artist constantly sketching was a 21-year-old from Indiana named Bill Blass.

MASEY: Bill Blass.

Great guy, wonderful.

Knew what he wanted, read Vogue in his foxhole.

The rest of us are a bunch of slobs, but not Blass.

He was always dressed to the nines.

We all had the same uniforms, but leave it to Blass to have his pressed or something.

NARRATOR: Blass filled his notebooks with ideas for women's clothing, even sketching a logo he wanted to use for his fashion designs after the war.

Those of us from New York, you know, thought we were very sophisticated.

But Bill, of course, came from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was far more sophisticated than most of us.

BILL SAYLES: He was charming and he was genuine and he was eager and he was attractive-- he was the whole thing, he was the package.

NARRATOR: In December 1944, the Ghost Army headed out on what seemed like just another mission, their sixth since arriving in Luxembourg.

Heavy fighting was taking place near the German city of Cologne.

But further south, a 90-mile section of the front along the rugged Ardennes forest was thinly held by just four American divisions.

BIOW: The Army in its wisdom decided they would send the wonderful 23rd Headquarters up there to create the illusion that there were more troops than there were.

And we went in representing the 75th Infantry Division, which was still in England, as I recall.

NARRATOR: But the sector wasn't nearly as quiet as it seemed, and the Ghost Army was about to get caught up in one of the biggest battles of the Second World War.

JARVIE: The Germans were coming in, getting ready for the Bulge.

They were putting all their heavy hitters in there, and we didn't know it.

NARRATOR: In the early morning hours of December 16, Hitler's legions unleashed a massive surprise attack in a last-ditch attempt to win the war.

Dazed American units along the front barely knew what hit them.

CLARK: Suddenly, out of the snow and out of the darkness, a group of men in white uniforms are moving toward you, and you're thinking, "Well, what is that?"

And they're 300 yards, they're 200 yards, and suddenly you realize that's the enemy.

And it's almost too late.

NARRATOR: The attack would become famous as the Battle of the Bulge.

If you look at where the Germans attacked, they attacked smack into the 23rd Special Troops.

The fortunate thing was that on the evening of December 15, came midnight, somebody in their wisdom decided to pull us out.

So we left at midnight, December 16, and the Battle of the Bulge started about 4:00 a.m., December 16, just shortly after we left.

And if we'd have been there, there'd be no 23rd.

NARRATOR: Back in Luxembourg City, less than 20 miles from the attacking Germans, Ghost Army gunners manned rooftop machine guns and blazed away at attacking Luftwaffe planes.

It was the only time during the war they actually had a chance to fire at the enemy.

MASON: I was given the order to set charges on all our vehicles so that in case the enemy overran Luxembourg, we would destroy it.

So that was kind of scary MASEY: Victory looks like it's in sight.

The Allies are pushing like crazy.

Then, whammo, out of nowhere, "Pack up, we're going, the Germans are coming."

I said, "What do you mean, the Germans are coming?

Isn't the war over?"

"No.

"We've got to go; we're leaving.

"You have an hour to get all your stuff together.

"We're getting out of here.

"Trucks are waiting in front of this building.

We're retreating.” "Retreating?

"We're supposed to have won this war, or on the verge of winning it."

I mean, it was a very depressing moment.

What's happened?

Where did these Germans get this suddenly eleventh-hour energy from?

NARRATOR: The Army didn't want to risk blowing the cover of the deceivers, so they were hustled to the rear.

BIOW: Now it's Christmastime.

What do you do next?

Well, one of the guys went out and cut a Christmas tree and rigged it inside the pillbox.

And then the question, how do you decorate it?

Well, one way was to inflate condoms and hang them on there like balloons.

And the other method was to take tin cans and cut stars out of the tin cans, which we hung on the trees, and that was our Christmas tree.

DOWD: There were Polish refugees and other Middle European refugee children.

And being American soldiers, we tried to enliven their lives by giving them presents and so forth.

And I did indeed do a drawing of a little boy.

I can remember it so vividly.

He had this box, and it was open, but he was so forlorn looking, and nobody could get this little boy to smile.

God knows what he'd been through.

BIOW: And that was Christmas in 1944.

NARRATOR: By January 1945, the German attack had been blunted and the Allies were back on the offensive.

The Ghost Army was called on to conduct a series of deceptions to mask where each new blow would fall.

Suddenly, they were busier than ever.

They ranged across parts of Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Germany.

ALBRECHT: Man, we used a lot of fuel.

We traveled more across Europe than I'm sure any other Army unit.

NARRATOR: For months, the men of the Ghost Army had led a charmed life, often drawing fire but taking virtually no casualties.

On March 12, 1945, the odds finally caught up with them.

They were impersonating the 80th Infantry Division, and sobering proof that their deception worked came in the form of deadly German artillery fire.

(explosions) And there were people probably no more than 20, 30 feet away from me that lost limbs because of shrapnel just falling all over.

DOWD: And I can remember sitting in the truck with my truck driver and a bunch of guys in the back of the truck, and a shell landed in front of us, and then a shell flew over our heads and hit the truck behind us.

And I was thinking, "Do I tell them to get the hell out of here now?"

And with that, the signal came and we moved.

And it was just a case of luck.

"Luck" is the paramount word.

If you're in the wrong place, you can be dead.

If you're in the right place, you can live to be as old as I am.

NARRATOR: Two men were killed, 15 wounded, in the Ghost Army's deadliest day.

Just two weeks later, the men of the Ghost Army set out on what was to be their last and most critical mission of the war.

CLARK: The Rhine River is the western boundary of the most important industrial heartland of Germany.

It's the most direct route to Berlin.

So the heat was on.

And the idea was how to get across the Rhine River.

NARRATOR: The 21st Army Group under British General Bernard Law Montgomery was picked to make the major thrust across the Rhine.

Two divisions of the American 9th Army, the 30th and the 79th, would lead one wing of the attack.

The job of the Ghost Army was to fool the Germans into thinking that those two divisions were actually going to attack ten miles to the south.

To pull it off, they would have to operate on a bigger scale than ever before, with thousands of lives at risk.

Operation Viersen would require 1,100 men to convince the Germans that they were 30,000.

We moved on up to this last grand deception.

NARRATOR: Hundreds of decoys were set up around the towns of Anrath and Dulken.

Real armored vehicles and infantry were used to enhance the illusion.

Enclosed farmyards were turned into phony repair depots.

A forest was converted into a decoy motor pool.

BIOW: We even had dummy L-5s, small observation planes that were inflatable.

We created an airstrip so from the air it would look like an active unit complete with its air observation components.

NARRATOR: So convincing were the phony airfields that a real observation plane mistakenly landed at one and was promptly told to get lost.

As the real divisions were moving in, their radio operators went off the air at a pre-assigned moment.

Ghost Army radio operators began imitating them, creating the illusion that the troops were traveling to the fake point of the attack.

German intelligence radio monitoring and traffic, which thought they could identify the signal of an individual telegrapher, missed it.

These guys were that good.

NARRATOR: At night, the sonic trucks played the sounds of soldiers assembling the pontoon bridges needed to span the Rhine.

Created this effect of all this preparation for crossing the river at that point.

NARRATOR: On the eve of the Rhine crossing, Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined General Montgomery to witness the momentous occasion.

Tremendous efforts had gone into the deception, but no one knew whether they would really work.

In the early morning hours of March 24, Navy landing craft began crossing the Rhine.

Infantrymen on board steeled themselves for fierce fighting.

What they found, however, was weak and disorganized resistance, as if the Germans were expecting the attack someplace else.

EICHHORN: The 9th U.S. Army gets across with so few casualties, they would almost have that many casualties if they were running a big training exercise.

NARRATOR: U.S. Army intelligence officers were convinced that the deception was a rousing success.

Captured German maps showed the 79th Division right where the Ghost Army portrayed it.

"There is no doubt," said one report, "that Operation Viersen materially assisted "in deceiving the enemy "with regard to the real dispositions and intentions of this Army."

In some people's minds, it probably justifies the existence of the whole unit.

And it's pretty impressive.

NARRATOR: Once of those impressed was the Commander of the U.S. 9th Army, General William Simpson.

He wrote a letter of commendation, calling the deception "an important part of the operation," adding that it reflected "great credit on this unit"-- a glowing review for the final performance of the Ghost Army.

SHILSTONE: The day I got out of the Army I think was the happiest day of my life.

It wasn't day I got married or when our son was born or anything else, but when I got out of the Army.

NARRATOR: After the war, Arthur Shilstone became an illustrator, working for dozens of magazines.

He was one of many Ghost Army artists who went on to successful art careers.

Jack Masey was another.

MASEY: I learned a lot, fooling people and deceiving people, and it stood me in very good stead for the rest of my life.

NARRATOR: Masey designed exhibits for the U.S. government, including the 1959 Moscow Exhibition that that was the site of the famous kitchen debate between Khrushchev and Nixon.

A surprising number of Ghost Army soldiers won fame as artists and designers.

Bill Blass became a fashion superstar; Ellsworth Kelly, a celebrated minimalist painter.

Arthur Singer's bird illustrations earned him world renown.

Art Kane's photograph of 57 musicians on a stoop in Harlem remains a jazz icon.

Many others made their mark as designers, illustrators, painters, sculptors, and architects.

The official Army history of the unit and the details of its wartime operations were kept under wraps for more than 40 years.

We were told we couldn't tell our wives or anybody about what we did.

It was totally secret.

Americans were pretty convinced the next war was going to be against the Russians.

And so when you have operations that work well against the Germans, you don't want to tell the Russians what you did because then they'll be prepared for them and it will be useless against them.

NARRATOR: The Ghost Army never launched an attack, never took a position.

Their victories were of a different sort.

EICHHORN: Did it absolutely baffle the Germans every time?

Probably not.

Did it cause the Germans to react in ways that we wanted them to react?

Definitely.

There are German records that show that some of the deceptions were taken hook, line and sinker.

The 23rd did not win the war singlehandedly, but I think it would have cost a lot more American casualties had they not been there.

JARVIE: You know you saved lives.

You don't know how many you saved, but you know you saved them.

They estimated that we saved between 15,000 and 30,000 lives with our maneuvers.

But even if we only saved 15 or 30, it was worth it.

One mother, or one new bride, was spared the agony of putting a gold star in their front window.

That's what the 23rd Headquarters was all about.

NARRATOR: The story of the Ghost Army is one of creativity flourishing under the most extreme circumstances.

Their best art was not the paintings and drawings they left behind, but the ephemeral masterpieces they created on the battlefield.

ALBRECHT: Can you picture the German commander, after he was preparing to defend himself and perhaps attack over in our direction, going over there and finding nothing but maybe a lot of tank tracks.

Because we were gone.

That's the Ghost Army.

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