As the Western World commemorates the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the few remaining veterans of World War II who traveled to France for this year’s ceremonies will be most likely the last of their comrades to tell their stories of the day that began the liberation of continental Europe.
According to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 119,500 of the more than 16.4 million Americans who served during World War II were still alive as of 2023. That is certainly a remarkable number given the fact that even the final enlistees from 1945 (who would have been the minimum age of 18 required to join the armed forces) would have reached at least 96 years of age as of last year.
The National World War II Museum in New Orleans recently speculated that approximately 130 of the remaining men and women who served in that war are dying each day. At that rate, most of those veterans of the Greatest Generation will be gone within the next two to three years.
While a great many Americans would have preferred to sit out the conflict in Europe, the U.S. military had begun to prepare for war as soon as Hitler’s forces invaded Poland in 1939. Even after the United States joined the fray in December of 1941, it would be another two and a half years before the invasion of mainland Europe by American ground forces would begin in earnest in June of 1944. If nothing else, that large lapse in time afforded the Allied Forces ample opportunity to plan for every conceivable contingency when it came to defeating the enemy.
Landing thousands of troops on the western shores of France would be the largest single military undertaking ever attempted. But those troops would need heavy armor to support their advance towards Germany. If the Germans knew the location of all that armor and the routes it would take as it moved inland, the Allied Forces would be hit by all the might the enemy had to offer. Such heavy fighting could either lead to an early Allied defeat or make for an extremely deadly and slow advance towards Germany.
Deception would be crucial to success. Convincing the Germans that the attack would come from multiple angles with greater numbers of tanks and heavy armor than the Allies possessed could spread out the German forces responding to the invasion.
That task would become the mission the 1,100 men assigned to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops.
Created in January of 1944 at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, the 23rd would bring together four units under the command of Colonel Harry Reeder. It would later become popularly known as both the Deception Corps and the Ghost Army.
The 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion consisted of approximately 380 men who specialized in deceiving the enemy through special effects, such as creating and deploying hundreds of realistic looking 93-pound replicas of military tanks that were made of inflatable rubber. Made up mostly of artists and designers, they were tasked with convincing the German Army that Allied troops and equipment were in places they were not. That greatly spread out the enemy forces and gave the Allied command a tactical advantage in moving through Europe.
The 244th Signal Company was made up of nearly 300 men who specialized in radio deception. Their operators created false signals meant to convince the enemy that troops and armor were moving in directions where there were none.
The 3132nd Signal Service consisted of another 150 or so men who created phony sound effects that simulated the noise made by heavy armor on the move. Those sounds were recordings broadcast over powerful loud speakers mounted on a minimal number of armored vehicles that would be long gone by the time the enemy arrived.
The fourth unit was the 406th Engineer Combat Company, the only true combat unit of the 23rd. Consisting of less than 200 men, they were tasked with providing perimeter security for the other three units while they carried out their mission of deceiving the enemy.
In all, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops conducted more than twenty separate operations meant to deceive the Germans as the Allies moved through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and into Germany. Many of these operations were staged dangerously close to the front lines, but almost all resulted in the great success of drawing enemy troops and fire away from real Allied units as they either advanced or regrouped. Amazingly only four soldiers from the Ghost Army were killed in action, but their heroics have been estimated to have saved as many as 20,000 to 30,000 casualties among the Allied forces they were charged with assisting.
According to the Ghost Army Legacy Project website: The details of the story remained classified until 1996. Thirty years after the war, when the details of their story were still being kept secret, a United States Army analyst who studied their missions came away deeply impressed with the impact of their illusions. “Rarely, if ever. Has there been a group of such a few men which had so great an influence on the outcome a major military campaign.”
In 2024, the United States Congress finally recognized both the importance and heroics of the men of the Ghost Army. They were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for their efforts. Unfortunately, most of those men were awarded their medal posthumously, with only three surviving members healthy enough to attend the ceremony.
One of those men, Seymour Nussenbaum, a member of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion that designed and placed all those inflatable tanks throughout Europe was asked by a reporter how he had kept his mission a secret for over 40 years, and what he had told his family and friends he had done during his time in Europe. His reply was short, simple, and completely honest, “I told them I blew up tanks.”
At least one local resident was a member of the Ghost Army. Arthur Rudolf Shilstone was born in Weehawkin, New Jersey on August 7, 1922. Shilstone enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a watercolor painter and illustrator. Much of his work was created after his move to Redding in the early 1950’s where he and his wife resided in a converted barn on Picketts Ridge Road that also housed his art studio.
Shilstone’s illustrations have appeared in more than 30 magazines, including National Geographic, Life, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine and the Smithsonian. He also worked as an official artist for NASA, including creating a series of paintings for the Space Shuttle program beginning in the early 1980’s.
A junior at the Pratt Institute when the United States entered World War II, he left college to join the Army. Shilstone was assigned to the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion.
After World War II, Shilstone completed many assignments for Life magazine by covering important events, such as the Sam Shepard Murder Trial, the funeral of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and even cases argued before the United States Supreme Court.
Arthur Shilstone passed away in 2020 at the age of 97. His Congressional Gold Medal was posthumously awarded to his family.
