Rubber Tanks and Sonic Trucks: the Ghost Army of World War II (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: While you may have heard of the Ghost Army that was used to fake troop movements during WWII, it's unlikely that you truly grasp the level of skill and success these elite groups achieved. At its surface, the story is about inflatable armies that could fool German intelligence from afar. That is one visual component, but there were many more involving sound and radio communications. Before the digital age, it was quite a trick making authentic audio recordings of military vehicle sounds on 2-mile long spools of very thin wire played back from vehicles outfitted with 500 Watt speakers. The A/V wasn't complete without radio communications spoofed to look like the Ghost Army was the real deal: this used the best of personal-morse-code-style impersonators. Elite groups trained in these phony arts operated throughout the European theater. Their story was top secret long after the war because the craft was considered a strategic asset well into the cold war era.

Comments

rubber tanks OR sonic trucks

[turkeydance]

either could be your band's name.

More info

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a PBS documentary called The Ghost Army on Netflix about this that was made in 2013. This group was mostly Hollywood effects men and not soldiers, which made it especially dicey when the Germans actually advanced on their position quite rapidly at one point and they had to run like hell to get away as they had no real weapons or training to fight! The documentary is quite good if you're interested. It's an hour and seven minutes long.

Re:More info

[pipedwho]

Probably a really good thing that they ran, as they would have been dramatically outnumbered if they'd hung around to 'fight'.

Keep in mind that this was a couple of guys in a vehicle pretending to be a whole battalion. So any attack on them would have been made by a force big enough to have some chance of success against the much larger 'illusory' target.

Re: This is news?

[KGIII]

I went and found you one of my favorite documentaries on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The whole series is pretty good. It's biased but they all are. This is less biased than some. It's a good enough series to warrant watching the entirety of it. I... err... I don't really watch television so much, or movies really, but I do generally watch more documentaries than is healthy. This is one of my favorite subjects. There's still loads more for me to learn.

Re: Lame,,,

[__aagigi1968]

My thought exactly. And for all the releases and all the programs made about ww2,our governments are still inventing new lies about it and leaning on old lies to try and stop folk learning too much of the truth. If you have good walking legs and boots,can read maps and have some knowledge of major points in ww2 history,it's amazing what you can find in the southern half of the UK,but you have to be very careful cos being a tiny,cramped little island there are only so many places that current establishments and kit can be hidden .if you think you have some strange mapping anomolies in America,you want to try the UK.it's fun if you have a large collection of old maps and don't mind loads of trouble with supposed land owners,troops etc etc. You soon realise how much of our "history" is pure bs...

Patton vs. Bradley

[PolygamousRanchKid]

The big victory here, was that the Germans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. The Germans considered Patton to be the most formidable General that the Allies had. Unfortunately for Patton, he was on the shit-list, because he slapped a patient in a field hospital in Italy, who Patton mistakenly claimed was just suffering from cowardice.

The German spooks heard of this, but discarded it quickly. Why would an Army sideline a brilliant General, just because he slapped a simple enlisted man? At any rate the "Patton Threat" really played a crucial role in all this, and helped the Normandy landings to be a success.

Personal Note: I met an old German soldier a long time back, and we discussed the Normandy landings. He said, "We were waiting the whole time for Patton to land in Calais."

Hey, fooled you, most awesomely!

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[Noah Haders]

america sucks at how we treat our most talented generals. patton, macarthur, mcchrystal, petreus. all shut down by the paper pushers. its like the ultimate muscle-flexing by the civilian-controlled military. any time a military leader gets too powerful, knock him down a few rungs.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[mjwx]

The big victory here, was that the Germans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. The Germans considered Patton to be the most formidable General that the Allies had. Unfortunately for Patton, he was on the shit-list, because he slapped a patient in a field hospital in Italy, who Patton mistakenly claimed was just suffering from cowardice.

The German spooks heard of this, but discarded it quickly. Why would an Army sideline a brilliant General, just because he slapped a simple enlisted man? At any rate the "Patton Threat" really played a crucial role in all this, and helped the Normandy landings to be a success.

Personal Note: I met an old German soldier a long time back, and we discussed the Normandy landings. He said, "We were waiting the whole time for Patton to land in Calais."

Hey, fooled you, most awesomely!

This was no error on the part of the Germans, well at least not a stupid one. The Allies deliberately built a huge propaganda machine centred around Patton for the express purpose fooling the Germans into believing that Patton was leading the invasion and it would be at the Pas de Calais. It wasn't just propaganda either, everything from false intelligence fed through double agents to using Hollywood experts to build an entire fake army around Patton.

And as you said, the Germans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. When Hitler's aides woke him and informed him of the Normandy landings he dismissed it as another raid and refused to allow the release of armoured reinforcements because he was that convinced the invasion would be at Calais. A deception that saves thousands of allied lives.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[k6mfw]

The German spooks heard of this, but discarded it quickly. Why would an Army sideline a brilliant General, just because he slapped a simple enlisted man?

Hey, fooled you, most awesomely!

I wondered the same myself. I think Patton slapping a GI is small stuff, probably did much more to piss off his superiors. Maybe they used that to create a red herring for German spies. Back when History Channel had history, one panelist commented if Patton was active on Normandy landings, they would have been more successful (not sure how to define success, airborne troops scattered about was a disaster but it really confused the Germans to exact beachheads). Speaking of ghost armies, I read that Saddam Hussein really believed he had formable WMDs and other weapon systems because his staff pumped up the numbers out of fear if they really told him he had no capable WMDs, they would be fired (literally). Apparently the American spooks fell for this as well.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[youngone]

I have no personal view about Patton's ability, but I have read of men who served under him that were appalled by his disregard for the lives of his men.

MacArthur however was treated with barely concealed contempt by the Australians (in particular) because of his grandstanding, and the way he was followed around constantly by camera men.

He also viewed the Australians as second class soldiers, despite their heroism in appalling conditions at Kokoda (for example). He ended his career by being sacked after going behind the president's back during the Korean War.

Petreus' end speaks for itself.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[dbIII]

MacArthur however was treated with barely concealed contempt by the Australians (in particular)

Very obvious lies inspired that. Taking credit for the actions of Australian forces long before he even turned up didn't go down well, but his entire career was like that - whatever real success he had did not seem to be enough for him to boast about.
I don't know if it's true or not but the history taught to Chinese kids about the Korean war says that the Chinese decided to join in when MacArthur looked across the river into China with binoculars. Reality is likely to be different since the initial North Korean soldiers were the many Koreans that fought in the Chinese army in WWII anyway, and still in units, so effectively China was in the war on day one even if the force committed was a lot less than later.

Petreus' end speaks for itself.

Ironically due to wanting to "get his end in" with a journalist.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[KGIII]

Patton's mistake was, as I recall, doing it while press was present.

Re:Patton vs. Bradley

[gtall]

Old ideas never die. Schwarzkopf during the first Gulf War used the Marines history of storming beaches to fool the Iraqis into thinking the U.S. was going to retake Kuwait for the fat boys in robes via a seaborne invasion. He had them practicing beach storming in the Gulf in ways the Iraqis could see.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Patton ruse was a British idea. The things the Brits did to the Germans during WWII with misdirection, deceit, etc. were really amazing.

a bodyguard of lies

[z0idberg]

From the first line in TFA:
Winston Churchill once told Joseph Stalin “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”

Certainly explains a lot about how the truth is handled in the War on Terror.

We did the same thing in the Gulf War

[OctobrX]

So I was a 93F with the 101st and one of the first things we did when we got in country was take a trip into Iraq. I was amazed at the HUGE giant amount of tanks I saw as we approached our area to run a met mission(fly a weather balloon lol). As we got closer and closer... I started to notice something. About 50 feet away, I noticed there were wires holding these inflatable vehicles down and let out the biggest cackle you'd ever heard. It was brilliant.

We were there as a part of the GHOST ops to make it look like stuff was happening. Pretty smart if you think about it.

Re:We did the same thing in the Gulf War

[Tablizer]

The W-M-Ds were probably also inflated fakes.

Re:We did the same thing in the Gulf War

[AHuxley]

The problem now is the numbers of rushed in, poorly vetted contractors, random dual citizens working for contractors, other nations workers, private sector staff, US gov staff who are needed to provide support for the once secure all US mil only areas.
As the US looks to out source and no bid contract even more of its invasion, occupation and other massive war like efforts, the amount of random people wondering around, looking around will be interesting.
WW2 worked well as Germany only had look limited fancy new down platforms and had to work with vast radio and telephone capture. German over flight optics was only so good.
Germany had lost its spies in the UK early in WW2. The UK always had very good methods to track people globally.
The UK was also very active in hunting down Germans or people in contact with Germany in neutral nations too (MI5 section 1a teams, Camp 020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).
UK teams would go to neutral nations and find German related radio networks and turn them or ensure the radio traffic stopped.