Скачать или смотреть The WWII Ghost Army: How “Useless” Decoys Fooled the Wehrmacht

Inflatable tanks. Recorded engine noise. Fake radio chatter.
This is the true WWII story of the “useless” decoys that misled an entire German army and helped save thousands of lives.

In this cinematic World War II documentary, we follow the secret 23rd Headquarters Special Troops — the “Ghost Army” — a unit of artists, sound engineers, and radio specialists ordered to fight with illusions instead of bullets. From the first absurd sight of a rubber Sherman inflating at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, to the freezing night operations outside Bastogne, this film traces how deception became one of the Allies’ most effective weapons.

You’ll meet men like Private Daniel Tomkins, a department store sign painter turned battlefield illusionist, and Colonel Harry Reeder, an armored commander forced to trade real steel for rubber and compressed air. Together with Major Ralph Ingersoll and the Signal Company, they learned to synchronize three-dimensional deception: inflatable tanks and fake supply dumps, thunderous sonic trucks, and radio nets that perfectly mimicked real divisions the Germans thought they knew.

From the first test near Brest in Operation Brittany, where Luftwaffe reconnaissance diverted anti-tank guns toward rubber Shermans, to the desperate winter gamble of Operation Kodak during the Battle of the Bulge, the Ghost Army repeatedly stepped into the line of fire to draw it away from others. Near Bastogne, in bitter cold and darkness, their phantom armored columns bought precious hours for Patton’s relief forces and the surrounded 101st Airborne.

The stakes reach their peak at the Rhine. In Operation Viersen, hundreds of decoy tanks, fake bridge-building sounds, and a blizzard of phantom radio traffic convinced German intelligence that the main crossing would come at Viersen, not Rheinberg. When German artillery hammered the decoy site at dawn, the barrage tore through rubber and canvas — but not men — while the real Ninth Army crossed largely unopposed fifteen miles to the south.

Yet illusion had a cost. In Operation Lockhausen, German mortars finally found their mark, killing radio operator Robert Mills as he transmitted messages for a division that didn’t exist. For a unit built on invisibility, his death made the price of deception painfully real.

For decades after 1945, the Ghost Army’s missions remained classified. Veterans could not tell their families how they had spent the war, or how many lives their illusions had quietly saved. Only slowly did the story emerge, culmin­ating in Congress awarding the Ghost Army the Congressional Gold Medal in 2013 — belated recognition for a unit that proved confusion could be as powerful as firepower.

If you’re drawn to deep, human-focused WWII history — operations, codenames, and quiet acts of courage far from the usual battlefield narratives — this film is for you.

👉 Watch to the end for the Ghost Army’s long-delayed recognition and the modern legacy of their techniques.
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