The Ghost Army is vanishing.
Only seven of the soldiers who conjured their deceptive “magic” on the battlefields of France, Belgium, Germany and elsewhere are still alive.
Bernie Bluestein is one of them. He’s 100 years old and lives in a retirement home in Hoffman Estates. He’s never been one to brag about his World War II mission.
And others have said, decades after the war ended, that they aren’t even sure that what they did made a difference.
The U.S. government is sure.
Two years ago, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law authorizing the Congressional Gold Medal be awarded to the Ghost Army. The medal is Congress’ “highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions.” Bluestein and three others plan to travel to Washington D.C. in March to receive duplicate bronze medals at the special ceremony on March 21. The actual gold medal will be kept at the Smithsonian.
“I’m happy about all this glory, but it’s not me,” Bluestein says. “I grew up in a poor family. ... I’m not the kind of guy who goes and blows his horn.”
Bluestein will be in the nation’s capital with his son Keith Bluestein, 68.
“It’s going to be like the icing on the cake,” says the son, who lives in Buffalo Grove. “I’m really looking forward to it. It’s long overdue.”
From soldiers concealed inside a hollow wooden horse to cunning camouflage to fake invasion documents, deception is as old as warfare itself. But the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and the 3133rd Signal Company Special were unusual in that they were two mobile, multimedia units devoted entirely to the art of deception.
“There is nobody quite like the Ghost Army,” says Rick Beyer, a Chicago author and filmmaker who has spent much of the past two decades telling its stories.
The units came together toward the end of WWII — an idea conceived by a celebrity journalist, Major Ralph Ingersoll, and a West Point graduate, Col. Billy Harris.
The New York Times described Ingersoll as an “energetic egotist.” A fellow officer called him a “goddamned liar.”
“It makes perfect sense” for a man devoted to trickery, Beyer says.
The Army assembled 1,300 or so men. All sworn to secrecy, they weren’t allowed to talk about the mission with loved ones or even other soldiers.
Beyer calls them a “traveling road show.”
Their props: inflatable tanks, trucks and howitzers, misleading radio communications and speakers blasting the sounds of fake convoys on the move.
Their aim was to draw the Nazis’ attention away from the movements of the real Allied forces.
Some soldiers chosen to be part of the Ghost Army were disappointed when they found out they’d been selected for a mission that didn’t involve fighting. Bluestein wasn’t one of them. He volunteered.
“I wasn’t a macho guy who wanted to fight with a gun,” says Bluestein, a 19-year-old art student in Cleveland when he was drafted. “There were two words that made me very, very interested: non-combatant.”
The inflatables, built in rubber factories in the United States before being shipped overseas, were astonishingly realistic — especially when viewed from a distance.
Watch one of the grainy WWII-era films of soldiers hoisting what looks like a full-size Sherman tank above their heads, and it’s hard not to laugh.
“This weird combination of whimsy and humor — with a very life-and-death situation — it is funny,” Beyer says.
Only it wasn’t funny. Soldiers, who set up their dummy weapons under cover of darkness, often were near or even at the war’s real front lines. Given that they were there to draw fire away from the real fighters, casualties were relatively light: three soldiers killed in action and approximately 30 wounded by artillery fire, Beyer says.
The soldiers used air compressors to inflate their blow-up “weapons.”
“If things went not so well, there were bicycle pumps,” Jack Masey, a New York native and Ghost Army veteran who died in 2016, says in one of the videos in the online Ghost Army Legacy Project. “If things went terribly badly, there were our lungs.”
To pull off the charade, soldiers had to gouge fake tank and tire tracks in the dirt leading up to the dummies. Giant speakers blasted the recorded sounds of rumbling convoys. Radiomen created misleading conversations.
The Ghost Army soldiers needed to act the part as well. They were encouraged to stroll into bars and talk openly but not too openly about their fake missions — in hopes a spy might overhear them.
“If you say you’re from Chicago, you have to know what’s the big stadium there,” Bluestein says. “We had to have that thing down pat so that we were convincing.”
A little bit of magic, a lot psychology, according to Beyer.
“The easiest way to convince people of something is to get them to think they’ve come to it on their own,” he says.
The Ghost Army units were pulled into about two dozen military operations. Their last — convincing the Germans that an Allied Rhine River crossing would occur farther south than it actually was planned to be — was perhaps the most successful. The Ghost Army deployed hundreds of rubber vehicles and guns at the fake crossing site. Troops set up empty medical tents. The Army Corp of Engineers hauled in bridge-building equipment.
The real crossing elsewhere ended up taking the Germans by surprise, likely saving thousands of lives, according to historians and military experts.
“After it was all over, I said, ‘What did I get myself into?’ ” Bluestein says. “Nobody explained it to us. When you’re in the army, you listen to the person above you.”
After the war, he moved to Chicago and worked as an industrial designer for Sunbeam, Zenith and other companies.
Bluestein isn’t like many other veterans. No sun-bleached photographs of him and his war buddies on his walls. No old uniform in a closet. As he describes his experiences, Judy Garland’s voice floats out from a TV in a room that’s cluttered with Bluestein’s artwork: whimsical sculptures he fashioned from mahogany, finely polished aluminum and also giant needles, a clothes peg and a hairpin. His work — inspired by his mother’s work as a seamstress and his father’s as a tailor — might fit in at a Soho art gallery in New York.
“I do it for myself,” he says of the art. “This is what has kept me going for 100 years.”
Does he have any mementos from his Ghost Army days? He drags an arthritic finger across an iPad to pull up some digital photos. But then he remembers a piece of shrapnel he brought back — a two-inch chunk that landed between his legs during a German bombing raid soon after he got to France.
Scooting around on his walker, Bluestein rummages through a couple of old cigar boxes, looking for it. He finds his old dog tags and a pocketknife — but no shrapnel. It’s somewhere.
And why did he hold onto it for all these years?
“It reminded me,” he says, “of how lucky I was.”
