HOW THE GHOST ARMY HOODWINKED HITLER

A brisk salute to a U.S. Army unit created and trained to keep Germany guessing about Allied troop movements and placement.

Armed with rubber tanks and trucks, huge speakers blasting recorded sounds of soldiers on the move, and other tools of deception, the self-dubbed “Ghost Army”—officially designated the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops—arrived in Great Britain just before D-Day and went on to sow confusion in the enemy’s ranks until the war’s end. Readers interested in the finer details of the Ghost Army’s methods, or how its gear was designed and constructed, will have to dig into Siegel’s substantial bibliography, but her running account of its multiple successes (and failures), well stocked with period photos and often based on oral histories and family interviews, successfully delivers the high points. While frankly and properly acknowledging the horrors Allied troops found in the concentration camps as they swept into Germany and also that the U.S. Army was both segregated and had its own share of antisemites, her narrative shows an overarching sense of pleasure in recounting the results of creative minds at work. The unit’s mission, she writes, was “breathtakingly strange,” and its “most potent weapons were smoke, mirrors, and the German imagination.”

Lively and thoroughly researched.