During World War II, the Allies used everything at their disposal to defeat the Axis powers, including a lot of trickery. One of the best examples? The Ghost Army units: groups of soldiers armed with little more than inflatable weaponry and sound machines.
The work of these units was classified for decades after the war, and former soldiers had to keep their work a secret. Like Al Albrecht, one of the soldiers in the Ghost Army, whose family knew little about his time at war.
“We didn’t really ask about it, and he didn’t talk about it a lot,” says Karen Skibba, who wrote about her father’s work in this month’s Milwaukee Magazine.
That was until his work was declassified in 1996, allowing Albrecht to talk about his work for the first time. Albrecht dedicated the later years of his life to sharing his story with groups around the nation, exploring how the Ghost Army helped distract enemy combatants and waste their resources, while real Army units were able to move undetected in the area.
In an interview he did before his passing, Albrecht explained how it worked.
“I drove a halftrack, [in the] back of my halftrack, I tell my children, was the biggest boombox you ever saw, but it played sounds of tanks and activity... We would play this to the Germans, probably in artillery position, which was a half-mile or a mile away. They would then recognize that there was action, and they would send over an aircraft, and they would see all of these ‘tanks,’ and from the air, this really looked real,” he explained.
The Nazis would then prepare to attack the ghost army, as American infantry escaped detection around them. According to Albrecht, the Ghost Army was able to dismantle in about two hours, so when the Nazis were prepared to attack the ghost army would already be gone.
With this trickery, Skibba says, the ghost army was able to prevent a lot of death and destruction—a fact her father took pride in.
“[The ghost army soldiers] had many stories of the allies that said, ‘[The Nazis] didn’t come over to attack us because they were over by you, trying to attack you, and you were able to distract them. And because of that you saved many American and German lives,'” says Skibba.
