Here’s Ghost Army Legacy’s Rick Beyers’ thoughts on George and the achievements of the Ghost Army in World War II.

George Wilson, 1944 - Photo by George V. Rittenhouse

George Wilson and The Ghost Army

By Rick Beyer

Put yourself in George Wilson’s shoes in 1944.

The world is engulfed in the biggest event in human history: WWII. You are a soldier, and you get your orders. You are headed to the front. But you aren’t going to be firing an M-1 rifle, or driving a Sherman tank. Your mission is to put on a show – for the enemy,

You must stage a complex, multi-media production spread out over many miles…and do so in the middle of a warzone!

It must be utterly convincing to an attentive and discerning audience that wants nothing more than to KILL YOU. Your life, and thousands of other lives, are riding on whether you can pull it off.

And next week you will be asked to do it again.

That, in a nutshell, was the mission handed to George and his fellow soldiers in the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, - a boring name for a one of the most remarkable military units in the history of warfare. To carry off their mission they used inflatable tanks, sound effects, radio trickery, and illusion on a massive scale.

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George was in his third year of studying art at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute when he was drafted into the Army in September, 1942. As fellow Ghost Army soldier John Jarvie later said, “It was a big war, and everybody went.” George was one of more than 30 Pratt art students or recent graduates who found themselves assigned to a newly formed camouflage unit, the 603rd camouflage engineers. It was no coincidence so many artists affiliated with Pratt found a wartime home here.

James Boudreau, the dean of Pratt’s art school, was a general in the United States Army reserve. In the early 1940s, with war already raging in Europe and Asia, and fears rising over the threat of aerial devastation from enemy bombing, the farsighted Boudreau organized an experimental laboratory dedicated to camouflage research and development. He recruited camouflage experts to the faculty, and instituted a camouflage course.

Pratt alumnus Victor Dowd recalled that Dean Boudreau actively recruited art students (and recent graduates) for newly organized Army camouflage battalions. Dowd had known since childhood that he was going to be an artist. “My mother never had to worry about me on rainy days, because I’d occupy myself by drawing.” After graduating from Pratt in 1940, he and classmates Ray Harford and Bob Boyajian worked together as comic strip artists at the Jack Binder studio in what is now considered the Golden Age of comics. They drew such heroes as 'Bulletman', 'Captain Midnight,’ and 'Spy Smasher.' Under the auspices of Boudreau, all three found their way into the 603rd.

Wilson must have found himself at home in this unit. Nearly 40% of the 603rd was composed of artists, with the rest being truck drivers from Tennessee, bartenders from Pennsylvania, accountants, shoe salesmen, and other people from all walks of life. “It was a wild array of all kinds of people,” said another Pratt student who joined the unit, Arthur Shilstone.

The 603rd had been together for nearly two years in January 1944, when it was uprooted from Fort Meade, and sent to Camp Forrest in Tennessee to be part of the Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops. Up to now, the 603rd had engaged in large scale camouflage projects: camouflaging an airplane factory in Baltimore and coastal guns on Long Island. They also participated in large-scale Army maneuvers in Tennessee. Now, instead of trying to hide things, they were going to be in the risky business of drawing attention to themselves.

The Twenty-third Headquarters Special Troops was activated at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, in January 1944. After a few brief months of training, the 1100 soldiers in the unit shipped out to Europe in May and June. Their mission was deception. Deception confuses the enemy. Deception can create surprise and give you the advantage. These particular deceptions involved impersonation. Impersonating other much larger American units, to fool the Germans about the location and size of those units. To make the enemy believe a unit was in one place, when in fact it was someplace else.

The 23rd was composed of four sub-units. George and the other men in the 603rd carried out visual deception: using inflatable tanks, artillery, trucks and other vehicles to fool enemy aerial reconnaissance. Another unit, the 3132 Signal Service Company, used sound effects to fool the enemy, playing them from 500-pound speakers mounted on top of halftracks. A third unit, the Signal Company, Special, carried out radio deception, imitating the signals of real units. A fourth unit, the 406th Combat Engineers, provided security and operated heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, used in creating the deceptions. All four units took part in what was called “Special Effects” – literally impersonating the soldiers of a real unit by wearing fake patches, putting fake bumper markings on their vehicles, and creating fake headquarters with fake commanders!

The Twenty-third landed in France starting in June and July of 1944. Over the next 10 months they carried out 22 different deceptions against the enemy, often operation on or near the front lines. Here are some of their more notable operations.

• Operation Brittany, August 1944 - The Twenty-third tricked the enemy about which direction General George Patton’s Third Army was headed. They made it seem as if four of his divisions were heading west, into Brittany, when they were really heading in the opposite direction. That deception contributed to the eventual destruction of the German forces in the Falaise Pocket

• Operation Bettembourg, September 1944 - After General George Patton’s Third Army raced across France and began attacking the fortress city of Metz near the German border, a twenty-five mile gap opened up to his north. The Twenty-third came in to hold that undermanned part of Patton’s line. The deception was only planned to last for three days, but that stretched into eight long days. As each day went by, the soldiers became more and more convinced the Germans would catch on to their trick – but they never did!

• Operation Kodak, December 1944 - During the Battle of the Bulge, they conducted a “radio only” deception to draw German attention away from George Patton’s troops fighting to relieve Bastogne.

• Operation Viersen, March 1945 - As the war neared its end, they put on a dazzling deception along the Rhine River, their biggest ever, that drew the enemy away from a real crossing by the 9th Army. That mission, Operation Viersen, is believed to have saved thousands of lives all by itself.

Many of the soldiers came home with funny stories about civilians’ bewilderment at the sight of fake tanks, or trying to deal with fellow American soldiers taken in by the deceptions. They were under orders to keep those stories under wraps for 50 years after the war’s end. And it wasn’t all fun and games – three men were killed and dozens seriously wounded carrying off these deceptions.

Courtesy Ghostarmy.org. George Wilson outlined in red

But the effort was definitely worth the price. A top-secret US Army report written years later categorized their exploits this way: “Rarely, if ever, has there been a group of such a few men which had so great an influence on the outcome of a major military campaign.”

Portrait of George Wilson by Joseph Mack, fellow Ghost Army artist, courtesy of his son Steve Mack

During their time in Europe, the artists in the 603rd painted and sketched their way across the continent, using stolen moments of spare time to create a visual record of war. This wasn’t part of their mission, it is what they did in their off hours. We don’t know what George Wilson created during this period, if anything, but there are thousands of works by the artists he served with. Some described their time in the Twenty-third as a traveling art seminar. Ned Harris, another Pratt student in the unit, said “I learned more about who I was as an artist and learning my craft by being there rather than even at school.”

Many of the artists who served in the Twenty-Third went on to striking art careers. A few of the more famous:

• Bill Blass became a fashion superstar, operating his own design label in the 1970s - 1990s.

•Ellsworth Kelly became a minimalist painter and sculptor who went to become one of the foremost American artists of the 20th century. In 2013 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts, considered the nation's highest honor for artistic excellence, from President Obama.

•Arthur Singer illustrated Birds of North America and many other books. With his son Alan, he also created the Birds and Flowers of the 50 States postage stamp series.

• Art Kane was a fashion and music photographer who photographed such artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. In his first assignment as a professional photographer, he took a picture of fifty-seven jazz musicians on a stoop in Harlem (“A Great Day in Harlem”) that became one of the most iconic photographs in jazz history.

• Arthur Shilstone’s illustrations appeared in more than thirty magazines. His work also included scores of book jackets and album covers for artists such as Billie Holiday and Aaron Copland. He was an official NASA artist, one of eight artists in the country chosen to cover the maiden voyage of the space shuttle.

Another artist in the unit, Victor Prezio, had a career that paralleled George Wilson’s. Victor became one of the most prolific and underrated pulp magazine, comic book, and dime novel cover illustrators of the post WWII era.

He painted many covers for men's adventure magazines, and worked for Dell, Gold Key, and Warren Publishing, among others. His works featured buxom, scantily clad women and dashing heroes, but also science fiction and western themes. Victor and George were in different companies during the war, so we don’t know if their paths crossed there, but they certainly would have known about each other in the decades that followed.

A documentary film, multiple books, museum exhibits, and historical markers have shined a light on the Ghost Army’s achievements over the last twenty years. Most notably, in 2022 President Joseph Biden signed into law legislation awarding the unit a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow.

George and his fellow soldiers were not textbook heroes, but they served with ingenuity, courage, and honor. They put themselves in the line of fire to fool the enemy, buying other soldiers a chance to fight, and to live.

Veteran Stanley Nance summed it up this way: “If one mother, or one new bride, was spared the agony of putting a gold star in their front window. That’s what the 23rd Headquarters was all about.”

Rick Beyer produced the documentary The Ghost Army, co-wrote the book The Ghost Army of WWII with Elizabeth Sayles, and is president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project. You can find out more about this unit at the Legacy Project’s website, www.ghostarmy.org

George Wilson And The Ghost Army