For half a century, Al Albrecht dutifully kept an astonishing secret – even from us, his family – about his service during World War II: He was part of an Army unit that used loudspeakers, inflatable tanks and fake fortifications to misdirect Nazi Germany’s armies.
READ MORE: LIFE IN THE WWII ‘GHOST ARMY’ THROUGH A MILWAUKEE VETERAN’S EYES
He was my father, a seemingly ordinary Milwaukee transplant from Two Rivers who worked as a salesman and spoke proudly but infrequently about his service. Then, in 1996, declassified records told the amazing story: Dad was a covert operator of a secret unit known as “The Ghost Army” that played a pivotal role in the war in Europe.
“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,” says a declassified military report written in 1975.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
For this unusual mission, the Army hand-picked an unusual group of soldiers for their creativity, intelligence, trustworthiness and special skills – artists (including future fashion designer Bill Blass), designers, scriptwriters and sound engineers.
Dad drove a half-track outfitted with 500-pound speakers blasting military sounds that could be heard up to 15 miles away – “the biggest boom box you ever heard,” he once told author and filmmaker Rick Beyer.
Others in the 1,100-strong 23rd Headquarters Special Troops handled radio deception, built fake buildings and created and inflated rubber vehicles and artillery. The “ghost” name comes from how quickly the unit deflated the vehicles and moved to another area of the theater needing a show of force.
This “traveling road show of deception” operated dangerously close – often less than a mile away – to the enemy’s front lines. The unit staged 22 deception operations in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany, starting in the summer of 1944 and a sister unit carried out two deceptions in Italy in 1945.
The Ghost Army’s last operation, in March 1945, was its largest. All 1,100 of its men, plus help from a few regular Army units, puffed themselves up to look like two full divisions – 40,000 troops strong – along the Rhine River to distract German forces from the real 9th Army’s crossing elsewhere.
They used every resource at their disposal, including more than 600 inflatable tanks and artillery, fake radio networks, sounds of construction and phony trucks. They even set off flash canisters to sound like artillery fire. The Germans responded with heavy artillery fire that damaged rubber tanks and guns instead of actual warfighting matériel.
Because they had very few real weapons, the danger was real. “If they did attack us, we would have been overrun,” Dad told me in 2003. “Under my seat in the half-track were explosives, and if this ever happened, our orders were to destroy our equipment.”
Though that never happened, four men of Ghost Army units died during their service, and dozens were injured; my father had teeth knocked out when he hit a tree while driving the half-track.
After the declassification, my father went from keeping a secret to spreading the story of his unit’s service far and wide. He organized Ghost Army reunions and shared its story with many community groups and schools. Dad died in 2010 at age 86, three years before the release of Beyer’s documentary The Ghost Army, in which he was featured.
The unit’s legacy received formal recognition at a March 21 ceremony at the Capitol when the Congressional Gold Medal was bestowed upon Al Albrecht and the rest of the Ghost Army, with three of its six remaining members – all aged 99 or 100 – in attendance.
“It has always struck me that the Ghost Army’s deception mission demanded a special kind of courage,” Beyer said that day. “To project strength when you have none … to purposely draw enemy fire, to keep it from falling on others. A dangerous business, not for the faint of heart.”
Dad never forgot the objective of the Ghost Army’s ruse and subterfuge: to save lives. The military put a number on that impact; it believes the Ghost Army saved the lives of 15,000 to 30,000 American servicemen.
“The biggest thing that we accomplished was saving many American and German lives,” he told Beyer. “War is meant to shoot people and kill people, and we saved people. And to me, that made me very proud.”
