This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

In 1943, the U.S. Army came up with a daring plan to trick Hitler's army.

They created a unit of artists, sound engineers, and prop builders

who fooled the German army into seeing the U.S. Army in places it wasn't.

The year is 1944 and the world is engulfed in the biggest catastrophe in human history, World War II,

you're a soldier and you get your orders, you're headed to the front.

But you're not going to be firing an M1 rifle or driving a Sherman tank.

Your mission is to put on a show.

To put on a show for the enemy. You must stage a complex

multimedia presentation spread out over many miles and do so right in the middle of a war

zone for an attentive and discerning audience that wants nothing more than to kill you.

Thousands of lives, including your own, depend on how good a job you do.

And you're going to be asked to do it again next week.

And that in a nutshell is the mission that was handed to the 23rd headquarters special troops, also known as the Ghost Army.

They were designed to fool the enemy. And to do so, they employed battalions of inflatable

tanks, a vast array of sound effects, radio trickery. They even dressed up as soldiers from other units,

created phony headquarters, all to fool the German army into thinking the Americans were in one

spot when in fact they were someplace else entirely.

The Ghost Army is really the brainchild of two American staff officers who are polar opposites, Colonel Billy Harris and Major Ralph Ingersoll.

Ingersoll is kind of a wild civilian guy.

He was a journalist, sort of flamboyant left wing, very imaginative,

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