This is 99% invisible. I am Roman Mars.

In the 1940s, there were, as there are today,

a lot of great art and design schools in New York City, Pratt Cooper Union, Parsons.

And there were then, as there are today, a lot of young talented artists and designers at those

schools who would go on to have great careers. But in the 1940s there

was something else that some of those artists and designers had to do first. That's

our own Katie Mingle. There was a war going on, World War II, and the Army needed

artists because, well, they had kind of a crazy idea.

And it was a crazy idea that came out of one of the most

conservative organizations you can imagine the United States Army. That's Rick

Byer, more about Rick in a minute. And it had to go up the line to high-ranking

generals up as high as Eisenhower himself to get approval. The crazy idea

was this. The United States Army would design a deception unit, a unit that would appear to the enemy to be a large armored division.

Thousands of soldiers, tanks, trucks, guns, only this unit would actually be equipped with fake tanks, fake trucks, fake guns,

and manned by just a handful of soldiers.

And it really is something unusual.

Rick Beyer has a forthcoming book about all of this and also made a film about it called The Ghost Army.

People say to me, well, did the Germans have something like this?

Did the Japanese have something like this?

Did the Japanese have something like this?

And what I've said is the Germans and Japanese

did deceptions, but I haven't found anybody ever

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