The Ghost Army - How Inflatable Tanks Helped Win World War II

Written By Southpoint Collective

By now, most of you listening to this episode will know a fair amount about the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy on the 6th of June, 1944.

What some of you may not yet know about however, is the incredible story of the contribution made by some men and women, who up until this point in their lives had spent their working days creating films and television shows.

The war effort was desperate for any help they could get, and so they turned to these creative artists and enlisted their skills to help give the troops any advantage they could in the midst of the most crucial operation of the entire conflict.

It was dubbed Operation Fortitude, and it was a work of genius.

Now the story actually starts 4 years earlier, in the autumn of 1940, when Colonel John Turner began constructing entirely fake airfields, full of decoy fighter planes in order to confuse the German luftwaffe into incorrectly inflating Britains air defence capabilities. You see, when flying 20 000ft above the land on reconnaissance missions, the sight of hundreds of neat rows of airplanes all lined up and ready for battle, would surely have struck terror into the hearts of the German air crews. But from all the way up there, it was impossible for them to tell that they were nothing more than some painted cardboard and a few pieces of strategically placed metal.

It was not all plain sailing for Colonel Turner though, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, as he ran into some opposition from the Head of RAF Fighter Command, Air Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding. He didn’t see the value in the exercise and argued vehemently that any of these resources should not be diverted from the real fighter squadrons and airbases stating that he wanted “subtance not shadows”.

But the Air Ministry had some calmer heads and told Turner to carry on. Initially the engineers building these dummy planes ironically did too good of a job. They added all the intricacies you would expect to find on a real fighter plane, but this also meant that they spent way longer than necessary on the construction of each one. Not only this, but it exponentially increased the cost as well.

Turner didnt need them to look real from 20ft away, they only needed to look real from 20 000ft away, and because of this, all he really needed was some vaguely plane shaped blobs.

He cancelled the order with the dummy plane manufacturers and enlisted the help of a man named Norman Loudon.

Norman, up until the war broke out, had been a very successful Scottish businessman who had, in the early 1930’s, bought a rather large 70 acre estate West of London. Here, he had opened a film studio on the grounds of his Shepperton mansion. It consisted of two enormous sound stages, full to the brim with the latest in audio technology and was kitted out with dressing rooms, wardrobe departments, fabrication workshops and anything else you can imagine that would go into the process of filmmaking. 

By 1939 it had doubled in size and had already attracted some of the finest filmmakers, designers, set dressers and carpenters in the business. Unfortunately for him, war was bad for business. Finances that once would have gone towards the arts, were now all being diverted into the war effort, and soon almost all of the scheduled movie productions ground to a screeching halt.

But Loudon and his team would not be out of work for very long. After a chance encounter between Turner and Loudon, it dawned on the military man that he had the perfect ensemble of talent, just waiting to be used. In fact, not only were they skilled craftsmen, their entirely specialty was making fake props appear to be real when shown to the viewer. He met with Loudon and soon, the Shepperton estate crew had won the bid to create 50 fake Wellington airplanes and 100 fake Blenheims. It was an added bonus that their quote was one third of that charged by the original dummy aircraft manufacturers. It was a win-win situation, the RAF were delighted, Turner got the decoys he was after, and Loudon and his crew had found a way to see themselves through the war.

Around this same time, in an entirely different theatre of war, a man named Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke was busy creating another unit, simply known as A-Force, whose sole purpose was to mislead the Italian and German forces fighting across Egypt and Libya. He initially struggled to make his early plans stick, but it soon dawned on him that his unit’s purpose shouldn’t merely be to make the enemy think something was happening, but instead convince them to such a degree that they began to act upon those thoughts. He wanted the enemy to be so totally caught up in the deception that they began leaving troops in places where no attack was coming, or alternatively moving troops away from areas the Allies did plan on attacking. This realisation changed his entire outlook on how he went about devising his plans.

He began having an entire brigade of men practicing the same training methods that paratroopers underwent, leaping from tall scaffolds onto soft sand, fully kitted out with backpacks and parachutes. And he made sure to run these drills in place he already knew were under Italian surveillance. These drills sent the Italians into a panic, convinced that this brigade was training for a mission to drop behind enemy lines. They moved entire battalions around to cover their backs in preparation for what they believed was imminent attack. Little did they know, no airborne troops existed in the North African conflict.

Clarke invented entire divisions and army corps to bolster the ranks of the Eighth Division, making it appear to the enemy that their forces were much larger than they really were, and in 1942 at the battle of El Alamein they managed to convince the enemy that the Allies were making a massive push up from the Southern edge of the conflict. Regular army trucks had been covered in tarpaulin and decked out to look, from afar, like a long line of tanks were slowly making their way to the battlefield. They had special tyres fitted to mimic the tracks that tanks would leave in the sand, and even ran an entirely fake pipeline to a made up fuel depot in the South, to really sell the ruse that there were a horde of machines that would soon emanate from there. In fact, it was nothing more than a long series of old oil drums that had been crudely welded together.

The Germans, spotting this hive of activity in the South, sent two entire armoured divisions to defend that front against what was sure to be an Allied onslaught.

Imagine their surprise then, when Montgomery and his forces suddenly appeared on the Northern edge of the battlefront, mowing their way through the German lines, and leaving them scrambling to reassemble a coherent defence.

But now we found ourselves back in 1944, and General Montgomery, who had found such success in North Africa using their ingenious deception tactics, had been put in charge of the 21st Army Group, effectively making him the commander of all the land forces from D-Day and beyond.

Germany had stationed their 15th army, a large portion of their military presence in the area, in the French region of Calais. The Allies feared that they might split their forces, or worse move the entire army, to the real proposed landing grounds at Normandy.

So what was the best way to ensure this didn’t happen? Well of course, the Allies would need to convince them that Calais was in fact the proposed spot for the Allied invasion of Europe.

But how could Montgomery ever hope to convince the Germans that a non-existent army of 300 000 soldiers was about to take their shot at Calais?

Operation Fortitude, as eluded to in the intro was a crucial campaign of deception that very well might have tipped the eventual success of the Normandy landings in the Allies favour.

This is where the First US Army group came in. A fearsome fighting force known by their acronym of FUSAG, a group so revered that they struck terror into the hearts of the enemy, the only catch was, they didn’t really exist at all.

Our filmmaker friends from the Shepperton studios had been hard at work building an array of dummy vehicles, vessels and aircraft to flesh out this entirely phoney army. Hundreds of dummy tanks were built, nothing more than some rubber and canvas stretched around a metal frame, and when each one was eventually maneuvered into position, the canvas and rubber skin could be inflated to look just like a real tank in under 30 minutes. Huge vessels designed to look just like the real landing crafts, were simply canvas stretched across wooden frames and set afloat on top of a mesh of empty oil drums.

With a crew of 30 carpenters and builders, each one of these large vessels could be constructed in as little as six or seven hours. Because of this great speed, they were able to launch 250 of them along the south-east coast bordering Dover. The sheer quantity of them looked mightily impressive to any onlookers, except when on the occasion that a strong wind would blow along the coast and, despite each of the decoy vessels being moored with a heavy anchor, the wind would simply flip a few of them over like a childs inflatable toy in a pool. This would be a dead giveway if anyone was to spot this, and so a dedicated regiment from the Worcestershire Companies was positioned nearby, ready to rush into the sea and flip them back over again at a moment’s notice.

Again, just as they had done in North Africa, an entirely fake fuel depot was constructed just a little way down the coast, to really sell the narrative that these “very real vessels” would need to have somewhere to fuel up before they crossed the channel. This depot was nothing more than some wooden boards attached to scaffolding and some old sewer pipes pieced together that had been blown up during the blitz. From the ground, it looked like some giant toddlers had messily arranged their toy blocks in a rather haphazard configuration, but crucially, to the only people it mattered, it looked very real from 20 000 feet in the air.

But visual deception only gets you so far. They needed to convince the Germans by any and every means possible.

Germany had for many years been infiltrating spies into Britain, but many of them had subsequently been discovered, and the price for living to see another day, was to turn them into double agents, sending designed misinformation back to their German handlers. And while this was a very effective avenue to exploit, the deception did not end there.

Scientists and electrical engineers were brought in to develop a fake US Army Signals unit that would broadcast supposedly cryptic radio messages up and down the command chain, explaining in detail the training exercises and mock beach landings they were undergoing in advance of an invasion.

Of course, they just happened to not do a very good job of keeping these communications private and so German radio operators were celebrating, thinking they had just struck gold by intercepting what appeared to be crucial information that they could use to their advantage.

The Sonic Warfare team, as they would come to be nicknamed, made sure to send such a large amount of radio traffic that it appeared it could only be generated by an enormous military force assembling themselves in the South East of England. By the end of May, just a week before D-Day, the German intelligence officers had calculated that no fewer than 79 Allied divisions were assembled there and ready to strike. The Germans would have to move some pieces around to make sure they were ready when the time came.

Now, as we know, every circus needs a ringleader, someone loud, vibrant and recognisable to usher in the show. And this show was no different. General George S Patton was a well known and instantly recognisable figure across both armies and so when he turned up in the South East of England, making loud, inspirational speeches and inspecting imaginary infantry units and armoured divisions, well this was simply the icing on a very deceptive cake.

Everywhere he went, hordes of photographers followed, snapping hundreds, if not thousands of photographs. And soon, these very photographs just happened to be leaked to German High Command. They knew he was one of the best generals the Allies had and this left them in no doubt that he was surely about to spearhead the forces in their effort to invade Europe.

Thousands of German troops were relocated to Calais in preparation, tanks were set up along the ridgeline and sea mines were strategically placed along the shore.

It was the 6th of June, 1944. Allied soldiers crammed themselves onto crowded landing crafts, and soon the engines of these vessels roared to life. Men silently prayed to their Gods for protection, favour and swift victory, but many of these men would lose their lives in what would turn out to be the day that changed the entire course of the war.

The vessels cut through the channel waters and in what seemed both like an eternity of waiting, yet also just mere minutes since they had departed, the men on board these vessels suddenly felt the thud of sand underneath the hull. The air erupted in noise as they heard the yells of their commanders urging them forward to engage the enemy waiting for them above the beaches. Gunfire rang out from every direction, the screams of men as they were struck by red hot metal, and the deafening explosion of artillery shells and grenades as they cast the beach in a smoky haze.

D-Day had finally arrived. Yet the beaches of Calais, where 150 000 German troops now waited,  was eerily quiet. They were on high alert, sure that an attack was imminent and yet still, nothing happened. All of a sudden the radio operators pack crackled into life, and frantic German voices could be heard, pleading for backup as their positions were being overrun.

All too late it dawned on the assembled commanders that they had been duped. They urgently radioed German High Command, asking for orders to go and reinforce the Western positions in Normandy more than 200 miles away. But the meticulous planning, the staged invasion force and the tidal wave of fake radio communications had sold the ruse so comprehensively, that they were ordered not to leave, but instead to wait for a second wave  of attacks that the military strategists were utterly convinced were still coming.

And while reinforcements from other areas did attend to the battle in Normandy, making the Allies struggle for a full six weeks to finally break out from their entrenched positions, having those extra 150 000 German soldiers there, might have been enough to repel the Allied invasion entirely.

In war however, what if’s serve no purpose, and as it happened, Operation Fortitude was a resounding success.

In the days and weeks that followed D-Day, the Ghost Army would go on to do some of it’s greatest work. By this point in the war, this strategic deception unit had grown to include over 1000 artists, designers and sound engineers.

In the midst of the D-Day landings however, a small 17 man platoon had come ashore at Omaha Beach and were put to work immediately. The allied forces were coming under heavy fire from German artillery and so after some planning and resource gathering, this small group of artists and carpenters set about creating their own artillery placements away from the Allied positions. From the german lines, peering through binoculars, the Nazi forces watched as large silhouettes, that looked remarkably like artillery cannons, were wheeled into place in a position they had been sure, up until now,  was unoccupied by Allied forces. More and more of these cannons began showing up, just far enough in the distance for them to not see the strange notches on the cannon barrels, almost as if some branches had been growing out of them, but had just been rather hastily chopped off.

Not taking any chances, and in an effort to neutralise this threat before it began raining mortar shells down on them, the Nazi forces turned their own artillery cannons away from the Allied forces they had been firing upon, and aimed them towards the rows of enemy cannons facing directly towards them.

This was the first of many clever plots to throw the Germans off kilter. The first large scale deception came during the siege of of the port town of Brest,  in the Summer of 1944. The Ghost Army deployed 50 of its dummy tanks just a few hundred yards away from the front lines, and with them they brought trucks equipped with enormous loud speakers. During the day the Germans could see the large tank force waiting just out of reach, and at night, when things were hard to see, the trucks with loudspeakers blared out the sounds of tanks being rolled  into position, and the fake roars of engines as imaginary convoy after convoy of troop trucks added huge numbers to the Allied forces. Sure that this was General Patton’s 3rd army getting into position for an all out offensive, the German forces dug in, bringing in reinforcements of their own. Little did they know that just across the lines sat a small force of Allied soldiers hoping against hope that the Germans didn’t discover their plot. They didn’t, and because of this, it actually allowed the real 3rd army to sneak past their position undetected race eastward across France almost unchecked.

Later that same year, in September 1944, the Ghost Army would once again come to the aid of General Patton during his prolonged attack on the fortified city of Metz. General Patton’s forces had taken significant losses and were on the brink of having their line collapse at even the slightest pressure from the enemy forces. A reinforcement division had been sent for and was on it’s way there, but they would not arrive for another week. Again, they set up their inflatable tanks and had a few of their actors pretend to be Sergeants, marching up and down the line yelling out orders to non-existent units. The loudspeaker trucks once again played the sounds of tanks and military convoys approaching the position, doing just enough to convince the besieged nazi forces to stay inside the town of Metz and not push their unrealised advantage against a flailing army outside their gates.

But it was in March 1945 that the Ghost Army pulled off arguably their greatest and most elaborate hoax.

Operation Viersen was named after a German city in the lower Rhine Valley, north of Cologne. Their mission here was simple. 

The Allies needed to cross the Rhine river. The Germans knew they had to cross the Rhine river too, and so had stretched their defensive forces across all of the most obvious places they suspected might be used.

So it was not a matter of making them think they weren’t going to cross, but rather, just as they had done on D-Day, convince the Germans that they were in fact going to invade via a route that was in fact rather far away from the true crossing point.

In order to do this, they needed to make the Germans think that both the 39th and 70th infantry divisions were assembling in a particular area ahead of an attempt to cross.

Late in February of that year, after an audacious blitz by the First Army, they were able to cross the Rhine at Remagen, but the following 9th army was not so fortunate and were held back right on the river line.

Now, the Ghost Army needed to get to work. It took the effort of all 1000 men in this unit, and every resources at their disposal, to truly make this plan come to life. They commandeered some military trucks and set about creating the impression that rather than just 1000 of them, that there were in fact 40 000 men, all gathering at a crossing point 10 miles away from the real one. They used these military trucks to create fake convoys rolling by on their side of the river until they were out of sight, before carefully turning the trucks around, navigating them through some woodland and having the very same trucks roll past again, looking like even more reinforcements were arriving.

They also rolled out the tried and tested inflatable machinery and vehicles which had served them so well in the past, each time they created new ones, they would simply be added to the stock they already had. This meant that by the time they arrived on the banks of the Rhine, they could roll out over 600 dummy tanks and artillery cannons to simulate an enormous force gathering in that area. Smokescreens were continuously set off to obscure the Germans vision just enough to not be able to see that all of these forces were in fact fake. 

The Sonic Warfare crews worked around the clock, playing sounds of trucks rolling in, while others in a different part of the encampment played sounds of heavy machinery building what the Germans could only assume was some bridging mechanism to lay across the river. 

Flash canisters were set off frequently near the fake artillery cannons to give the impression that they were firing real shells, prompting the Nazi’s to fire their own shells back at them. But each time a tank was seemingly struck, it strangely seemed to be replaced just hours later with another one. Little did they know that a few repairs had been undertaken to replace blown up, torn or burnt pieces of the rubber and canvas before putting it right back into position.

Almost all of the available German forces began moving to counter this imminent threat and when the time came for the real 40 000 troops to cross the river 10 miles away, all they met with was some flimsy, disorganised resistance, leading to an astonishingly swift victory and significantly few casualties.

In total, the Ghost Army carried out more than 20 deception operations, and their efforts likely saved thousands of lives by confusing and redirecting enemy forces. By making the Germans believe so deeplu, they allowed the real Allied forces to strike where they were least expected.

For decades after the war, the Ghost Army’s existence remained classified. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the full details of their operations became public. Their work is now recognized as one of the most successful deceptions in military history.

Many of its members went on to have fascinating careers. Some became famous artists and fashion designers, including Bill Blass, who later became a world-renowned fashion icon. Others continued their work in deception - just, you know, in advertising instead of war. Even today, modern militaries use deception tactics inspired by the Ghost Army’s work.

In 2022, the Ghost Army was finally awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for its contributions to the war effort—a recognition that was long overdue.

Their legacy proves that sometimes, the best way to win a war isn’t with bullets or bombs—but with creativity, a little theatrical flair, and a whole lot of nerve. After all, who would have thought that the most dangerous weapon of World War II… was a rubber tank?

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