Research Leads to Recognition for an Army of Ghosts

During World War II, a secret unit of American artists, designers, and engineers known as the Ghost Army saved thousands of lives and contributed to the Allied victory over the far-right Axis regimes. Though the existence of the unit and the roles they played were classified until 1996, Roy Eichhorn ’75, whose stepfather served in the unit, began his research into the Ghost Army while an anthropology student at Beloit College. He continued throughout graduate school and his career, his research becoming a lifelong personal capstone project.

---

This story starts with my stepfather, George Martin, whom I refer to as “my Dad,” an artist, photographer, and U.S. Army camouflage engineer. He was born in the Bronx to immigrants from Bohemia— his mother was Czech and his father was Hungarian. He studied at McLane Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York, and had taken a camouflage course at NYU.

George Martin reads letters from home.
Credit: Courtesy of Roy Eichhorn ’75He was working as a commercial artist in New York, producing paintings, record jackets, sheet music covers, and children’s book illustrations when the U.S. entered the war in 1941. He enlisted in the Army in 1942, and was assigned to the 603rd Engineer Battalion (Camouflage-Special). His official position was as a camoufleur (a term adopted from the French Army in World War I), and starting shortly before D-Day, he also served as the official photographer of the unit.

I was interested in military history at a young age, and I knew my Dad had been in the war as a member of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, but I would not find out for decades that he had been in a top-secret deception unit known as the Ghost Army, whose members were sworn to secrecy for fifty years. Though he would talk about “when we were in Normandy,” it wasn’t until I got declassified documents years later that I discovered he had landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day plus six, and did deception work often near enemy lines. The Ghost Army conducted 22 large-scale operations, from Normandy through the crossing of the Rhine into Germany, and in the Po Valley in Italy.

The members of the Ghost Army kept their oath. After the war, some of the camofleurs went on to become successful artists and designers, including fashion designer Bill Blass, painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, photographer Art Kane, Cleo Hovel who designed the Hamm’s Beer bear and Starkist Charlie the Tuna ad campaigns, Jack Masey, who designed the Ellis Island museum and the D-Day museum (now the National World War II Museum), and the list goes on. The average age of these men when they went to war was 19.

After the war, my Dad returned to New York City and his art, and from time to time ran into friends from the Army, including Bill Blass, on the street in Manhattan. He told me they would simply make some sign of recognition, smile, and head on their way — still keeping the secret of their wartime work. When Blass died, my Dad contacted The New York Times about Blass’s obituary. Blass, like my Dad, had received five campaign ribbons and was quite proud of his service, yet his obituary made no mention of his experiences in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, nor the crossing of the Rhine. My Dad made several trips back to where he had been in Europe during the war, but he rarely talked about it and he told me absolutely nothing about the deception work.

The Ghost Army’s final mission, about which the history books were mostly silent, involved their movement into Germany near the end of the war. There they discovered concentration camps where the Nazis had imprisoned and killed millions of people. Over 100,000 survivors were put under the care of the Ghost Army, a unit of 1,100 soldiers. He told me about his unit’s assignment to create displaced persons (DPs) camps for concentration and labor camp survivors and other DPs. He told me about the challenges caring for the DPs. The unit had received no training, no manual, no additional supplies. They were unprepared to treat the medical, physical, and psychological trauma of these concentration camp survivors. The Army left them to figure it out, and they did. I was surprised to hear stories about how his unit had to deal with escaped Russian and Yugoslavian camp survivors who were preying on other survivors and local German civilians. This work was outside their mission and therefore not classified. Those were the stories that started me researching, but I would start and stop because I didn’t have a structure. That’s where the professors at Beloit College came in.

As a student, I received research guidance from Professor Tom McBride and Professor Robert H. Irrman. They taught me how to structure research, how to get information, the importance of putting one’s research problem into the broader context, etc. The immediate postwar period in Germany is still not that well covered and in 1971 there was very little, so I did a lot of reading and asked a lot of questions. My interactions with those professors confirmed that Beloit was a place where I could come to understand the context of my Dad’s wartime experiences.

To understand more about what was happening at the war’s end, particularly with the Soviets, I took two courses on Russian history from Professor G. Douglas Nicoll, which opened a new world for me, and introduced the concept of “strategic culture,” which I would see again in graduate school. This basis for understanding Russian culture and history would serve me well throughout my career, teaching and doing research and consulting within the Department of Defense.

Beloit was where I learned how to learn. I learned about the research process in history and anthropology courses. Professor Dan Shea modeled the anthropological approach, and taught me a lot about statistics. Ed Way ’68, former director of the Logan Museum of Anthropology, improved my attention to detail by showing me how to find subtle clues in bones. Fred Lange ’67, and his father, Chuck, my grad school advisor, were supportive of my research and taught me how to structure questions and examine my thinking. These professors taught me how to think critically, a skill I continue to use in my work to this day.

When I was a student at the Army Command and General Staff College, there was nothing available about the Ghost Army. I didn’t find out about it until after 1987 when I graduated. Later, my positions on the faculty of the Army Management Engineering College and the Army Management Staff College allowed me access to a progressively wider circle of people who knew Army history. I used my anthropology training to fearlessly interview people at all levels. The Ghost Army was a secret so well kept that many colonels and generals dismissed the idea that it had ever existed. Even after the Army declassified the official history of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops in 1996, things remained quiet. But I found occasional clues that told me I was on the right track, writing and research for two books simultaneously: Gerard’s Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War IIs Heroic Army of Deception and Gawne’s Ghosts of the ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in the European Theater, which detailed the Ghost Army’s elaborate deception work creating dummy tanks, cannons, and trucks, fake radio signals, sonic deception, and special effects to make entire Allied army divisions seem to appear out of thin air to baffle the enemy forces.

My research eventually brought me into contact with Rick Beyer, the documentary film producer and author who would produce the PBS documentary, Ghost Army of WWII, and be my partner in the Congressional Gold Medal process. I had worked in the federal executive branch for decades with teams of people who accomplished amazing things. This would be bipartisan, so how hard could it be, I thought.

The Congressional Gold Medal is the oldest and highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress. The process of achieving this recognition for the members of the Ghost Army provided a new perspective on the legislative process from start to finish. I learned enough about this process from the staffs of Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Representative Anne Kuster (D-New Hampshire), who sponsored the bill, for my skills from Beloit to kick in. Without the patience and guidance of those staff members, we wouldn’t have been successful. I, and other volunteers of the Ghost Army Legacy Project, worked for over eight years to get the legislation passed, which required a super-majority in both houses of Congress. President Biden signed the bill, Public Law 117-85, in 2023. But, we weren’t done yet.

Each Gold Medal is unique, with designs on the obverse and reverse. I was one of three people appointed by Congress to liaise with the U.S. Mint to work on the medal’s design. I testified before the Citizen’s Coinage Committee and the National Fine Arts Council, where my education in history and symbology, going back to Beloit’s anthropology program again, came into play. Some of the design features we wanted were a tough sell. We wanted representation of the various methods of deception the soldiers used, and we wanted to include symbols the soldiers created to represent themselves. Despite opposition, we ensured that the Ghost and Devil icons were included on the Congressional Gold Medal.

When I first began my research into the Ghost Army, I simply wanted to learn more about my Dad’s experiences. Over time, I interviewed dozens of other veterans and met their families, and I could not promise them anything except that I would do my best to finally get the story told. I am still working to keep that promise. I still write for the Army, researching earlier techniques for deception in combat and how they might apply in today’s world. I am researching the displaced persons work the Ghost Army soldiers did. I continue to explore identity and language, specifically of Jewish soldiers, some of whom escaped the Holocaust and returned with the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis. Today, only seven Ghost Army veterans are still with us, and as each passes, it is like losing a dear friend. There is more to tell about what these soldiers did, and so I and my colleagues continue working to tell their remarkable story.