Secret Soldiers
by Philip Gerard
You know, we don't respond to World War II veterans as we once did. When I was a kid, and when Philip Gerard was a decade or so later, we revered them as children revere their uncles, because they were. A WWII veteran was a guy who could pull quarters from your ear, who wrote and made photographs, who prospered from a car dealership or an office at a bank. He may have been missing a leg or terribly hurt in another way, or he may have been a Freemason. He belonged to you, and incidentally he had traveled in a troopship or manned an Arctic airfield or trained to sweep Japan for land mines. His stories, if he told any, weren't history but things the family talked about. Those veterans belonged to the nation, could be, but nobody said so: They belonged to the Teagues, the Shepherds, the Lackeys.
Now the kids have grown up, the family line is two or three generations longer, the veterans much thinner on the ground. The nation has claimed the men and their story, perhaps rightfully. Those who fought the war have a place in history but, I think, no longer the same place in their families. And the nation conceives itself as requiring patriots and heroes, so the old men become the focus of commemorations.
There's nothing new about this. The last survivor of Waterloo got his share of ink, and probably the Greeks dipped their flags when the last Salamis crewman died. We've let 4000 years' worth of veterans come home to their families (or not) only to lionize them decades later. Secret Soldiers is part of a long tradition, then.
Beginning in the late 90s, Gerard explored what the 23d Headquarters Special Troops did to help win the war in Europe. He interviewed the survivors (and their survivors), sought out published and other accounts, badgered the Defense Department for records and reports, and wrote a compelling and rather funny book about the units that made up the 23d. It's well worth reading.
Baseball legend Wee Willie Keeler gave the formula for his success as a batter: "I hit 'em where they ain't." The use of deception in war is just the opposite: Get 'em to hit you where you ain't. If you can make your enemy believe your army is there when it isn't, or it isn't when it is, he may waste resources attacking empty space or fail to notice your threat. You can camouflage your artillery so that the enemy's observers don't spot it; you can have 50 men build 400 fires so that his sentries think you are still present in force even though you've moved somewhere else; you can create traffic on your radio network that suggests your army is on the move when it's really standing ready to defend itself. You may win a battle this way (as George Washington did at Princeton), but it's more likely that you will gain some lesser advantage such as time. Deception on the battlefield was the purpose of the 23d, created in 1943 when a radio communications unit, a camouflage unit and a "sonic" outfit were put under one command.
What these guys did was partly what earlier generations had learned, particularly about camouflage. But artfully placed nets to hide people and equipment were just the beginning; by D-Day the army could field inflatable tanks and other vehicles, set off gunpowder flashes to simulate phony batteries of guns, and use authentic rolling stock to make ruts suggesting that hundreds of trucks had passed through. Radiomen impersonated operators belonging to other formations to give listeners wrong ideas about who was where. Audio engineers created wire recordings that could make observers hear forces digging in or retreating. And the results? Lives saved, on both sides, for example when efficient German troops were pinned on the east bank of the Rhine in front of sound trucks "playing" the preparations for a crossing. (Nobody shot at the Germans the next day when the real crossing began, 10 miles away, and no Germans shot at the American divisions in their boats.)
As a secret organization with a secret mission, the 23d vanished at war's end. Army museums don't display the huge loudspeakers or the blow-up artillery, camps where the units trained don't have their numbers on monuments, even wartime newspaper files don't mention the men or their achievements. That's good, of course—heightened alertness might have worked against deception, at least some of the time—but it means too that these "uncles" never got the recognition they deserved for good work. Gerard does what one man can to set the balance right. Secret Soldiers is worth the reading.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Secret Soldiers