ARMY GUY:Soldier Bill Blass, seen here in 1976, as a member of the “Ghost Army,” which used inflatable tanks to fool the Nazis.
Inflatable tanks like this one fooled the Wehrmacht. (
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Bill Blass, as a member of the “Ghost Army.” (
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ARMY GUY: Soldier Bill Blass as a member of the “Ghost Army,” which used inflatable tanks (above right) to fool the Nazis. Right: Blass, in 1976, at the height of his fame. (
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Years before he took the fashion world by storm, Bill Blass helped to stitch together a web of deceit that played a secret role in the downfall of Nazi Germany.
Blass, then a 22-year-old kid from Indiana, was one of a group of handpicked GIs who — starting in the summer of 1944 — used a fleet of lightweight rubber tanks and trucks, professionally recorded sound effects and scripted radio transmissions to fool the Germans into thinking they were facing an armada of American military might.
What they were facing, in reality, was “The Ghost Army,” whose story, kept under wraps for over 40 years, will be told next month in a documentary airing on PBS.
“I had read a lot of World War II history . . . but you don’t see this [story] in the big books about the fighting in Normandy or [at] the Battle of the Bulge,” says Rick Beyer, “The Ghost Army’s” writer/producer/director.
“Part of it is that the secret was kept for so long and it kind of got written out . . . and, for whatever reason, it didn’t make a big impact and people don’t know the story,” says Beyer, who spent eight years on the documentary.
“This starts after D-Day and these guys were within a few hundred yards of the front lines, participating in 21 different deceptions over the course of the war,” he says. “There are people who might not have lived without ‘The Ghost Army.’ ”
Blass passed away in 2002, but his family gave Beyer access to the wartime sketch books used by the future design icon during his time with “The Ghost Army” (technically known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops).
“He had already moved to New York and done some low-level fashion design work but he was just another guy in a foxhole,” Beyer says. “The sketchbook is filled with women he saw along the road . . . but it’s all-about the clothes, page after page of this stuff. The people we interviewed who knew Bill said he had this great positive attitude, and you can see that in some of the pictures of him. He’s beaming.”
(“He read Vogue in his foxhole,” one of Blass’s fellow “Ghost Army” colleagues recalls.)
Blass was just one of several “Ghost Army” vets who later found fame in their respective fields, including painter Ellsworth Kelly and photographer Art Kane.
It wasn’t all fun and games, of course, and the 19 men who are interviewed in “The Ghost Army” recall being shot at near the front lines (several “Ghost Army” soldiers were killed in action).
“By and large they’re all proud and humble,” says Beyer. “Most of them say, ‘We weren’t front-line soldiers in the trenches, that wasn’t what we did’ . . . but they’re humbled in the sense they felt they had done something important.
“They’re proud of this sense of, ‘We did this very strange and interesting thing’ . . . and I think they’re very appreciative of getting some recognition — especially since this was secret for such a long time.”