‘Ghost Army’ recognized in Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony

After a German army tank parked astride his foxhole one night during World War II, Sergeant Jack Stanley probably wondered about his prior decision to join the monumental conflict. After failing the eye test for both the Marines and Navy, he memorized the chart while he was standing in line for another test — and passed it to get into the U.S. Army.

Stanley once told his daughter, Janice Blanchard of Turniptown, that his heart was beating so loud that night  “he was certain the enemy could hear it!” With his background in language studies — he later majored in foreign languages — Stanley could even understand some of the Germans’ chatter as they cut the motor and bivouacked for the night inside the tank.

Blanchard and her husband, Bill, traveled to Washington, D.C., last month to attend a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in honor of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops and the 3133rd Signal Service Company — also known as the “Ghost Army.” However, the Blanchards had to settle for watching the commemoration by video when Janice tested positive for COVID on the trip to D.C.

“My brother Jim accepted the duplicate gold medal (that all family members received) in my father’s honor,” she said. “I was probably over the COVID, but with that room and 400 people there, many of them older, we just didn’t go to the festivities. It was very mild, I’ve had colds that were worse. But I asked myself, ‘What would my father had done?’ and I knew he wouldn’t go. So I just decided I didn’t want to risk giving it to anyone.”

The Blanchards watched the ceremony on C-SPAN and saw where Speaker of the U.S. House of Representives Mike Johnson and other legislators also attended the ceremony.

A National Public Radio report of the commemoration quoted a leader who strove for years to get the elite unit recognized: “It has been 80 years since the Ghost Army landed in France, 19 years since I came to this story, nine years that I’ve been working on the gold medal,” said Rick Beyer, president of the nonprofit Ghost Army Legacy Project. “This is a day that has been a longtime coming. But it has been well worth the wait, right?

“The room roared with applause.”

Blanchard said her father was more open about his role in the Ghost Army after their activities were declassified in the 1990s. They had been kept secret for half a century in case U.S. troops would need to use the tactics again. She believes her father may also have been involved with the D-Day deception by Allied troops, tricking the Germans as to where they would make the historic landing.

“He would talk about them blowing up (inflating) the tanks — you would see guys holding a tank over their head because it’s a balloon — but they looked real!” she relayed. “They were instrumental in us crossing the Rhine River. Their work was fictitious, faking out the Germans with the radio signals. He would send the signals knowing they would intercept them, mentioning the crossing, but it wasn’t where they were crossing.”

Faking out the enemy

A 2012 article in the Newton Citizen when Stanley was still alive (he died a few months after the interview), described the unit’s activities.

“The Ghost Army (was) an elite 1,000-plus member secret unit of the U.S. Army that used inflatable tanks, sound effects, fake radio broadcasts and good old-fashioned playacting to confound the Nazis,” according to the story. “The show they put on was massive in scope.”

“Some of that stuff we did would have made old Cecil B. DeMille proud,” Stanley said of the Hollywood icon in the article. 

The story continued, “But unlike a Hollywood production, their mission had life-or-death consequences. The Ghost Army staged some 20 battlefield deceptions from June 1944 to March 1945, and was part of the most infamous conflicts in the war, including the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine River. Stanley was a radio operator, transmitting fake radio messages for interception by the Germans. He and his comrades would imitate different divisions in the field and make it seem as though they were on the move or getting ready to move.”

Janice Blanchard said famous fashion designer Bill Blass was in the Ghost Army.

“They would design different patches and even change the (unit) emblems on the jeeps,” she noted. “A jeep might go around (an encampment) 50 times, but every time it made a pass, they’d put different emblems on it so the Germans would think it’s 50 different jeeps. There were a lot of artists in the unit, but my father was on the technical side.”

Killing a sniper

Working behind enemy lines put the “ghosts” in dangerous situations. Once while on patrol, Stanley saved the lives of some of his fellow soldiers, she said.

“Even with my father’s poor vision, one time he actually shot someone,” said Janice Blanchard. “There were very few shots fired by his unit, but he and his platoon were on maneuvers and he caught the glimpse of a sniper in a tree and got him with one shot. He had Coke-bottle glasses, but actually got a sharpshooter’s award.”

From the Newton Citizen again: “Sometimes, Ghost Army members would act as if they were drunk and stumble into local bars, pretending to spill classified information about operations.

“‘We knew the Germans had stool pigeons in these places,’” Stanley said in the article. 

“Many of the members of The Ghost Army were makeup artists, engineers, actors, sound technicians and press agents, some recruited from Tinseltown ... Stanley was picked because of his training in radio operations and because he had a high IQ, a requirement to be in the unit,” according to the Citizen.

Janice Blanchard pointed out that “people were different back then.”

“When he joined at age 17, it was around 1942 or ‘43,” she said. “He was 19 on D-Day plus one when he landed. I cry when I see the beginning of that Tom Hanks movie, Saving Private Ryan, because I think ‘My daddy was there when he was just a kid!’”

In 2013, the Blanchards took Janice’s late mother, Bea, to the World War II Museum in New Orleans after a Ghost Army Legacy Project documentary was released, and she was honored in her husband’s memory. 

“My father used to go camping and trout fishing, and he loved the mountains,” she recalled. 

A full-length movie starring Ben Affleck was planned after the release of the documentary, but the COVID pandemic derailed the effort, Janice Blanchard said. She added that there are discussions for a Ghost Army exhibit to be housed in the International Spy Museum in the nation’s Capitol. Official estimates are that The Ghost Army saved as many as 40,000 lives during the war.

“He absolutely loved being part of that unit,” said Janice Blanchard. “He was a history buff and living in history like that, it was different — like being a spy instead of combat. There was very little danger, but his unit was in some dangerous situations because his radio unit had to pull off some trickery. If they had gotten caught, it would have been very dangerous.”

Bill Blanchard has also researched his father-in-law’s unit.

“He was the radio operator so he would have to learn the ‘hand’ of the radio group they were going to imitate, so he embedded in those units,” he said. “His son Jim said there were some pictures of his dad with a rifle walking some prisoners back (to the lines). So he would be embedded and be put to work — not to go up to the front and shoot somebody. They weren’t soldiers of that ilk, but they did what they could to help.”

Janice Blanchard said she also worked “for years” on helping get the Ghost Army nationally recognized after declassification of their activities and effectiveness. 

For more information about the secretive Army unit, visit GhostArmy.org or GhostArmy.com.