Norris Gordon Watkins, 89, member of Ghost Army

[Bob Of Burleson]

Star-Telegram

Norris G. Watkins, 89, was surrounded by his loving family when he passed to his heavenly home on Father's Day, Sunday, June 15, 2014, after being unable to recover from an emergency surgical procedure.

Funeral: 1 p.m. Wednesday at Galbreaith-Pickard Funeral Chapel. Interment: Ballew Springs Cemetery. Visitation 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Galbreaith Pickard. Norris was born Oct. 23, 1924, in the Parker County community of Garner to Mattie and Paul Watkins. He lived in Weatherford and the Garner area the majority of his life.

Norris served in the Army in World War II as a member of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops (known as the "Ghost Army"), specializing in impersonating other troops.

The 23rd's 82 officers and 1,023 enlisted men pretended, at one time or another, to be the 5th Armored Division, the 4th Infantry Division, the 6th Armored Division, the 90th Infantry Division and many other Army outfits in order to fool the enemy and, by doing so, enabled the troops that the 23rd was impersonating to sneak into new positions and be able to launch a surprise attack or in some other way catch the other side off-guard.

The Ghost Army stayed classified by the United States government for 50 years.

See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dfw/ob ... 6OWU7.dpuf

[Bob Of Burleson]

Ghost Army: The Inflatable Tanks That Fooled Hitler

The Allies saved thousands of lives by embracing the artistry of war.

Megan Garber
The Atlantic

Bill Blass was one of them. So was Ellsworth Kelly. And Arthur Singer. And Art Kane. Before these men embarked on the artistic careers they would become known for, they served together during World War II. But they were a particular kind of soldier, serving in a particular kind of unit: Blass and his brothers in arms were recruited from art schools and ad agencies. They were sought for their acting skills. They were selected for their creativity. They were soldiers whose most effective weapon was artistry.

Blass and his cohorts were members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an elite force whose specialty was "tactical deception." They're now better known, though, as the "Ghost Army" -- a troop of soldiers that doubled, in Europe's theater, as a troupe of actors. (The unit was the brain child, one report has it, of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) The 23rd were, essentially, the Trojan Horse builders of World War II.

Except that their wooden horses took the form of inflatable tanks. And rubber airplanes. And elaborate costumes. And radio codes. And speakers that blared pre-recorded soundtracks into the forests of France.

These props -- "advanced technology" as advanced technology -- were amazingly effective, doing what all good theater props will: setting a believable scene. The Ghost Army, some 1,100 men in all, ended up staging more than twenty battlefield deceptions between 1944 and 1945, starting in Normandy two weeks after D-Day and ending in the Rhine River Valley. Many of those performances -- "illusions," the men appropriately preferred to call them -- took place within a few hundred yards of the front lines.

And they relied on what the Ghost Army termed, awesomely, "atmosphere" -- creating the overall impression of an omnipresent military force. Soldiers in the Ghost Army were Potemkin villages, personified. They pretended to be members of fellow units (units that were actually deployed elsewhere) by sewing divisional patches onto their uniforms and painting other units' insignias onto their vehicles.

The Army would dispatch a few of its members to drive canvas-covered trucks -- sometimes as few as two of those trucks -- in looping convoys that would create the impression (sorry, the "illusion") of an entire infantry unit being transported.

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[Gigi]

That is really interesting. We had some very sneaky people on our side, thank goodness!