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23rd Headquarters Special TroopsSecret Soldiers Exerpt After Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., USNR, complete a tour of England and its special forces installations, the Hollywood star convinced the Navy brass to train an elite unit that eventually evolved in to the only Army force of its kind-a top-secret band of unknown heroes. The men of the 23d Headquarters Special Troops were recruited to win the Battle of Europe. Comprising 82 officers and 1,023 enlisted men, they were unlike any outfit in the U.S. Army before or since. They were artists, actors, engineers,special-effects experts, architects, advertising layout men, electronic wizards, writers, and designers. These elite soldiers counted among their number designer Bill Blass and painter Ellsworth Kelley, and were inspired by Hilton Howell Railey, the "P.T. Barnum of Deception." Four units comprised the Special Troops: a sonic deception company, a special radio company, a company of combat engineers, and a battalion of camoufleurs. They answered directly to Gen. Omar Bradley, the American ground commander in Europe, through the Special Plans Branch attached to his 12th Army Group headquarters. Long before the D-day invasion, Bradley had taken a hand in designing this special unit. They trained Stateside in the southern swamps, the western desert, the Jersey Shore, and the north woods, then served under fire with four armies in five European countries during five major campaigns from D-Day until the end of the war. Their overall mission was deception: optical illusion, sleight of hand, radio misinformation, bluff, sonic feints, disappearing acts-all calculated to fool the enemy into doing or not doing exactly what the Americans wanted. Their mission on the Rhine, for example, was simple: to create a false "truth" for the enemy, an old-fashioned hoax to convince German intelligence that the U.S. Ninth Army would not attack at Wesel but more than thirty miles south, near Düsseldorf. And not on March 23-in fact, not before mid-April at the earliest. They "sold" the idea using everything frominflatable rubber tanks and howitzers to elaborate sound effects, fake radio transmissions, special effects artillery fire, and other elements of Hollywood stagecraft. The Germans bought it. Believing the false messages they didn't fortify the real bridgeheads. Instead, the Germans diverted precious reserves to a place far from the planned battle, where they would be as harmless as if they had already been captured. They fought in more campaigns, from D-Day to the Rhine River, with more Allied armies, than any other unit in the European Theater of Operations - yet not even their fellow American soldiers were aware of their presence. The Special Troops' mission was twofold: to deceive the German army into believing that the Allies possessed more troops and matérial than they actually did, and even more heroically, to draw enemy fire on their position to allow other units to advance free of lethal resistance. Through the art of camouflage, sonic deception, and illusion, this extraordinary troop of brave, ingenious men saved countless American lives-while sometimes losing their own. They were masters of the craft of illusion and deception, but the 23rd's greatest disappearing act was to virtually vanish from history as one of the unsung heroic units of WWII. == endit ==
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