Tyrone man tells story of serving in deceptive unit in World War II.
The oil painting of a farm scene Roger Templeton Sr. completed in 1942 and his service in World War II may seem unrelated, but the artwork and his Army years are inextricably linked. It was his imagination that took him to both places.
Eighty-seven-year-old Templeton, a resident at Colonial Courtyard in Tyrone, served in the “ghost army” of World War II — a unit of 1,100 men officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops of the 603rd Camouflage Department. The ghost army was created not to fight, but rather to deceive the Germans. Sometimes, the group would pretend to be another army; others, it would create the illusion of several thousand troops setting up camp.
“Primarily, the ghost army was [making the Germans] think they were a bigger force,” said author Jack Kneece, who wrote The Ghost Army of World War II (Pelican Publishing Co., 2001). “Sometimes they pretended to be Patton’s third army, which was huge.”
The United States government began to form the ghost army in 1941, seeking actors, artists, and designers along with other creative, imaginative types with IQs higher than 119, Kneece said — a group of people who could pull off the deception. “When they decided to do this, they had these guys comb the entire Army for people and found out they didn’t have enough really good artists. So they went to the civilians, asking art school professors who their really good students were. They’d end up with a guy who was maybe 20 and say, ‘Hey, kid, you’re in the army.'”
Templeton, who was 22 and an art student at the National Academy of Design in New York City at the time, was about to be drafted when he learned of the ghost army. He wrote to the unit’s leaders and was accepted.
“One of the requirements to get in the ghost army was that you had to have a high IQ, so I don’t know how I got in,” Templeton said with a laugh. “I only had a grammar school education.”
The army used inflatable tanks, pyrotechnics, camouflage, and sound effects to fool the Germans. “We had to learn all about the troops we were imitating,” Templeton said. “We took on the complete identity of the soldiers, right down to the arm patches, the vehicles.” When he wasn’t imitating other soldiers, Templeton was sketching. He kept a tablet with him and still has the drawings he did — of his then-fiancée, Natalie, his foxhole, and of the European countryside.
The ghost army deceived the Germans in 21 separate operations, Kneece said, “using asymmetric trick warfare that was done with such precision it probably saved 50,000 or 60,000 lives.”
In one operation, the Germans were trying to determine where the U.S. would cross the Rhine River, so they could gather a huge number of troops and destroy the soldiers in the middle of the crossing operation, Kneece said. Enter the ghost army. “They went to a certain spot on the Rhine and pretended to be a big army. They brought equipment there, even actually brought boats, and at night, would broadcast what sounded like outboard motors and building noises. So, the Germans are thinking, ‘We’ll stop this,’ and they amassed 34,000 troops. [The U.S.] crossed elsewhere and had 17 casualties, but we could have lost 30,000 men if the Germans found out where we were really going to cross.”
It’s those saved lives that Templeton said are his greatest source of pride. “I’m proud of being in an outfit that saved over 40,000 lives of American soldiers and at least 40,000 allied soldiers,” he said. “While we were engaged with the enemies, we kept them in one place, and they weren’t in another place — killing [soldiers].”
Templeton said he never fired a shot, though the ghost army did carry weapons, should they have had to fight, and Kneece said their vehicles were equipped with “huge amounts of explosives” that they were to detonate if they were ever captured.
Sorting through the armbands he wore as he impersonated different soldiers, Templeton talks freely about the war and the ghost army’s tactics, but he wasn’t allowed to share it with even his family until 1996, when the government declassified the information. “The only thing he ever said was that they had [inflatable] tanks,” said son Roger Templeton Jr., 61, of Tyrone. “It was top-secret information; that was the main reason.”
The government kept the ghost army under wraps, Kneece said, because the deception tactics worked so well, the military went on to use them in other wars. The tactics didn’t start in World War II, though — Kneece said they dated back at least to “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general in the Civil War. “Jackson would have his soldiers light thousands of campfires at night, more than they needed. The Northern troops would look over and say, ‘We’ll never defeat them, they have so many men over there.'”
Jackson’s tactics were brought to World War II by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the head of Germany’s Afrika Korps, who used the deception techniques to fight the British in northern Africa, Kneece said. “When British intelligence finally caught on to this, they decided to go one better and adopt a lot of those things. They did some remarkable things.” Inflatable tanks, painted shadows, and sound effects all combined to fool the Germans. “When the Germans flew over, they couldn’t tell the difference unless they got down to 1,000 feet above, and they weren’t going to do that.”
The deception didn’t stop with inflatable equipment, sound effects, and painted shadows. One reason the military sought creative men for the ghost army was so they could act their parts. They trained young soldiers to go into local pubs near where they were stationed. “You’d have the bartender, who actually was probably a German spy, and they had a 23-year-old guy trained to tell him a bunch of lies. You have a 23-year-old guy having a few beers — no one dreams he’s been trained by the ghost army.”
Many of the ghost army’s actors — and painters and designers — went on to succeed in creative fields, with fashion designer Bill Blass, artist and movie star Douglas Fairbanks Jr. among them.
As for Templeton, he returned to the U.S. and married his fiancée, Natalie; he’d proposed before he left. The two settled in Jutland, NJ, where they raised three sons and a daughter. They relocated to Tyrone in 2001 to be closer to son Roger, who works for the Railroad Retirement Board, a federal agency.
Templeton and Natalie met in art school, and though neither pursued art as a career, they continued to sketch, paint, and carve together. Natalie passed away in 2007, and her paintings — many of women with hauntingly realistic eyes — are all over Templeton’s room, hung on the walls and propped on tables. “Anything with life in it, she loved,” he said.
Though his hands are too shaky to paint or draw, Templeton said he plans to make small baskets out of walnut shells, which he cut apart and glued together. He’s been creating for as long as he can remember. “Nobody encouraged me,” he said. “I just liked to draw and paint.”
This article originally appeared in the Aug. 24 edition of the Altoona Mirror and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
Share your memories