WWII GHOST ARMY CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL

For most of his life, Bernie Bluestein was not allowed to say anything about what he did during World War II in Western Europe.

Mr. Bluestein was a sophomore at Cleveland School of the Arts in 1943 when he left to join the U.S. Army. He then trained in a secret unit that landed at Normandy, France, shortly after D-Day in June 1944.

What we did is we attracted the Germans' attention so that the real units could do whatever they had to do elsewhere, Mr. Bluestein, age 100, said in an interview.

In his final mission, Mr. Bluestein said, the ruses devised by the roughly 360 soldiers of his battalion forced German commanders to spread their defenses thin in eastern France. That, he said, allowed the U.S. Army's 90th Division — which was actually 10 miles north of the 603rd — to cross the Rhine River with less resistance.

We saved the lives of about 30,000 soldiers, Mr. Bluestein said.

The 603rd and similar units came to be known as the Ghost Army, which numbered about 1,100 troops. Together, they inflated rubber tanks, created fake airfields, blasted the sounds of troops marching from speakers placed on trucks and designed other diversions to fool German soldiers.

The mission of these lightly armed soldiers, who were a precursor to the Army's current psychological warfare units, was officially declassified only in 1996.

 

On Thursday, Mr. Bluestein and two other members of the Ghost Army — Seymour Nussenbaum, age 100, and John Christman, 99 — received the Congressional Gold Medal on Capitol Hill before a crowd of more than 600 that included family members and friends.

Getting the Congressional Gold Medal for the soldiers took years of work, much of it initiated by Rick Beyer, a film producer. He learned about the unit 19 years ago from a friend's colleague who said someone should make a documentary about them.

It took us four sessions of Congress to do it, and it took a whole team, Mr. Beyer said in an interview. We had 40 or 50 people who were volunteer lobbyists. They were emailing. They were calling. They were visiting offices in person. Covid hit in the middle of that, but we readjusted our way of doing things and kept going. And by God, we made it happen.

"Following the war, the unit's soldiers were sworn to secrecy, records were classified and equipment packed away," says the National WWII Museum.

Wormuth said Thursday that immediately after the war, Ghost Army soldiers received a letter of thanks from then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a memorable P.S.: "If you tell anyone, I'll see that you hang."

Beyer told WUNC before the ceremony that the mission had been so deeply classified that the "Army basically lost it."

"It kind of forgot about it until the late 80s, when they suddenly rediscovered this and started bringing Ghost Army soldiers to the Pentagon for briefings," he explained.

"One of my favorite lines was one gentleman who only would tell his family 'I blew up tanks,' without saying they were inflatable tanks," she said on Thursday.

To read the complete articles, see:
At Long Last, a Gold Medal for America's World War II ‘Ghost Army' (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/ghost-army-gold-medal.html)
After decades of secrecy, the 'Ghost Army' is honored for saving U.S. lives in WWII (https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congressional-gold-medal-world-war-2)

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