CLARION, Pa. (EYT) — When John Spence was growing up in Clarion he wanted to know what his dad did in World War II, but Joe Spence said he wasn’t allowed to talk about those days. The senior Spence volunteered that there was one guy from his unit that had a little too much to drink, started talking, and ended up in Fort Leavenworth.
In 1944, Joe Spence was part of a top-secret Ghost Army, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, that helped deceive the German Army in many key battles. The Ghost Army was a handpicked group of soldiers with artistic and creative talents for a unique mission.
For nearly 50 years, the work of the Ghosts was classified information, but a new documentary by Rick Beyer detailing the operation aired Tuesday on PBS. Beyer interviewed 19 members of the Ghost Army for the story in 2005, including Spence.
A press release for the documentary provides some background for the special unit. Beyer says that in summer of 1944, a handpicked group of G.I.’s landed in France to conduct a special mission.
“Armed with truckloads of inflatable tanks, a massive collection of sound effects records, and more than a few tricks up their sleeves, their job was to create a traveling road show of deception on the battlefields of Europe, with the German Army as their audience,” states the news release.
“From Normandy to the Rhine, the 1,100 men of, known as the Ghost Army, conjured up phony convoys, phantom divisions, and make-believe headquarters to fool the enemy about the strength and location of American units. Every move they made was top secret, and their story was hushed up for decades after the war’s end.”
John remembers that his dad was always guarded about his war years because of the classified nature of the work, but admits he started talking a little about it a few years before it was declassified. Once it was declassified, his family heard all sorts of stories. His father died on Sept. 12, 2011.
Joe’s journey with Ghost Army started after he and five other friends enlisted in U.S. Army in 1942 while they were freshmen attending what is now Edinboro University where Joe was an art major. He was called to duty in February of 1943.
During basic training, he was tested and pulled out of a line and was told that the Army was going to send him to additional training through Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and he completed the Army course in Basic Engineering at the City College of New York.
“The Army wanted to give him more education, and some of it was math and physics and some electronics, but it wasn’t art,” said John. “Dad used to tell the story of how on one of the first days at City College, he got lunch and walked out in the cafeteria. He told us there wasn’t much of anyplace to sit, but there was this one guy with kind of curly hair sitting in a corner, and he joined him. It turned out it was Albert Einstein. He couldn’t remember much about it and couldn’t understand some of it.”
His next step was some time at Pine Camp in New York State where they were pulling the unit together under the direction of General David Eisenhower. If he thought he was confused after he talked to Einstein, even stranger things were to greet him when he arrived in Europe for a still secret assignment.
“When he arrived at his base, he got off the train, and he saw two guys come over and pick up this fricking tank and move it over,” said John. “He thought he was in the wrong place. I’m just a little guy, I’m not going to be able to do that.”
The inflatable tanks were just one of the options in the Ghost Army’s arsenal of deception. It employed an array of strategies as inflatable tanks, sound trucks, phony radio transmissions, and even playacting to fool the enemy. He served with this group in the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion in five campaigns and 21 battles from Normandy to the Rhine.
It wasn’t always a case of using his artistic abilities in the war. John said one of his father’s stories was when he was a checkpoint guard during the Battle of the Bulge period, and the Ghosts were called on to replace Patton’s armored division.
“Around that time Patton came across the sector boundary in a jeep with a driver and my dad was on checkpoint, and he asked Patton for the sector boundary password and Patton didn’t know it,” said John. “Dad told him he couldn’t let him through. Patton looked at his dad and asked ‘Do you know who I am soldier?’ while putting his hand down on his pearl handled revolvers. Dad said, ‘I don’t care who you are. If you don’t have a password, you don’t cross.’ Patton when back, got the password for the crossing, and told dad he was a good soldier as he passed through the checkpoint.”
Another mission had the Ghost Army faking out the Germans about a crossing the Rhine. Joe was assigned to the sound truck and told John that the sound was so loud because it was recorded sound of mortar and tanks to make the Germans think the Allies were crossing about 30 miles from the actual crossing. The Germans were just not ready for the crossing when it came.
One night Joe had to man 30 to 40 campfires himself, running from campfire to campfire so it would look like there was an entire division below the enemy.
“One of the things they did a lot of times was they would go right up on the front lines, and they would go into villages and towns that were on the lines where German spies,” said John. “Sometimes they would even get behind the German lines in jeeps and trucks that were painted with battle insignias from different units. They would leave and repaint their trucks and put on fake beards and mustaches, sew on different shoulder patches they made, and they would go to the same place again. They would spread all of this misinformation about what units were in the area.”
While they were required to use their creativity in fooling the enemy, things weren’t all fun and games for the Ghost Army.
One of their duties was to liberate a concentration camp and guard it.
“That had an incredible impact,” said John. “He didn’t paint or draw much about it, but I remember one time I had seen that painting, the Scream, and I asked him about it, and we went downstairs into his studio and said he had seen something like that once. He did this series of figures of wan people with skin hanging off of them, and you could see their ribs. He obviously had some very dark memories of this.”
“He always said to do everything you can to avoid war because it is horrible. He wasn’t one of those people who was gung ho about it, and he found it to be a very sober and humanizing experience.”
There was also a darker aspect of some of the missions that Joe never talked about even after declassification.
“I think they did some other things that he was quite reluctant to talk about that were perhaps less than pleasant and weren’t included in the documentary,” said John. “I know that from things he told me they were likely involved with things like assassinations of high brass behind the lines and stuff like that.”
After his discharge from the army, Joe married Carol Carr. They were married for 63 years.
He worked as a teacher at Oil City High School and Beaty Middle School in Warren before joining Clarion University where he was chair of the Art Department in 1955.
In 1970, Dr. Spence moved to head the Art Department at Mankato State University in Minnesota, and in 1975 became Director of the School of Art at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In 1979, he was appointed to chair the Department of Creative Arts at The University of North Carolina in Charlotte. When he retired from UNCC in 1986, he and his wife returned to Pennsylvania.
Looking back at the Ghost Army, one can’t help but think there may be something more coming in addition to the various books and documentary.
“I always thought if you did it right, you could actually make a very interesting war comedy sort of like MASH,” said John. “This would be an excellent subject for that kind of film because as dad said in the documentary, ‘it’s really kind of silly.’ They had a lot of fun doing what they did because it was always pushing their creative buttons. They would be told what to do but not how to do it. It was up to them how to best pull it off.”
John is a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton’s Department of Renewable Resource where he was also department chair for 10 years. It is a research-intensive university where he teaches two courses each year and travels the world in grant-funded research.
