Conspiracy Clearinghouse

Bodyguard of Lies: The Ghost Army & Wartime Deception (WIW 11)

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EPSIODE 95 | Bodyguard of Lies: The Ghost Army & Wartime Deception (World Is Weird 11)

More than 100 million soldiers took part in WWII, but not all of them were fighting with guns. There was obviously a lot of administration and infrastructure to deal with, there were codebreakers and spies, and there were even some who engaged in secret deception to trick the enemy.

This episode is not abouts ghosts, but rather the Ghost Army. No, not a battalion of unstoppable undead like Aragorn brings with him against the forces of Mordor, but a dirty tricks tactical deception unit the Allies deployed in Europe near the end of the war to fool Axis commanders.

Because, as the saying goes, all’s fair in love and war. This episode is partly a cynical attempt to lure in military history fans, but these are also really interesting stories. And you might consider them to have been, in fact, conspiracies, ones that were successful, by and large.

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SECTIONS

  1. 02:58 - Sucker Bait - Dudley Clarke, Jasper Maskelyne, North Africa fun, Operation Crusader, Operation Bertram, the Second Battle of EL Alamein, Sunshields & Cannibals, Operation Canwell, Operation Sly Bob, HMS Houdin
  • 12:08 - I’ll Make Mincemeat Out of That Mouse! - Operation Husky (the invasion of Sicily); Operations Barclay, Mincemeat, Waterfall & Animals, the Trout Memo
  • 16:47 - Don't Touch the Sides! - Operations Overlord, Neptune, Bodyguard, Wadham, Starkey, Tindall & Cockade; 'A' Force, Plan Jael, Operations Fortitude & Ironside, double agents (Garbo, Brutus, Tricycle, Tate & Bronx), Operations Graffham, Royal Flush & Zeppelin
  • 23:52 - We Can Scare You, but You Can't Scare Us - The Ghost Army, Eye of the Needle, Operation Quicksilver, the 3132 Signal Service Company Special & spoof radio, Operation Viersen
  • 30:31 - Surfin' USA - Douglas Fairbanks Jr. gets inspired by HMS Tormentor, the Beach Jumpers, PsyOps, the Navy SEALs
  • 36:04 - Would I Lie to You? - The Siege of Yapu, Alexander crosses the Hydaspes River, Sun Bin of the Qi, the Empty Fort Strategy, Mongol deceptions, the Sultan Baybars takes the Krak des Chevaliers in the Ninth Crusade, the Americans vs Brits & North Vietnamese
  • 40:03 - MILDEC strategies & guidelines - Sun Tzu vs. Clausewitz, the fog of war, the five main MILDEC tactics, Magruder's Principle, Jones' Dilemma, Avoid Windfalls, Multiple Forms of Surprise
  • 45:38 - We're Not as Clever as We Think We Are - The military influences fashion, all deception if about perception and psychology
    • Music by Fanette Ronjat

    More Info

    • Magic in the Desert on the Warfare History Network website
  • The Magician of WWII who Made Tanks Disappear on War History Online
  • The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War by Thaddeus Holt
  • The War Magician: The True Story of Jasper Maskelyne by David Fisher
  • Operation Bertram on the Scholarly Community Encyclopedia
  • A 5-Minute History Of The Battle Of El Alamein
  • Dummy Tanks and Fake Radio Broadcasts: WW2's Biggest Deception Campaigns
  • Operation Husky: The Classroom for Amphibious Landings
  • Trout Memo on Military History Wiki
  • What Was Operation Mincemeat?
  • Dead Man Floating: World War II's Oddest Operation on NPR
  • Operation Mincemeat: The man who never was on The History Press
  • "A" Force: The Origins of British Deception During the Second World War by Whitney T. Bendeck
  • 6 Daring Double Agents on History.com
  • Agent Garbo on MI5 website
  • Secret Agents, Secret Armies: The D-Day Misfit Spies on the National WWII Museum website
  • A Pioneering Experiment - OSS Double-Agent Operations in World War II paper by Robert Cowden
  • The Ghost Army Legacy Project website
  • How the Ghost Army of WWII Used Art to Deceive the Nazis in Smithsonian Magazine
  • The Top-Secret WWII Unit That Fooled the Nazis on History.com
  • Ghost Army book and film
  • How a Ghost Army of American artists helped defeat Hitler in The Week
  • Inside the 23rd, the 3132 Signal Company, The Sonic Deceivers
  • Operation Viersen mission summary
  • D-DAY DECEPTION: OPERATION FORTITUDE SOUTH
  • Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
  • The Defeat of Hitler: D-Day Invasion on The History Place
  • How Actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Crafted an Impressive Military Career on Miltary.com
  • Douglas Fairbanks's Drama on the High Seas on HistoryNet
  • The Beach Jumpers and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. video by The History Guy
  • U.S. Navy Beach Jumpers Association
  • UDT-SEAL Association
  • Army document FM 3-13.4 Army Support to Military Deception
  • Deceivingly Decisive: U.S. Army Military Deception and Counterintelligence article by First Lieutenant Will Rector 

  • Two Taxonomies of Deception for Attacks on Information Systems by Neil C. Rowe and Hy S. Rothstein, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School

  • Tactical Level PSYOP and MILDEC Information Oper Operations: How to Smartly and Lawfully Prime the Battlefield paper by Joshua E. Kastenberg
  • The lost and found art of deception on US Army website
  • ‘The Art of War’: As relevant now as when it was written in Irish Times
  • The Grand Strategy of Carl von Clausewitz on Warroom
  • On War Without the Fog article in Military Review
  • Genghis Khan's Secrets of Success on HistoryNet
  • Hiding in Plain Sight: The Science of Military Camouflage blog on UF PRO
  • Lessons from Others for Future U.S. Army Operations in and Through the Information Environment paper by the Rand Corporation
  • Deploying Deception on the Battlefield in Scientific American
  • The Military Influence on Fashion on Highsnobiety
  • The Psychology of Cognitive Deception

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