NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — They’re often referred to as the unsung heroes of World War II — the Ghost Army. A mission that was kept secret for years but that undoubtedly saved lives. The Ghost Army had a huge impact on the war and they trained right here in Middle Tennessee.

The Ghost Army sounds like something that belongs on the set of a movie. “Their mission was deception, and to carry it out, they used inflatable tanks, and sound effects and illusion impersonation, right on the battlefields of Europe,” explained Rick Beyer of the Ghost Army Legacy Project.

Everything they did was to deceive the enemy, while giving actual units elsewhere time to move around. The Ghost Army was a unit with about 1,100 soldiers that conducted 22 different “deception missions” starting right after D-Day until the end of the war.

“Deception is a great military tool, if you can fool the enemy, about your intentions about your location,” said Beyer. “If you can manipulate them to do what you want them to do, it’s to your advantage, it can create surprise and help you out. So the Ghost Army, their mission was to impersonate other much larger American units.”

These “combat con artists” had one goal: to save lives. But they did this with a bit of creativity. “So they have inflatable tanks, and trucks, and artillery, and jeeps, and inflatable spotter planes and anything so they could set up a huge, you know, presentation, if you will, on the battlefield,” explained Beyer.

They used sound deception: “They had sound trucks, these were half tracks with 500 pound speakers mounted on top that could play sounds that could go as far as 15 miles.”

Radio deception: “So the enemy’s listening in on the radio and so you’re sending phony radio messages and tying in with real radio networks,” said Beyer.

And even special effects: “That involved physically impersonating the units that they’re, that they’re pretending to be. So they’re going to put on phony shoulder patches to make it seem like they’re in the 75th infantry division, let’s say, they’re going to set up fake headquarters. And they’re going to have one of the guys be a fake general. I mean, I know it sounds made up. But this really happened and happened multiple times.”

It sounds somewhat whimsical, but there were very real consequences. “If you’re going to understand the Ghost Army story, you want to enjoy the Hollywood aspects of it, the make believe that pretend, but you want to sober up pretty quickly to realize that there are people who are buried in cemeteries, in Europe and in the United States who gave their lives to carry out this mission,” said Beyer.

Beyer’s mission with the Ghost Army Legacy Project is to tell these stories. “It was all kept secret for 50 years or so after the war. This was a secret. And I gotta tell you, there’s still a lot of people who don’t know very much about it at all.”

These soldiers trained right here in Tennessee at Camp Forrest in Tullahoma.

Today, there are just three living members of the Ghost Army left. They were finally honored at the Capitol in 2024, 75 year after they served.

Although it’s impossible to know exactly how many lives these men saved, their impact is clear.

“There have been estimates that maybe 15,000 to 30,000 lives, and there’s no way to know, right? Is that is that accurate? I met a guy once who was a tanker under Patton. And he had never heard of this unit,” said Beyer.

“He said, ‘I think this unit might have saved my life.’ And he’d been in one of the places where they operated. And that to me was really meaningful, because you can talk numbers and say 1,000s here, 1,000s there, but here was one guy. And he was showing me pictures of his children and grandchildren and saying, well, maybe they wouldn’t even have been born if it hadn’t been for this unit.”

Beyer wrote a book about the ghost army and produced a documentary. More information about the Ghost Army Legacy Project can be found here.