It's estimated their work saved between 15,000 and 30,000 lives during World War Two.

The Ghost Army was a tactical unit, activated a few months before D-Day.

And among their ranks, a remarkable young man from Fort Wayne.

Good evening.

I'm Bruce Haines, and welcome to PrimeTime.

The Ghost Army used inflatable tanks, sound effects, radio trickery and imagination to fool the Germans on the battlefields of Europe.

The unit was full of artists, including Bill Blass.

Fort Wayne native and graduate of South Side High School.

Blass went on to become a noted fashion designer.

But his efforts and the service of the rest of the men in the Ghost Army would be kept secret for 50 years.

In 2013, documentary filmmaker Rick Bayer helped share their story with the world.

In March of 2024, members of Congress presented surviving Ghost Army veterans and their families with a Congressional Gold Medal for their unique and distinguished service.

May their story be told in this.

And every succeeding generation, may it be told in our cities and towns, in our schools and places of worship, to our friends and neighbors and to our families.

May their righteous deeds and heroic memory live with us and a grateful nation forever and ever.

And today on PrimeTime, we will talk about the campaign for that congressional Gold Medal that took a number of years.

We'll also learn more about Bill Blass, his service in the Ghost Army and hear of some of the other ways that people are continuing to honor his legacy and to tell these stories.

Joining me today from Chicago is Rick Beyer, the filmmaker who helped tell the story of the Ghost Army.

And in studio with us, Cathy Carrier, who is president of Bill Blass Legacy, Inc. And welcome to you both.

This is great.

Great.

Good to be here.

And Rick, let's start with you.

And for those who may be stepping into this in the middle of the storyline for background, how do you explain what the Ghost Army was?

Well, you said it.

They were a tactical deception unit that used inflatable tanks and sound effects and illusion to fool the Germans on the battlefields of Europe.

And some people might think, I know about this.

It's the D-Day deception.

Well, no, that was done by the British for D-Day.

This unit goes into action after D-Day.

It's all American.

And they carry out 22 deceptions on the battlefields of Northern Europe from June 1944 to March 1945.

And basically, they're just trying to trick the Germans about the size and location of American units so that they just don't see the punch coming because they're looking in the wrong direction.

Well, and General Eisenhower and others that helped to frame the Ghost Army into being seem to feel very strongly that deception was one of the most important tools in the toolbox.

Why?

Well, because deception creates surprise.

Deception can give you an advantage If the enemy thinks that you're doing one thing and you're doing something else, you're going to catch them off guard.

And Eisenhower knew this was a good thing.

And there's a great memo I found in the archives where Eisenhower is asking George Marshall to get the Ghost Army guys over to England by a certain date.

And Marshall says, Well, to do that, we're going to displace, you know, a thousand combat pilots or whatever the number is.

And Eisenhower says, well, don't do that, but I want them on the next ship.

After that, he really wanted to get those guys over to Europe and have them be in action because he knew that would help the Americans after they invaded and were fighting the Germans in France.

Not only did the men go overseas, but also some technology went with them that didn't even exist.

A few years earlier.

We think technology changes quickly for us, multitrack recording wire recorders and and a lot of it sounded like it was learning by doing.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, inflatable tanks were pretty new as well.

But the real technology that is is striking is the sonic technology And they are playing sounds from 500-pound speakers mounted on the back of half tracks.

They're playing them from wire recorders, which is the predecessor of the tape recorder.

And like all parts of deception, they have to pay great attention to detail about the sounds they play and how they play them to make sure they are totally convinced, saying to the Germans.

What's incredible in this, when we have a photo to prove it is an overhead shot of one of the unit encampments, say, post along the way.

And it does look for all the right down to the tire tracks Rick.

Right.

So every vehicle in this photograph is operation versus and in March 1945 is inflated.

This is about ten miles from the Rhine River.

And the thing that makes it look real is the tank tracks.

And that, again, is attention to detail.

And we had a combat engineering company that's making those tank tracks.

And that is what's going to make that's going to sell the story of the inflatables.

And one of the veterans who still alive, Tom Anderson, who I think is 100 or 101 in Delaware, he's one of the guys who operated the bulldozers that drove the tank tracks.

So that little piece of history is still with us today.

And this ties into with who these men were.

They are technicians, but many seem to be, if you will, artists in the highest definition of that.

That word where an artist's eye for detail really comes in handy, I suppose.

So the unit that did visual deception was the six third camouflage engineers and about 40% of that unit were artists, and they were recruited heavily from art schools.

Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, 30 or so people went there, but from other art schools as well, up and down the East Coast and in as far as Chicago and maybe even a little further.

And and these artists, when they're there in Europe, they are painting and sketching anything they see.

And that to me was an aspect that made the story even more exciting because their art is a really unique archive and a unique way of looking at the war in Europe.

Well, and one way clearly to bring that story home is when all of that artwork connects to a northeastern Indiana resident who went on to have quite the career of his own.

And of course, we're talking about Bill Bless.

Take a look.

Another artist constantly sketching was a 21 year old from Indiana named Bill Blass.

Bill Blass, great guy.

Wonderful.

Knew what he wanted.

Read Vogue in his foxhole.

The rest of us are a bunch of slobs, but not Glass.

He was always dressed to the nines.

We all had the same uniforms, but leave it to Blass to have his pressed or something.

Glass filled his notebooks with ideas for women's clothing, even sketching a logo he wanted to use for his fashion designs.

After the war.

Those of us from New York and know thought we were very sophisticated.

But.

But Bill, of course, came from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was far more sophisticated than most of us.

Well, that sophistication connects to a, again, the full narrative of the Ghost Army.

And you'll be able to see that documentary this Sunday afternoon at five and this coming Monday afternoon at one.

There it is.

The Ghost Army And Cathy Carrier has been stewarding and several others have been stewarding the Bill Blass legacy right here on the home front.

And Cathy, tell us introduce us a little more to Bill Blass.

Yeah.

So myself and seven others, there's eight of us that are part of Bill Blass legacy.

We've we're really proud of this man who was a native of Fort Wayne.

He was born in 1922, grew up on South Calhoun.

The house is still there, put a marker in his front yard and he lived a life of adversity.

His father took his life through suicide there in the home on South Calhoun.

And so he grew up and Bill saw saw that he was part of that.

So he grew up in a single parent home, his mother during the Depression, very poor family.

And all through that childhood, he had this dream of becoming a fashion designer.

Crazy, right?

So he went to South Side High School.

And today, in fact, we're doing a lot of things over at Southside.

But so he was a South Side high school student, sketching dresses, selling his dress sketches to address manufacturer in New York during the Depression.

While he's in high school, he was making money doing that.

Remarkable.

Really remarkable.

He then went to went to New York to pursue his fashion career and was recruited out of the Parsons School of Design into the Ghost Army.

He voluntarily joined the Army to be part of World War Two and joined the Ghost Army.

And we're really proud of that.

He's a hero.

He's a decorated hero.

And following that, he had a 50 year fashion career.

He was known across the globe for his skill and expertise in both men's and women's fashion, and his career was remarkable.

He won something like 27 fashion awards.

So and he was an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneur.

He never gave up.

He he figured out how to design women's clothes and men's clothes and upscale clothing.

He branded his his Bill Blass branding.

He got royalty income and he was an incredible entrepreneur.

What a man.

What a story.

And he's a Fort Wayne native.

I'm really proud of him.

I know this and get and smile to the quote of his when in doubt, wear red.

That's what's going on with it.

wow.

He actually designed that.

We were in New York a couple of years ago and we saw 1500 of his dresses in one place.

And they were all sorts of colors and designs and fabrics, not just red, but that's his one of his famous quotes that when in doubt, wear red.

He he loved vibrant colors.

So he loved his fashion was all over the place.

And you can see so much of this legacy online through the courtesy of your own computer and the work of Bill Blass legacy and the county public library as well.

The Bill Blass website is one which will give you a full tour of so much of his career.

There it is.

Bill Blass, Legacy.com, and the Allen County Public Library.

That's an interactive site of sorts, I believe.

Yeah, we're fortunate with the genealogy center there run by Kurt, which it was Kurt's idea.

He's like, don't just end the Bill Blass celebration at the end of the 100 days.

You need a lasting legacy.

What about an online archive?

So we've taken a lot of the content of his life, his ghost army career, his fashion career, his life in Fort Wayne.

We've put it in this archive that Kurt, which are in his team, have helped us create.

And we we're still putting in we we're now posting the Congressional Gold Medal photos and videos to the archive, and we keep interviewing people who knew Bill Blass.

We post those Zoom interviews.

It's just so we're continuing to enhance what's there and this is a way of tying Ghost Army to Bill Blass that much more because the thread is really the notion of preserving legacy.

Yes.

And keeping memory alive.

And Ric, you have been quoted as saying that it has been 80 years since the ghost army landed in France, 19 years since you came to this story, nine years that you've been working on the gold medal.

That's a lot of effort over a lot of years.

Why the wait?

Why?

Why so long on that project?

Well, I have spent you know, I was entranced by the story when I first came across it.

And, you know, wanted to make a film.

And I was turned down by the History Channel and I had never made an independent film before.

But I said to myself, How hard can it be?

And those words are really dangerous, because it turns out I was really hard.

It took eight years and then the book only took a couple of years to get out.

But then we started on the gold medal and again I thought, Well, how hard can it be?

And I reached out to a congresswoman friend of mine, Annie Kuster.

We went to college together and she said, sure, I'll introduce this legislation.

But as she admitted in a speech at the at the Congress last month, she didn't know how hard a gold medal was.

And you have to get two thirds of the house and two thirds of the Senate to co-sponsor the legislation before it can even be considered.

And that's like 350 or more senators and congressmen.

And, you know, it it just took a long time.

And so many people volunteered.

You know, I think Cathy was involved with that.

Other volunteers from across the country.

People came to Washington with us, people lobbying via email and on the phone.

And it just took that amount of time to bring those people on board.

And also for us to learn how to lobby.

We keep trying to do things that we haven't done before.

And you know, it just there's a learning process that that's part of that as well.

And I do remember, Bruce, if I can add this one thing in a meeting from a couple of years into the gold medal project where this congressional staffer who was supposed to be the gold medal guru, he said to me basically that it was going to be almost impossible to do what we were trying to do.

So, you know, I guess it's just the answer is if you're going to do the near-impossible, it it might take 19 years.

Well, and the announcement came, what, in 2022, I believe, was in and that an award was coming.

I think it was 20 or 23 or 23, 22.

President signed the legislation on February 1st of 2022.

Yeah, these dates are all burned in my head and, and, but because it's a custom designed medal and your audience has seen it because the camera shot has shown it, they then had to have a whole design process.

And the men said to us, well, the design process will take two years.

And we were like, We are going to do everything we can to make it go faster.

Well, it was two years in one month from the time the president signed the bill to the time that we went to the U.S. Capitol, we had 600 people in Emancipation Hall and saw the congressional leadership praising these soldiers that I had spent so long, you know, telling their story.

Cathy, if you would share, I'd like to put that image of the medal back up because you explained that the three aspects are primary divisions of activity for the for the ghost Army is is illustrated on that.

Yeah.

There's actually four there's a person stitching and that's because every they had they changed their outfits when they were replicating or duplicating other different army units so they were stitching on different patches.

There is the inflatable at the top of the medal which represents the inflatable tanks the those deception tap tactics.

There's a huge speaker, which is the sound deception that they did.

And then at the bottom of it, there's someone doing teletype ing or whatever it was called back then, which was the radio transmission, fake radio transmission.

So those are the four ways they deceived.

They did deception.

You can I can I can I throw something out there if we can go back to that close up of the medal?

You know what's missing in that shot there is the thread of the guy who is sewing.

If you if you are able to zoom in between his hands of the man who's sewing, he's using invisible thread.

There's no thread there.

And I want to know, you know, from the designer, I've been meaning to reach out to him to say, was that on purpose or did I just catch the thing you were hoping nobody would catch?

It must be the ghost part.

It's right.

Right?

It's the ghost threads.

So, you know, maybe.

Maybe it was a purposeful mistake.

Or maybe I can offer that option to him and he can claim it was a purposeful mistake.

Right.

Let me ask you both what it was like.

In fact, not even ghosting, but to really be at the congressional ceremony that was in March of 2024 after all the time had passed.

Let me ask you first, Cathy.

Yeah.

So I was able to go with Linda West and Theresa Walker, three of our board members, and it was overwhelming.

I mean, you walk into this huge hall, there's 600 people, all relatives, mostly all relatives of ghost army members, grandkids, children.

And so we're all there where there are plenty of really have to go through this huge check in process, which is really overwhelming for you.

You're not used to that level of security.

So you finally get in there, you sit down.

We turned and looked behind us and there's just all of these cameras and the press there.

I mean, I'm never involved in things like that.

And so I just found it to be overwhelming.

And what really struck me was it seems that our nation is often so divided.

And so we sat there during the ceremony, just transfixed by the speakers.

There was the secretary of the Army and various members of Congress.

Speaker of the House Rick spoke very beautifully.

Bernie.

One of the ghost Army members spoke and all of that came together.

But at the end of every single person's talk, they all said the same thing.

They said something like, We're proud of this nation.

God bless America.

I mean, the patriotism was unified.

It was very, very short.

It was very loud.

It was remarkable.

It was beautiful.

We sat there and cried for the most of it, frankly.

Rick, how about for you, sir?

Well, I think overwhelming is a great word because my emotional level was very high throughout this whole ceremony and watching it unfold after all these years and yeah, like Kathy said, I mean, all those people who were there, all the cameras when we were standing up there on the stage posing for a picture, picture and staring at this sea of photographers trying to take our picture, That was pretty amazing.

And what really impressed me was the way that you had, you know, the secretary of the Army, you had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

You had Speaker Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell, and they are all treating these Ghost Army soldiers with the utmost of respect.

I mean, really leaning in in some cases, kneeling on the ground to talk to the men in wheelchairs, doing anything they can to to get their story and to honor them.

And that is what I was hoping for when we started this gold medal process.

And it was just so deeply satisfying to see it happen.

If we could return that last shot to the screen, perhaps, Rick, you could point out to us who the three surviving members were of the Ghost Army who were receiving the awards there that day.

There we go.

Right.

So towards the left, second, from the left standing up is John Chrisman, who's just in remarkable shape for a 99 year old man seated in the gray suit in the middle is Seymour Nussbaum, who's 100 and his lifelong friend, or well, only 80 years, but his his friend Bernie Bluestein in the white hat, we have a picture of Bernie during the war wearing a hat not dissimilar from that.

So that's something he's been doing for a long time.

And Seymour and Bernie knew each other in the Ghost Army.

And then they came home and they didn't talk to each other for 75 years until they met at an event we did in in New Orleans five years ago.

So just really incredible that they have now reconnected.

And I think they talk to each other once a week.

Well, and we are grateful too to have a short portion of Bernie's comments upon the receipt of his medal.

Let's take a look.

I want to thank everybody in my life that I've contacted many of you.

You've all contributed to my existence and to my being who I am and very proud and happy to be here to receive this honor.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Actually, yeah.

Thank you for your service.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, amazing moment and amazing two in in that hindsight provides this perspective of all those 20 missions and across the time spent in action, only three go to Army soldiers killed and dozens wounded in carrying out their missions.

I mean, in relative terms, this is a unit that is being asked to be fired upon.

I mean, that was a realization for them.

And so to have this as as part of the objective total, if you will, we're always sorry for loss.

We're grateful for service.

They defined a lot of us.

They really did.

And I mean, you know, there's a whimsical aspect to the story.

Hey, we're using inflatables on the front line and there's this serious aspect that three of them were killed, 25 or 30 were wounded fairly seriously.

They but they were lucky.

You know, it could have been far, far worse.

And I think it's also a mark of how good they were at conducting their impersonations, that the enemy never caught on to what they were doing, never realized that a deception unit was operating against them.

And I think that's another really important thing to remember about this extraordinary World War Two unit.

I'm imagining at this point, there are folks who are watching, believing it would be so great to be able to get a little more up close to the things that have helped comprise this story of the Ghost Army and of Bill Blass.

His role, like tributaries in a river all flowing ultimately together.

And Kathy, you can get us there between now and next year.

Tell me what's in the works.

Yeah.

So about a year, year and a half ago, Rick was up in Skokie, Illinois, at the Holocaust Museum.

He said, Hey, there's a ghost Army exhibit up here.

That's a touring exhibit from the World War Two Museum.

If you're if you want to see it, I'll I'll walk you through it.

And I went and I was flabbergasted by the depth of this exhibit.

So I was determined with our board members to bring it to town.

If we're going to do that, we're partnering with the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

They've been a great partner with us since the beginning.

So August, September and October of 2025, next year, August, September, October, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art will host a comprehensive 4000 square foot ghost Army exhibit.

That's just remarkable, with a lot of artifacts that Rick Byers procured and helped helped get.

So it's a very well done exhibit.

It's unlike anything I've seen.

And we're really excited to partner with the Fort Wayne Museum to bring it to town.

Until then, we put a Ghost Army exhibit at the Veterans National Memorial Shrine Museum here in town.

Got a great ghost Army exhibit with a focus on Bill Blass.

If you haven't been there, you need to go.

So there's a great exhibit out there.

We are putting one of our replica medals there at the veterans National Memorial Shrine Museum.

We're also putting one at South Side High School.

We just met with the principal last week and the history teacher, John Baker.

And we're going to put it in the South Side High School World War two exhibit.

That's beautiful.

And in their school next summer, we continue to work with art this way.

And Alex Hall, very proud to be a partner.

And we've hired we did a RFP and we selected an artist, an Indiana artist who will do a wonderful, vibrant, beautiful mural in downtown Fort Wayne in June of next year.

So 2025 is big for us.

We've got the mural going up during the summer, probably around his birthday.

Bill bless his birthday, which is June 22nd, and then August, September, October will be at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art with an exhibit and also other activities at the Veterans National Memorial Shrine Museum.

Rick Buyer and his wife Marilyn, will be back in town next year for a lecture.

So we've got lots going on and you're seeing where you can follow how life goes on with the Ghost Army site and the Bill Blass Legacy site.

As well.

So much to share and so little time.

My thanks to Kathi Carrier and all with Bill Blast Legacy, Inc.

BLASS-TASTIC!!!

There you go and Rick Beyer filmmaker, documentarian, the Ghost Army documentary Sunday afternoon at five, Monday afternoon at one on PBS, Fort Wayne.

And for everyone with PrimeTime, I'm Bruce Haines.

Thank you for watching.

And we'll see you next week.

Good night.