This fifty-year silence had significant consequences for how the Ghost Army was remembered — or, more accurately, not remembered. The major histories of World War II that shaped American public understanding of the conflict in the postwar decades could not include the 23rd’s story because the story was classified. The unit’s contributions to the Rhine crossing and other operations were not publicly acknowledged. The men who had used inflatable tanks and halftrack speakers to deceive the Wehrmacht were absent from the historical record as it was taught to American schoolchildren.
The resolution of exactly when various aspects of the unit’s history became available is not completely settled in the public record. Some accounts indicate that limited information was released in the early 1990s, while others point to 1996 as the date of full declassification. What is consistent across the historical accounts is that the work remained substantially secret for several decades after the war, far longer than many comparable wartime operations.
## Rick Beyer and the Documentary Record
The process of bringing the Ghost Army’s story to public attention in the twenty-first century was driven significantly by filmmaker and author Rick Beyer, who became president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project.
Beyer made a documentary film about the 23rd that brought the story to a wide audience. He also wrote a book, The Ghost Army of World War II, that provided the most comprehensive public account of the unit’s history. His work drew on interviews with surviving veterans — conducted while they were still alive and able to speak — as well as on the official records that had been declassified and on the personal diaries, sketchbooks, and photographs that many of the artist-soldiers had kept.