The story of this unit — how it was built, what it did, and how it spent decades as one of the Army’s best-kept secrets — is a remarkable chapter of World War II that most Americans never knew about until long after it was over.
## The British Example
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops did not emerge from nothing. Its creation drew on a tradition of deception operations that the British had been developing and refining since the early years of the war.
In North Africa, British deception planners had developed techniques for making small forces appear larger and larger forces appear smaller or absent. Operation Bertram, before the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1942, had used more than 2,000 dummy vehicles to conceal the disposition of General Bernard Montgomery’s armor. The British had a dedicated deception organization, the London Controlling Section, and experienced officers who understood that in modern warfare, what the enemy believed could be as decisive as what was actually on the ground.
American military planners watched these operations with interest. Two officers in particular — Ralph Ingersoll, a journalist turned Army officer, and Billy Harris — drew on the British example to conceive of a dedicated American deception unit that could be deployed tactically, moving with front-line forces and staging deceptions as the operational situation required. The unit they envisioned would have three technical capabilities: visual deception through dummy vehicles and equipment, radio deception through fake traffic, and sonic deception through recorded sounds. No previous American unit had combined all three in a single mobile formation.