When the men of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops packed up their inflatable tanks and their halftrack speakers after Operation Viersen and prepared for whatever came next, they were ending a performance that had run for twenty months and more than twenty acts.
The performance had not always worked as planned. The early operations in France had mixed results, as the unit learned in real conditions what training had not fully prepared them for. Some operations had generated German responses that suggested the deception had been noticed but not believed. Others had been compromised by circumstances the unit could not control: bad weather, unexpected German movements, the inherent difficulty of maintaining a fiction when the real world kept generating contradictory information.
But the arc of improvement was real. By the time of Viersen, the 23rd was doing something quite different from what it had attempted at Brest in August 1944. The coordination was tighter, the planning more sophisticated, the operational discipline more consistent. The unit had learned its trade by doing it, in conditions where mistakes had immediate and serious consequences.
The last act of this performance — the Rhine deception that sent the XVI Corps across the river with approximately 30 casualties at the initial bridgehead — was the unit’s best work, and it accomplished its objective completely. The German defenders were looking the wrong way when the real troops crossed the Rhine. The 30th and 79th Infantry Divisions, the real versions of the units the 23rd had been impersonating, made it across with their formations intact and their momentum maintained.