The sketchbooks survive because the men kept them, carried them home, stored them in closets and attics and drawers. When the declassification finally permitted the history to be told, the sketchbooks emerged as documentary evidence of a kind that official records could not provide: human, specific, visually immediate.
For historians of World War II, the sketchbooks offer something valuable precisely because they were not created for the historical record. The men drawing them were not thinking about future audiences or posterity. They were responding to what they saw with the visual tools they had spent years developing. The result is a kind of testimony that written recollection, with its decades of filtering and narrative shaping, cannot provide.
The Ghost Army Legacy Project has worked to preserve and publicize this visual archive. Exhibitions of the sketchbooks and other artwork created by unit members have toured the United States, bringing to general audiences not just the story of the deception operations but the human experience of the soldiers who carried them out.
## The 3133rd: A Parallel Story
The 3133rd Signal Service Company Special operated in the Italian theater and had no operational connection to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, though the two units shared a lineage — the 3133rd was formed in part from cadre drawn from the 3132nd, which was itself part of the 23rd.
Activated on June 21, 1944, at Pine Camp, New York, under Major John Williams, the 3133rd deployed to Italy in early 1945 with 10 officers and 192 enlisted men. Its equipment differed from the 23rd’s sonic unit: rather than the modified M3 half-tracks the 3132nd used, the 3133rd mounted its speaker systems on converted M-10 tank destroyers with dummy gun tubes installed to make the vehicles appear more conventional.