members of the crew not seriously injured were housed in the officers mess at the naval station. 13-year-old, a cab boy, the youngest survivor will appear before the department of commerce investigation board that calls commander rosendoll head of the naval station as first witness. experts believe the exact cause of the greatest of air disasters will never be known. over the hindenburg will loom a question mark that can never be forgotten. history bookshelf features popular american history writers of the past decade. airs every saturday at noon eastern. this weekend on history bookshelf, philip gerard discusses "secret sold jers" it tells the story of a top secret elite army unit that used deception such as fooling the germans about allied troop levels to win world war ii. this is 50 minutes.

good evening. it's my great pleasure to be here at politics and prose, always wauchblted to come here. came here early to wander the stacks and get lost in the books. every so often a writer's career, there come as chance to do something that really is a gift. that you know, i write novels, stories i make up, nonfiction, stories i find out about and this is a story i found out about but it really came to me as a kind of a gift. it came to me as a gift from 50 or 60 or so talented extremely individuals around the country who i interviewed other the course of a year. and dozens of other places. particularly as a gift from the seller of daryl ripatow and ak

detect in new york now living in florida mainly and one of the secret soldiers. in fact, his job after the war was to take and either declassify or destroy all the documents about the secret soldiers. for reasons known only to god, not even to him, because he doesn't remember, when i showed up in florida after having several letters from him he opened a box, a treasure-trove moving these guys it indeed done all things the legends and other documents only hinted at. i was very lucky. the story is basically this, that in between world war i and world war ii, the u.s. army forgot everything it learned. typical how democracy fights for us. in world war i, an interesting camouflage corps headed up by artists and sculptors were part of it and they joined what was then a sophisticated french and british effort on the western front. all that was kind of forgotten by the time world war ii rolled

around until people began realizing we were much weaker than the germans were. all deception in warfare arises out of a moment of weakness. overwhelming tanks and paairplas go right at the enemy and plow over them. it was clear, watching them roll into czechoslovakia, into france, greece into italy and norway and so forth, that they were going to need some kind of an edge. so among other things, a few things started happening. the army reconstituted its cam flash corps in fort meade, maryland, not far from here and put in charge of it a young west point guy by the name of julian who hated camouflage, wanted nothing to do with it. his mission in life he thought was to become a combat engineer. he envisioned himself building bridges under fire, gets the tanks across the river. didn't have a use for camoufl e

camouflage. like a good west point officer, many men of his duty, did it well. that made it possible for what happened later on the european battlefield he was in the pacific building bridges under fire in the philippines. prior to the invasion of europe on d-day, indeed a whole year ahead of that there was a deception plan that didn't quite come off. they were trying to make the germans believe they were really going to invade france. the problem, deception is like any lie. depends on being a good part of truth with just enough lie to make it useful. and the truth was the germans knew there were no supplies, no men in england capable of doing this. so the whole deception was a claus colossal failure. the general in charge of things for the u.s. army in the european theater stationed in

england. remember, there was no really u.s. army in europe yet. a bunch of headquarters people running around england decide to find out what to do about this and appoint add committee. the committee came back and said what we need when we finally go into europe, a battlefield decepti deception. they brought the camouflage group from fort meade. a group of radio specialists who came radio disinformation specialist whose wrote scripts that were quite elaborate. a head guy a former script writer for nbc radio, fred foxx, i'll talk about that a little more. they also brought into the fold a group even the army or most people in the army didn't know yet existed, because it was formed on technological breakthroughs. this was the 3122 sonic deception company. signal service company but they called themself sonic deception. these guys were the product of

two mavericks. one maverick was douglas fairbanks jr. the movie actor. douglas fairbanks sr., none of you even here is old enough to remember and certainly not me, but douglas fairban p bankbanks his day was the greatest superstar on earth, along with charlie chaplin. you could go to any country, go to africa, show his picture, they would know who he was. go to norway or spain, she all knew it. and intimate with president roosevelt when he was still the undersecretary the navy and so on. well, douglas fairbanks jr. grew up in his father's shadow and wanted more than anything it seems, to prove himself and to do something that was his alone. so, for example when he did go into acting reluctantly, one of the things he did do, shy way from swashbuckling add vench movies. he thought, my dad did that. flying around the stage on rope, sword fighting and all that. he did other things.

by and bishgs by, he got sucked into. became swashbuckler adventure films, including things like gunga din. another surprising history. coming out as it did about the time hitler was ready to go into the sedatant land, betrayed by the thuggees became the heroic allies fighting against the thug, the nazis. in a weird way before douglas fairbanks had gotten into the service he had already become something of a war hero. his fame followed him around that became a problem. what he wanted to do in those years was get into the navy. he wanted to become a naval officer. he hadn't been to college. he'd been to a suck suggestion of tutors, boarding schools, never very long and this stumped him.

how to get into the navy without a college education. he talked to an admiral. the admiral said there is a hitch, if you go straight into naval intelligence you don't have to do any of that stuff. sign up and we can take you. the irony wasn't lost on fairbanks. he went into naval intelligence -- thank you -- he went into naval intelligence and being douglas fairbanks was quite recognizable. it was hazed by his shapemateip found it easy because of celebrity status but because of celebrity status. everywhere he went, everybody thought he's a pretty boy movie star. he always had to prove himself. go the extra mile. he wound up on a battle ship in island about the time pearl harbor was attacked. by the time the boat came back to be refit he was taken off, sent to washington to go into the press section of the navy. they kind of got tired of him there because he was so politically connected in

washington, talking to presidents and admirals, they shipped him off to england where he really became involved with these guys. an old friend of the happened to be the lord, a little mo connected than the average g.i., should be said. after a few hints from fairbanks took him along to a haunted cass until scotland where he was training special operations forces. this was just the swashbuckling cloak and dagger stuff of real life. these guys lived in a haunted castle, the setting of a robert louis stephenseegeson stephenson stories. doing spooky special things. developing secret weapons. james bond-style ways of assassinating people and one of the most important things they came up with was something that mount battin himself was keen on. called it sonic deception subpoena used in a rudimentary way in the desert in north africa when rommel was slugging

it out with the british 8th army, and montgomery finally came on the scene later. field marshal montgomery. because he had the services of jasper, a magician by training, and several other officers who were so inclined, he himself had been experimenting with things like this. so in england as well as on the front, people were doing this, sonic deception basically was playing sound effects at the enemy to make them think something was happening that in fact was not the case. in north africa it was very rudimentary, in fact primitive. they would put a vick terror la victrola on the back of a jeep and slow it along the dune line supposed to trick the germans into thinking there was a tank coming. the thing skips out of the groove and so on. didn't work well. they were doing it all wrong. the real use of sonic deception used when -- a when, not an

if -- the allies assaulted mainline france. everyone knew he had to do, because a beachshed the hardest thing in modern wear faire. a time between t-- warfare. everybody crosses into a no-man's-land, the english channel, this case, and a long beach and can't fight back during all that time. they can only fight back once they established themself in a place, reorganized themself and established a perimeter. mount battin's idea, conceivably fool the germans where such a landing was going to take place and, in fact, this became a wonderful idea to fairbanks. he came home with it, with a mission specifically from the brit tosh try to get the americans to create some kind of a battlefield deception group. he went to the navy. as it was fairbanks, he didn't go to the captain above him or even the commander. he went to the admiral.

the second highest ranking admiral in the navy. admiral kent hewitt. hewitt said, that's fine. i think we can do this, but in terms of your more grandee oes plan, fairbanks had them, you have to go to the joint chiefs of staff with those. so you can imagine a young lieutenant in the naval reserves going to speak to the joint chiefs of staff today with his plan how to create an operational scenario for the whole war. i don't think it would play very well, but, in fact, he did, and it played very well. even though the joint chiefs deceived him and said, well, this is all very well and thank you, but good day, commander. actually at that point, lieutenant. but they adopted many of the things he had put forward and, in fact, either by coincidence or because they deliberately adopted the plan, his template for battlefield deception became a way the americans did it in europe. so fairbanks went back to norfolk and created a thing calmed the beach jumpers, using

sonic deception. nobody's quite sure where that name comes from, in any case, they used landing craft and pt boats to simulate this is the place where troops would land, practiced on the beaches of norfolk and went down to the outer banks of north carolina, a great, wonderful place i'm fond of and used the old coast guard station as a staging guard. meantime, fairbanks got mixed up with a guy named hilton howe raily. white a character. he was sort of brilliant, eccentric, probably a manic depressive by our standards. the guy, for example, discovered amelia earhart as an obscure person and put together her first flight across the atlantic as the first woman to cross. she passed as a passenger, nonetheless, it made her reputation. he did other things. while the lis tainia had been suvg in world war i, he was a serving officer at that point. after the war he put together a

consortium to try to raise the sunken gold from the lusitania, which is crazy for a lot of reasons. one of which to the british it was a sack ra sankt tomb of lost souls and shouldn't be distu disturbed. he lost lis fortune, but he made and lost many forchings across a period of time. a special correspondent for the "new york times" set about a secret mission across the country to delve into morale in the u.s. army and found out a terrifying thing. that this was just on the verge of pearl harbor that if we were attacked, or if we were to send troops into battle at that point, many of them wouldn't go. there was -- this was at a time when congress had sort of unilaterally extended enlistments of all draftees due out in six months and half the army would have melted away. they had really no choice, bought popular saying at the time, raily found out, ohio, over the hill in ohio, when the

enlistments ran out. doing crazy things and winds up, hobnobbing with society in boston and new york. he winds up on a special planning board, this developing secret weapons. now, let me just pause here and one of the interesting things to me in doing this book is to find out that there is a third kind of soldier we never heard about, who i found out about in this book. we always heard about the career west pointer. straight arrow, douglas macarthur, eisenhower. right? also we hear about the reluctant drafe draftee. many of the people you know. maybe some of you going about your life, get pulled out of college or trade school or a job, go into the service for two, three, four year, you're out. you might be a sergeant. you did your job and on you go. some of the people involved in this project, like raily, like douglas fairbanks, were extremely talented, a little older than the ordinary recruit

and many of the guys who would be part of the camouflage corps. because of this connections, because of their intelligence and ingenuity, wound up not only becoming part of the army, part of the navy in fairbanks' case, but actually helping shape policy, strategy, tactics to create the weapons of war. an astonishing thing i think would be impossible with an all-volunteer army. you couldn't see a public relations man and a reporter like raily asked by the pentagon to work on secret weapons. like bringing in steven spielberg to say we need to develop a nuclear deterrent. wrap can you do for us? that's the kind of thing it is subpoena fairbanks being an actor. tom hanks, you starred in a lot of movies. come here and show us how to set up this invasion plan. so if you look back on it, it's extremely farfetched that this even happened. none the less, by the time raily and fairbanks started working

today of which raily was the head they decided to stage a demonstration in the u.s. and so they were working out of, near the bell labs off sandy hook, just south of the city of new york, and they stage add thing called the battle of sandy hook. well what this consisted of they put 300 troops ashore, and they were going to attack at night. with assault landing force, and fairbanks and raily and the others were going to watch this and their technicians were going to play the sound effects and the whole object of the game was to lure the defenders to the wrong part of the beach. they had about a ten-mile stretch. and the idea was to get them as far away from the actual landing site as possible. and then the 300 soldiers would rush ashore. 300 on the beach. 300 on the landing craft. well, raily being raily, it wasn't fluff to get some old tug to take them out there. he got the walgreen family yacht. the dicksonnia and they cruise the out in style. i imagine, there's no record of exactly what was served aboard,

but with raily's taste, you can imagine they were drinking the best champagne and served by stewards. at any rate, it was a marvelous success and the troops fool and they were still using record players, but using enormous things called heaters, gigantic speakers developed by the navy and the reason, onboard ship they'd be able to cut across all the noise and a captain could talk to crews on deck and later used in aircraft carriers. everybody got excited. fairbanks got so excited he said, do it right way. get it into battle. went back to norfolk, got the beach tempers functional and performed brilliant lay. not in the invasion of frak but in cicely, italy and southern france later on. the army wasn't satisfied. they felt the commitment was primitive, phonographs would never work on jeeps or trucks

driving along rough ground and never stand up under battle conditions in winter when most battles were fought and all of unanswered questions. everybody knew sound could travel. how far? how well could it be heard? what frequencies would decay? what sounds exactly did you want to project? what sounds would get you into trouble if projected and so on and on. did terrain matter? projected against hills or forest. was that different against opens ground? if you broadcast in the rain or in snow, or when the humidity was a certain kind? did that matter? and so raily asked for and got an army experimental station which at first started out at fort hancock, new jersey and later moved to pine camp new york, now fort drum. it's a dry janetic place in those day a huge wilderness with pine trees, little in the way of amenities and the men went out in one of the bitterest winters

new york state had seen in 20 or 30 years and practiced sonic deception. they had guys from bell laboratories, a whole lunch of hand-picked guys from the army specialist training program, one. smartest thing the army probably did in world war ii, identify thr smart guys who knew math and science and languages and so forth and put them aside and not just put them in the infantry but put them into a place where they could be called on later to help in more sfis care of theed ways. a lot of these guys wind up, mostly interviewed personally with raily, and raily would say things like, are you willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for your country? and they would -- if they even hesitated, they were out. they had to go, yeah -- yes. right way. right. and you don't want them to think about it. one of the thing, the great balance in this whole thing is that you needed smart guys, you really did, for the stuff they were doing, but you didn't want them thinking too hard about what they were doing, because what they were doing was sort of crazy. what they ended up doing was

going to europe from d-day until the battle of the rhineland, and dlibltdly, while everybody else in the whole army was trying not to get shot at. get the best shot at the army without getting shot at in return, these guys were saying, hey, look at me. over here, look at me. they were deliberately becoming targets. they put the sonic deception guy, the camouflage guy, radio deception guys and a troop of very, a company of very tough combat engineers, the 406, who trained out at the desert training ground which covered at that point part of three states. it's now a joshua tree national forest out in california. patton had founded a place to train tank corps, and the legend is that when he got out there there was no water, of course, so he tapped into the los angeles aqua-fock-ack kwa for at people to los angeles to negotiate and never got permission. just kept taking the water nap

was how patton operated. anyway, these people all go to europe and have never trainered together before. the camouflage had trained in camouflage, now no longer the point. now deliberately trying to camouflage something just enough so it looked like it was being camouflaged but could actuallien seen. right xwa and now using neoprene tankses and neoprene how wirtss, jeeps, truck, what have you and had to precision them as if they were real armored divisions. they would go into the woods at twilight. as the tanks pull out you would hear the -- these thing was done to very exacting standards. they went out to fort knox to the harmered forces school and spent many weeks getting these things just right. you would hear not just the tanks coming into pes, but the pank backfiring, the sergeant swearing out. the guide cussing the tank

driver. you might hear odd noises associated with people setting up a camp or whatever have you. you might hear the tailgates of trucks banging and so on. meanwhile, you'd have radio traffic. they'd be on the radio and -- the germans had already figured out that the american tankers were always on the radio when they weren't supposed to be, and so the american was saying, let's use this to our advantage. we'll talk on the radio. they're expecting it anyway. but we'll say things that they think are true and are not true. so they're asking for fuel and talking about where the road sign is because they missed the purnoff and so foreign. meanwhile, guy, doing special effects. these guys dressed up as colonel, majors in some cases generals with a little staff running around with them in a staff car. going securing bill its, setting up headquarters and elaborate radio nets and so forth knowing, of course, that the local spies are going to take all of this back with them. now, remember, that the object of all of this is a bluff.

that if there really were forces there he wouldn't need to do any of this. on the line of september of 1944 after the americans race aid cross france many months ahead of schedule and eisenhower and his staff were scratching their heads how to supply an army already on the rhine river when they hadn't expected it to be in paris yet. there's an 80 mile gap to the left of patton and there are 2.5 panzer divisions sitting there waiting to drive through and roll back the attack as far back as they can. they sent out several hundred special troops. they sent out their tanks and their amplifiers and all rest of it. the radio guys, and they put them on this line with a dozen or so light tanks from a calvary recount unit and they were holding the line. the story i love best. in the end, not only didn't the germans attack they kept probing the lines every night. come in, there would be

firefights, hand grenades, light bombardment and the even planes flying over. they really were upset about this development on the line. the sixth armored movie and in the end the germans didn't attack. they were treated back across the river and blew their own bridge behind them. so it's a ka clau colossal gamb guys were involved in. the fact so many survived i think is attributable to the fact they were very good at it. their timing was good and also that the army math was good. the army figured in its own -- irresistible logic, if you have 10,000 or 12,000 men in a division spread out over maybe 10,000 miles of front, 2,000 or 3,000, depending, you get a barrage. so many men and vehicles are there a person percentage will die oren wounded in action. if we oent put 300 guys out

there, sure a few tanks and dummy truck, likelihood fewer will get hit. we can try to get the barrage on them. you'd have these guys with artillery shell casings fashioned into a thing calmed a flash device. that would mimic or artillery. if you were on that hill 1,000 yards away thinking, there's that 155 or whatever, and so they're shooting up what are basically fireworks, and getting real artillery back so that the real american gunners can now get a fix on -- just absolutely nuts what these guy was doing. at some moment, as i interviewed them i would ask the question, well, didn't it occur to you that you were basically making yourself a sitting duck? and they would all kind of scratch their head, get quiet and say, well, yeah, but after three or four months, yeah. we said, wait a minute. we keep getting these barrages. what's going on? and i think the tribute to them

is that they did it anyway. nobody deserted, ran away or failed to show up. and these guys were not gung ho soldiers. these guys were artists from the new york. one guy, george martin who was a battalion photographer, you know, designed sheet music for schirmer music up tin pan al any new york. bill bass a dress designer. even then selling sketches for $25 a piece on seventh avenue trying to make his first name for himself. others wanted to be commercial artists or were after thing men what have you, or they were what we would call today electronics in other words. fooling around with computers. depression boy, walter manser was one who would collect scraps in hinkley, illinois and from that build a radio crystal set and could sit there and tune in whatever he wanted to. do experiments and sonic projections. see how far his amplifier to

carry out into the corn field long before he was in the army. these guys kind of came together and now are in it greatest shooting war in history and really equitted themselves admirably. it was my great privilege to be able to talk to these mean who are by the way extremely modest about what they did. none considers themselves heros. they blush when they read the subtitle, "heroic army of deception" in the book. so that's who they were. and how i found out about them as i said, was, to find some of the guys and invariably they would say, you've got to talk to so and so. one of the first i found, a colonel, straight arrow west point guy. 92 years old. sharp as a tack. he said, well, don't just talk to me. this is after two minutes on the phone. he gives me five more names. you got to come to our reunion. having a reunion in two weeks in watertown, new york, the city near where we trained. where fort drum's camp is. i just swallow hard, bought a

plane ticket up to watertown, new york, not know kwhag i would find. spent about four days pretty much living in world war ii. big band music at night, in the dining hall. visits out to the fort, and when i got done and when i left i knew i was going to do the book. on the plane home to charlotte, north carolina i actually started writing part of what became the epilogue. it revochls around this idea and then i'll stop and take your questions. that these guys had done an extraordinary thing. very self-sacrificial thing. one served at the battle of the rhine said they're not heroes because they killed a lot of german, they're heroes because they saved thousands of american lives. the last alone probably saved 10,000 or 12,000 lives. and they had never really been recognized. and it was clear that while they were very modest, and there was an incredible calm