Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of 30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I’mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
The Ghost Army of WWII is a great book. There is also a documentary called The Ghost Army that may still be on Netflix. These guys were awesome.
so this looks weird bc it’s long I KNOW I’M SORRY BUT THIS WAS THE PERFECT PANEL
I don’t know how to edit or even crop things properly I’m sorry
I know what you’re wondering. “Is this about Blue? Or is this about Velvare?” and the answer is–yes.
Funny thing: this post would apply just as well to five different characters. Perhaps more.
Avidan just needed a hug, that’s all he wanted. Let him have a hug and take a nap.
Yay, the textpost edits for The Silver Eye that no one asked for!
Inspired by @aceofstars16‘s awesome edits, which can be seen here. I’m terrible at this, I’m sorry, but I had too many posts stored up for these characters to resist. There’s at least two more to come….
I’ve said this before but it’s been 80+ years since the highly successful, critically acclaimed Thin Man film series, in which literal marrieds Nick and Nora Charles drank and had cool parties and solved silly mysteries that made no sense, came into our world. And they were ALREADY MARRIED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SERIES THERE *WAS* NEVER ANY UNRESOLVED SEXUAL TENSION and they never had drama or broke up and yet their relationship /interaction is UNIVERSALLY REGARDED as the strongest aspect of the films and I can’t believe in the year 2016 I still have to listen to condescending and unfortunately influential fanboys tell me that established couples can’t be interesting and that I don’t really know what I want!!! lmao fuck off maybe!!!
It is the best goddamned thing you’ve seen all day.
Say hello to the Infinite Jukebox, an experiment in looping songs. See those curves cutting through the circle? What this bad boy does is analyze the song for similar beats and sounds, then randomly skips between said beats forever.
Yes, you heard me. Forever. With this piece of musical genius, you can literally play the same song for as long as you want – It will create the song that never ends.
And if that’s not enough, you can upload your own MP3s to this bitch and it’ll loop those as well.
Have fun, kids.
heads up – you can’t put this in a tab in chrome, then switch to a different tab and forget about it, because it’ll stop. But if you open it in its own window it’ll happily go on indefinitely.
Samwise: means “Half-wise” or “Half-wit.” He is Stupid Gamgee
Faramir: Boromir’s name means “steadfast jewel”, but Faramir’s name just means “sufficient jewel.”
Sufficient.
Denethor took one look at baby Faramir and thought “eh I guess he exists or whatever” which is very in character
2. Characters who Have Way Too Many Names
Examples include Aragorn son of Arathorn son of Arador heir of Isildur Elendil’s son, descendant of Numenor, Thorongill, Eagle of the Star, Dúnadan, Strider, Wingfoot, Longshanks, Elessar, Edhelharn, Elfstone, Estel, Hope, The Chieftain of the Dúnedain, King of the West, High King of Gondor and Arnor, and Envinyatar the Renewer of the House of Telcontar
Wait I’m sorry did I say “examples” plural
Cuz that was all one guy
3. Characters whose parents must’ve been prophets
-Frodo means “wise by experience.” His story is about becoming wise by experience -A lady named Elwing turns into a bird (geddit)
4. Characters whose families were so lazy that they copy-pasted the same first half of a name onto multiple people
Théoden/Théodred
Aragorn/Arathorn/Arador Éomer/
Éomund/Éowyn/Éorl Elladan/Elrohir/Elrond/Elros/Elwing/Elenwë/Elendil/Eldarion (the laziest family)
5.Characters whose Names are Expertly Designed so that Newbies can’t Remember Who is Who and Feel Sad
All the people mentioned in number 4 Celeborn, Celegorm, Celebrimbor, Celebrian All the rhyming dwarf names in the Hobbit Sauron and Saruman Arwen and Éowyn
6. Name so nice, you say it twice
Legoas Greenleaf: Legolas’s first name means “Greenleaf” in elvish. Legolas is Greenleaf Greenleaf (thranduil really likes green leaves ok)
King Théoden’s name means King in Rohirric. Tolkien decided to name his name his king “King.” All hail King King
this is what the fanbase means when we say tolkien was a creative genius with language
a few weeks back i looked up the source of “we deserve a soft epilogue, my love” because it’s such a lovely, evocative line and i wanted to know the name of the poet who wrote it and it was. from captain america fanfiction.
The Blue Castle 