Read Online Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll - Free Book Online Page B

secret for the simple reason that we were posing as other Allied troops in order to fool the enemy.… [We were] pretending to be Patton’s armor, the Fifteenth Tank Battalion. Except, that instead of Shermans, we had rubber ones that we inflated at night and left in his same tank tracks. We even had ways of faking tank fire and noise, which the men in the sonic unit blasted all night long at the Germans. So when Von Ramcke looked the next morning through the haze and battle smoke with his field glasses, he thought he was seeing Patton’s forces. In a matter of hours he would have known it was a ruse,but by then, Patton had attacked somewhere else, and we and our portable dummy tanks had vanished.
    Hundreds of artists, many with theater and design backgrounds, served in the so-called Ghost Army painting inflatable rubber “tanks” to make them look real, constructing fake ammunition dumps and troop cantonments to dupe German air reconnaissance, and coloring and arranging camouflage netting to appear as if rows of warplanes and assorted military equipment lay hidden underneath, all to convince the Wehrmacht that Allied forces were more formidable than their actual numbers. This turned out to be handy training for Bill Blass, who after the war built a fashion empire worth half a billion dollars. Among his most cherished possessions were the notebooks he sketched in while at Fort Meade.
    Bob photocopies the pages in my copy of Blass’s memoir about Fort Meade, and we discuss the remote-viewing buildings one more time. “Just don’t take any pictures,” he advises.
    I promise him I won’t.
    After driving around the post for a few minutes, I locate the spot and pull off on a side road. As I’m surveying the empty fields, a pickup truck parks right behind me.
    “You lost?” a helpful voice calls out.
    I look over and see a guy in his early forties, sporting a crew cut. I’m almost certain he’s military, although he’s not wearing a uniform, just a light-brown polo shirt and jeans.
    “Well …,” I begin, not sure who he is and how much I should say, “I’m trying to figure out where some buildings were.”
    “What buildings?”
    “They were numbered 2560 and 2561.”
    “Can I see that?” he asks, pointing at the map sticking out of my front pocket.
    “Uh, yeah.”
    “I think they were demolished a while ago,” he says, tracing a small circle with his index finger over the same area Bob had indicated.
    “It’s okay if they’re no longer there. I’m just curious where they used to be.… ”
    Now he’s a bit wary. “Why’s that?”
    I downplay it. “Oh, it’s just for this little project I’m working on.”
    That sounds suspiciously evasive, so I elaborate. “It’s about a top-secret program the CIA was doing using psychics.”
    Much better.
    He looks at me like I’m a nutcase. “Sorry I can’t help you there. Do you know how to find your way back to the main exit?” he asks. “It can be confusing.”
    “Not really.”
    He turns toward the street and says, “Drive out here, make a left onto Llewellyn Avenue, take your first left onto Ernie Pyle Road, go right on Mapes Road, and then you’ll turn right to 175.”
    “Left, left, right, right. Got it. And I’ll pass by the barracks, right?”
    “I don’t believe so.”
    I had forgotten to ask Bob where they were. “I need to find those, too. Bill Blass trained here during World War II.”
    “The fashion guy?”
    “That’s the one.”
    He hands back the map and shakes his head. “Lotta funny stories about this place.”
    “Any that come to mind?” I ask, smiling.
    He thinks for a moment, gives me a long, hard look, and says, “Almost forgot. They’re doing construction on Llewellyn, so you might have to jog around that a bit.”
    That would be a no.
    It’s also a good indication, even I can intuit, that it’s time to move on.

MARY DYER’S FARM
    We suppose you [in Rhode Island] have understood that last year a company of