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"The Ghost Army" (2013), Directed and Produced by Rick Beyer - WWII Documentary About A Secret Unit In France Used For Misdirection


DonRocks

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I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed "The Ghost Army" (2013), a PBS documentary about a unit of artists (yes, artists) that were used to misdirect German soldiers in France to great success.

This is right at the level where I like my leisure stories to be: informative, yet not too heavy. I learned *so much* from this great documentary which covers D-Day, The Battle Of The Bulge, and the first major crossing of the Rhine into Germany.

If I weren't running this website full-time, I would very much like to be a Ken Burns - not exactly Ken Burns, but someone who takes a complex, boring, drawn-out subject, and presents it as simple candy for the masses. I'd like to think this could be my calling in life - there's a legend that Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well," and this resonates so much with me.

This 68-minute documentary is light entertainment while at the same time being of the utmost gravity. You can watch it superficially and enjoy it as such, or, you can do what I did: get so deep into it, that you decide to create an acronym for the hierarchical ranks within an army for immediate future recall:

A CD BRoadens Really Basic, Common, PLastic SQuelches

Army

Corps

Division

BRigade

Regiment

Bataillion

Company

PLatoon

SQuadron

(Note that all three words beginning with two consonants are the same in both which should help with ambiguity.)

Our Army deserves you committing these basic terms to memory, so do it. It'll take you two minutes, and you'll be able to instantly recall them for the rest of your lives.

Back to the documentary. Just watch it. It's free for Amazon Prime members, it's one hour out of your life, and you'll be instructed about WWII history while being delightfully entertained.

(Who was it that said the chief end of literature was "to instruct and delight?" I can never remember that.

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