‘That’s when we really knew that we were going to be decoys, sitting ducks.’

George Diestel was a 20-year old student at the Art Institute of Chicago during World War II when he volunteered to join the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an Army camouflage unit. It turned out to be more special than he expected. Diestel is now a semi-retired designer and actor in Van Nuys.

The whole outfit was composed of artists. A lot of them were name artists like Bill Blass, the dress designer, and Art Singer, the painter. They were a very bright and talented bunch of boys.

We were shipped overseas to England, where we got the inflatable tanks, 2 1/2-ton trucks, halftracks, artillery and jeeps. That’s when we really knew that we were going to be decoys, sitting ducks. They were all rubber tubing inside, and on the outside would be a painted canvas looking like a jeep or a tank. You’d just inflate them, and they fill right up like a Macy’s balloon, actual size.

Starting at dusk we’d inflate some of the tanks with a compressor, then place them where they belonged. On one occasion when daylight broke we found one tank facing the wrong way. Four GIs lifted the tank and moved it around. Down the road there were some Frenchmen yelling, “American! American!” and flexing their muscles. I guess they thought they were real tanks.

Chateaubriand, Normandy, France, was our first so-called baptism of fire. We set up the rubber equipment simulating every type of army equipment there was. We also simulated artillery using flash devices to light up the sky. We had a Piper Cub acting like he was getting aerial observations. We had a signal company that would send and take phony messages and jazz the lines to create activity. It was all make-believe. We even had a halftrack with wire recordings and loudspeakers driving around playing recordings of GIs cursing, gears gnashing, the sounds of large troop movements.

Finally a German panzer division came looking for this big outfit they were going to kick the hell out of. But, when they reached our location, there was nobody there. A whole regiment disappeared in the middle of the night. The Germans were looking for a regiment of maybe 100,000 men with all that heavy equipment, and we were just 1,000 spread out all over the countryside. The night before the panzer division arrived, we deflated our equipment, rolled it up and packed it onto our trucks very fast. When we pulled out in the middle of the night, we would drive 14- or 15-hour days.

We would get shell fire, the artillery, but thank God we had very few casualties.

One incident, during the first attack on Brest, I’ll never forget. All day long you could hear our guns rumbling and grumbling, kind of like an earthquake in a way. We pulled into this area and stopped, and I remember I started to comb my hair in the mirror when I heard this strange “whoooosh” sound, like a huge disk coming at you. Just instinct, like an animal, I knew there was a foxhole nearby. I jumped in and on the bottom was Eddie Haas--he and his brother created the Munsters--and somebody jumped in on top of me. Eddie was on the bottom shouting, “Get off, I can’t breathe!” and we were saying, “The hell with you.” In the meantime they started lobbing all of these shells over, and, may God strike me dead, not one of those shells went off. If they had, it would have wiped out our whole company. We found out weeks later that the slave labor that worked in the Germans’ factories had screwed up the detonators of all those shells.

It was the greatest group of men that I’ve ever met in my life. We never had any fights or arguments in our unit. We were a very loving, caring outfit. When I go back to New York, we have little reunions. We always go on about the fun things. We never go on about the real bad things. When you look back, you never think of the bad things in wartime.