Albany Museum Unveils Ghost Army Exhibit With Inflatable Tanks, Fort Drum Ties

A full-size inflatable tank, original uniforms, and fabricated radio transmissions once used to fool Nazi commanders are heading to Albany. The New York State Museum will unveil a new World War II exhibition in September 2026 spotlighting the Ghost Army, the top-secret U.S. Army unit that used inflatable rubber tanks, staged visual effects, and recorded sound effects to trick enemy forces about the location of real American combat units.

The exhibition, titled Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II, was developed by The National WWII Museum in New Orleans and is supported by national sponsor the E.L. Wiegand Foundation. It runs September 5 through December 27, 2026, at the New York State Museum on Madison Avenue in Albany, according to NEWS10 ABC. Admission to the museum is free, and visitors will be able to explore original Ghost Army artifacts including artwork, equipment, and uniforms alongside archival photography, displays, and immersive multimedia environments.

A Secret Unit With an Artistic Roster

Officially designated the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the Ghost Army was activated at the beginning of 1944 and included more than 1,000 soldiers, per the museum. The unit's ranks included visual artists Ellsworth Kelly and Art Kane, and, per the dossier's broader background on the unit, future fashion designer Bill Blass, who reportedly designed illusions as a young soldier before launching his fashion career. The unit's missions remained classified for decades, New York State Museum Director Jennifer Saunders said, per NEWS10 ABC's reporting.

“The Ghost Army's story reflects extraordinary ingenuity, courage, and creativity,” Saunders said. She added that the exhibition will show how art and innovation became a tool of wartime deception. The U.S. Department of Defense kept the unit's existence, equipment, and tactical methods strictly classified for 51 years after the war, only declassifying the records in 1996, according to VA Hines Health Care, which notes veterans were forbidden from discussing their deception work even with immediate family.

Fort Drum's Role in the Deception Playbook

Ghost Army troops reportedly trained at Fort Drum in northern New York's Jefferson County, according to NEWS10 ABC's report. The unit's sonic deception arm, the 3132nd Signal Service Company, trained there in 1944, using 500-watt armored halftrack speakers capable of projecting recorded military movements up to 15 miles away, according to Army.mil. Engineers reportedly worked with Bell Labs to record authentic tank and troop sounds onto magnetic wire, giving the unit's fabricated radio transmissions and broadcasts their convincing edge.

The tactical payoff was significant. Official U.S. Army estimates credit the Ghost Army's 22 deception operations across Western Europe with saving between 15,000 and 30,000 American soldiers' lives by diverting enemy forces away from real Allied combat maneuvers, according to Smithsonian Magazine. During Operation Viersen in March 1945, the unit executed a hoax that fooled German commanders into reinforcing defenses 20 miles from where Allied troops actually crossed the Rhine River, with captured enemy maps later confirming German intelligence fell for the ruse, per the same publication.

Recognition Decades in the Making

In March 2024, Congress presented the Congressional Gold Medal — the nation's highest civilian honor — to surviving Ghost Army veterans and their families in a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, per the Airborne and Special Operations Museum. The medal was formally authorized by the Ghost Army Congressional Gold Medal Act, signed by President Joe Biden in February 2022. The unit suffered three combat deaths and roughly 30 wounded during its deployment across Europe.

Aaron Noble, the New York State Museum's senior historian and curator of political and military history, will join filmmaker Rick Beyer for a public discussion following a November 1, 2026 screening of the PBS documentary The Ghost Army, set for 2 p.m. Beyer directed the 2013 documentary and serves as president of the Ghost Army Legacy Project, an initiative that reportedly spent a decade lobbying Congress for the unit's official recognition, according to the New York State Museum.

Another Milestone for a Museum in Transition

Founded in 1836, the New York State Museum is the oldest and largest state museum in the country, drawing roughly 500,000 visitors annually across 100,000 square feet of exhibition space inside the Cultural Education Center at Empire State Plaza. The Ghost Army exhibition arrives amid a stretch of high-profile programming at the Albany institution, which is midway through a $150 million revitalization that Hoodline detailed earlier this year.

That capital campaign has already produced one dramatic public spectacle: the ongoing reassembly of an 18th-century Revolutionary War gunboat discovered beneath the World Trade Center site, whose timbers underwent 14 years of maritime conservation before returning to Albany. Between the gunboat and the Ghost Army's inflatable tanks, the museum's exhibition floor is offering visitors two very different windows into how ordinary materials — wood, rubber, recorded sound — helped shape the outcomes of American wars centuries apart.