Someone I'd Like to Have Met

You never know where the idea can come from to write one of these postings. A ceremony giving medals to centenarians and nonagenarians on the surface would hardly seem where a spark might come from. But the story of one such ceremony did.

President Biden signed a bill in February 2022 that bestows the Congressional Gold Medal to the members of a "traveling road show of deception" that build inflatable tanks and trucks to trick the Germans.

The story of the "shadow army" and rubber tanks, etc. is hardly a new story. There were tremendous efforts to keep the Nazis from knowing for certain where the invasion was coming from, Calais or Normandy?

It is amazing that a military operation—Operation Overlord—could have been kept a secret for so long. But those were different times. The building of the atomic bomb was a secret as well.

WW II veterans are all nonagenarians, or centenarians at this point, and are the next generation to disappear into history. The effort to honor those who were part of the massive deception and are still living, or have relatives still living, was lobbied for for years. It finally culminated in President Biden signing a bill, and a ceremony where Speaker Mike Johnson gave out Congressional Gold Medals.

The story of the ceremony appeared in the NYT print edition of March 22, 2024. It reminded me of how little I ever knew, or asked of my mother and father and how they came to serve in the war. Of course now it's impossible to ask.

But not all veterans were going to talk anyway. As part of the story by John Ismay, it is described that Mike Bagby flew from Birmingham, Alabama to attend the ceremony in honor of his father who served as an officer in the Ghost Army, but who passed away in 1992.

The activities of the Ghost Army were only declassified sometime in the 1990s. Much like the people who worked at Bletchley Park decoding German communications who signed the Official Secrets Act, these participants couldn't tell anyone until the veil  of secrecy was officially lifted.

With 600 people in attendance (lunch must have been served) three of the seven Ghost Army members were in attendance, many wearing a sort of Ghostbusters pin that I'm sure was not what they wore in the 1940s.

Mike Bagby said of his father, William Wright Bagby, "he took it to his grave. He just didn't talk about it."

Mike said his father worked as a mechanical engineer after the war, mostly in the coal industry. He said of his father, "he had a temper like a match head, No. 1, but he had an amazing vocabulary and did the NYT Sunday crossword in 15 minutes. But all of is conversational language surrounded four letters." 

I would have loved to have met a salty Southerner who sounded like a New Yorker.

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