Ex-Medford mayor among Ghost Army honorees
More than seven decades after they carried out top-secret missions as members of the “Ghost Army” during World War II, 50 military veterans from Massachusetts will be among more than 1,000 veterans awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Thursday on Capitol Hill.
John J. “Jack” McGlynn, a former Medford mayor and state legislator who died in 2016 at 94, is among those who will receive the nation’s oldest and highest civilian honor. His family will travel to Washington to accept the medal.
“The pride is overwhelming,” his son Michael McGlynn, 70, also a former Medford mayor, said in a phone interview. “It makes me feel very proud that not only did he [serve] because he loved his family and his country and his friends, but that he also kept it a secret for many years.”
The Ghost Army, whose existence remained classified until 1996, swindled German troops by using inflatable phony tanks, fake radio transmissions, and fabricated recordings of advancing troops, according to the Ghost Army Legacy Project.
Some soldiers sewed counterfeit patches onto their uniforms, painted false markings on their vehicles, and created a fake headquarters to impersonate larger Army units, according to the Ghost Army Congressional
Gold Medal Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2022.
Massachusetts Senator Edward J. Markey co-sponsored legislation to honor the Ghost Army, inspired by the service of McGlynn and others.
“The Ghost Army’s tactics were meant to be invisible, but its soldiers’ contributions are as lasting as any of the Greatest Generation,” Markey said Wednesday. “These brave servicemembers brought their exceptional creativity and resourcefulness to the battlefields of Europe, where they created complex illusions and impersonated other Allied units to deceive Germany’s military leaders.”
Two units — the 23rd Headquar
ters Special Troops and the 3133rd Signal Company Special — made up the secret army that carried out more than 22 operations in Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, and Luxembourg during the war, according to the legacy project.
The Ghost Army was composed of 1,023 soldiers and 82 officers but could pretend to be a unit of more than 20,000 men. Only seven members of the unit, who are each 100 years old or nearly 100, are alive. Three are expected to attend Thursday’s ceremony, according to the legacy project.
The families of those who have died have been invited to receive the honor posthumously.
“There’s a special kind of heroism that the Ghost Army involves, which is, ‘We’re going to act like we’re powerful where we’re not, and we’re going to draw fire on ourselves to keep it from falling on other people,’” said Rick Beyer, president of the legacy project and documentarian, in an interview Tuesday. “That’s something not for the faint of heart.’”
Jack McGlynn enlisted in the Army on April 9, 1943, trained as a cryptographer, and was assigned to the 3132 Signal Service Company, according to the legacy project.
“My father was one of the people they trained to learn German, and he would yell out to [enemy soldiers] in German and tell them, ‘Drop your weapons and we’ll spare your lives.’ And when the planes saw all those [inflatable] tanks, they just surrendered,’” Michael McGlynn said.
According to his son, the elder McGlynn never spoke of his secret role in WWII until the unit was declassified and the service member’s names became public.
Michael McGlynn found out when he received a call from a reporter saying the Pentagon released documents containing the elder McGlynn’s name, he said.
“So, I called my father and said, ‘Dad, I have a reporter on the phone who’s saying you fought in something called a Ghost Army,’ “recalled McGlynn, who was then serving as the Medford mayor. “And before I could say another word, he said, ‘You find out what his name is and how he found out.’”
Markey, who introduced and wrote the gold medal legislation, has known the McGlynn family for decades. Markey first began working to bestow the medal upon the Ghost Army while Jack McGlynn was still alive, according to Markey’s office.
Co-sponsors of the bill were Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Democratic Representative
Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, and Republican Representative Chris Stewart of Utah, the project said.
Markey said he is proud to have passed the law to honor all of the heroes of the Ghost Army “for our veterans, for the families of those who are gone, and for the generations to come, so they will know about these extraordinary American soldiers.”
“Jack McGlynn and the men recruited for the Ghost Army were men of muscle, but also men of the mind,” Markey said. “They were creative, original thinkers who used engineering, art, architecture, and advertising to wage battle with the enemy. Their weapons were unconventional, but their patriotism was unquestionable.”
If McGlynn were alive to accept the award, his son said he knows exactly what he’d say.
“He’d say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, I’m not going down there. All I did was my job,’” Michael McGlynn said. “Those were his orders and he was going to make sure that he followed through on them.”
Jack McGlynn said as much himself in a 2016 interview with The Globe, in which he spoke of the effort to publicly honor the Ghost Army.
“I didn’t do it to gain any gold medal,” McGlynn said in the interview. “My actions were to protect the United States of America and its families.”