Edward E. Boccia served his country during World War II as a private in the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion in the Ghost Army (23rd Headquarters Special Troops), which was presented a Congressional Gold Medal in March 2024. Born June 21, 1921, in Newark, New Jersey, to Cono and Frances Boccia, he was recruited by the US Army while he was an art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, before enlisting in August 1942.

Boccia was one of many art school students recruited for this top-secret unit designed to deceive and mislead German forces. Prior to shipping out to Europe, the battalion disguised strategic military installations along the East Coast from the air using camouflage. The soldiers served as expert deceptive artists during several major campaigns in Europe by deploying inflatable decoys of US military tanks, cannons, and jeeps to create dummy airfields, artillery batteries, and tank formations accompanied by sound effects.

The Ghost Army staged 20 battlefield deceptions from Normandy to the Rhine River. Starting in England in 1944, they traveled to France and Luxembourg and then to Germany in 1945. In September 1944, the Ghost Army staged the illusion of 20,000 US troops during General George Patton’s Operation Bettembourg along the Moselle River in France, securing an American victory.

Like many other soldiers, Boccia would sketch in his free time behind enemy lines and in bombed-out cathedrals and send the drawings home to his mother. He drew numerous portraits of displaced Russian, French, and Italian civilians along with his fellow soldiers in France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Among his closest friends from Company B were Bill Blass and Arthur Shilstone. Blass became a world-renowned fashion designer and Shilstone worked as an illustrator for major magazines like Life and National Geographic.

Following the Allied victory in Europe, Boccia married Madeleine Wysong, a fellow student at Pratt Institute, in July 1945. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University and began teaching and serving as dean at the Columbus (Ohio) Art School.

Boccia was the youngest art school dean in American history when the couple had their first child, David. Their second child, Alice, arrived after the family relocated to St. Louis in 1951, where Boccia served as professor in Washington University in St. Louis’s School of Fine Arts until 1985.

He became well known through his televised art talks and demonstrations on CBS, NBC, and PBS and his public and religious art commissions. Among those commissions were four large oil paintings to illustrate the history of banking for the First National Bank in downtown St. Louis, 10 mural paintings for the Kol Rinah Synagogue (formerly Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel) in St. Louis, and the monumental mural behind the altar in the Catholic Student Center (formerly Newman Chapel) at Washington University in St. Louis.

Boccia’s daughter Alice recalls many stories her father, who died in 2012, told her and the family from his time in the Ghost Army. “I have many fond memories of my father from my childhood, some of which involved him teaching me to march while he played the role of drill sergeant!” Alice said her father was very proud to have contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany and grateful that he could accomplish this without having to take human lives. “He would be a proud recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.”

See Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II at Soldiers Memorial Military Museum from September 25, 2024 through January 12, 2025. The exhibit is organized by the National WWII Museum and presented by the E.L. Wiegand Foundation. Additional local support from Veterans United Foundation.