Anderson Wilson was born in March 1923 in Lake Washington, Mississippi. His mother died when he was three years old. Her sister was married to his father's brother and they took in Wilson and his three siblings. He was raised as their child. His brother drowned at nine years old when the two were fishing. Wilson started working at a grocery store at age 12, from seven in the morning until midnight, during the Great Depression. His father was a bookkeeper in Louisiana. The uncle who reared Wilson worked for the railroad. They had cows for milk that they sold. His aunt, who he calls his mother, sewed clothes. Wilson heard over the radio that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. Most people did not know where that was. Wilson had finished a course at Jackson Commercial College and was working a Civil Service job for the Jackson Airbase in Jackson, Mississippi [Annotator's Note: Jackson Army Air Base; now Hawkins Field Airport]. He worked in the Flight Surgeon's office administering flight tests. He enlisted in September 1942. It was the right thing to do.

Anderson Wilson enlisted in Jackson, Mississippi in September 1942. He went to Camp Shelby [Annotator's Note: Hattiesburg, Mississippi] and was inducted. He asked for Coast Artillery and was sent to Camp Wallace, Texas [Annotator's Note: Hitchcock, Texas] for basic training for two weeks. At Camp Wallace, the first sergeant called him out and asked if he knew how to keep books. The first sergeant had to collect money for laundry from each trainee. Wilson reconciled his books for him. He had taken a high school course in bookkeeping. Wilson was then sent to be the Company Clerk and made corporal. He was at Camp Wallace for about 16 months. At the end of 1943, the base was turned over to the Coast Guard and Wilson was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. Most men at the time were being sent to North Africa and were not really prepared for war. He was there for Christmas and in early January [Annotator's Note: January, 1944], Wilson got orders to go to Camp Forrest, Tennessee. He left by train the next day.

Anderson Wilson arrived at Camp Forrest, Tennessee [Annotator's Note: Tullahoma, Tennessee] where he did not do anything. After about a week, a colonel marched in and said he was there to form a unit for the invasion of Europe. He told them they could leave if they did not want to take part. Not a single man in that Headquarters Company wanted out of it. Part of the new unit [Annotator's Note: 23rd Headquarters Special Troops] trained in Camp Pine, New York and part in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. None of them knew anything about the others. It was very secretive. In May 1944, they all came together in New York City. They took the USAT Henry Gibbins across the Atlantic Ocean. He woke up and realized the ship was moving and had left during the night. This was the largest convoy to cross the Atlantic. At breakfast, he looked across and saw a black soldier who had turned green. The ship was rolling, and the soldier got sick. Wilson bought two big boxes of Baby Ruth candy bars and that was what he ate going across. They landed [Annotator's Note: in England] and took a train to an old English manor outside of Stratford-upon-Avon, named Walden Hall. The owner lived there as well. The 12 of them got the message that the invasion [Annotator's Note: D-Day; the Allied invasion of Normandy, France on 6 June 1944] had started.

When Anderson Wilson and his outfit [Annotator's Note: 23rd Headquarters Special Troops], they were told not to go farther than 100 yards. They unloaded around three o'clock in the afternoon. The beach looked bad. There were soldiers everywhere. The wounded were begging for help, which was not their job. There was still a lot of resistance. The Navy had not taken out the pillboxes. A lot of the paratroopers had drowned. It was a sad sight and he does not like to recall it. There were two avenues to the beach from on top. In 30 hours, the engineers had created six avenues. They were able to make it to the base of the cliff the first day and to the top of the cliff by the second morning. Wilson was eating breakfast out of a mess kit, when a bullet hit the kit. Scared him to death. The hedgerows were rigged up. The Germans had put posts in to destroy any gliders coming in. He is sure there were a lot of mistakes made. They did not have the modern equipment like today.

Anderson Wilson moved inland from Normandy [Annotator's Note: Normandy, France] and awaited orders. They were part of the liberation of the Brest peninsula and annihilated Cherbourg. There were a lot of Germans cut off and captured there. The German general said it looked like they had more power than they could handle. They were there a month and were bogged down before General Patton [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] came. Then things started moving. Patton had one destination and that was Berlin [Annotator's Note: Berlin, Germany]. Wilson feels that if Patton could have done it his way, there would have been no divided Berlin. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks Wilson to describe the Ghost Army's 23rd Headquarters Special Troops' mission]. They would go in and replace a division with dummy equipment and sound effects. They had records that played the sound of a division in camp. They could be heard five miles away. The 23rd had been created by President Roosevelt [Annotator's Note: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States] and General George Marshall [Annotator's Note: US Army General of the Army George Catlett Marshall Jr., US Army Chief of Staff, 1939 to 1945] in late December 1943. It moved fast. Everything had to look correct for aerial observation. The Germans were convinced. Their first operation was in daytime. They learned it was a no-no, and afterwards, did them at night. The dummies [Annotator's Note: dummy military equipment] were inflatable by air compressors on trucks. They had 400 inflatable tanks. They used up to 200 at a time. Wilson did the paperwork for the unit. They were fired upon by the Germans. The unit would set off canisters that sounded like mortars and the Germans would fire on the sounds. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. [Annotator's Note: Douglas Elton Fairbanks Jr.; American actor and producer] was the most instrumental in getting the Ghost Army done. He was an actor but was an officer in the British Navy. Montgomery [Annotator's Note: British Army Field Marshall Sir Bernard Law Montgomery] had used something similar in North Africa against Rommel [Annotator's Note: German Army Field Marshall Johannes Erwin Eugen Rommel; known as the Desert Fox]. Aerial reconnaissance was all it was playing to.

Anderson Wilson and his outfit [Annotator's Note: 23rd Headquarters Special Troops] went into Germany. Frankfurt was the first city. Wilson went into one of the big banks there and had never seen anything as beautiful as that was. When the war was over, he was in Idar-Oberstein. There were 100,000 displaced persons to look after there. The German civilians were not as happy to see the Americans as Belgium, France, and others. In Luxembourg, the Crown Prince had been exile and returned while Wilson was there. When they left Plymouth [Annotator's Note: Plymouth, England] to go across the channel, the harbor was full of inflatable boats. A friend of Wilson's told him they were used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wilson was proud that he was selected to go in that unit. He has no idea of why he was chosen. In the 603rd Camouflage Battalion [Annotator's Note: 23rd Headquarters Special Troops], the average IQ [Annotator's Note: Intelligence Quotient] was 119. Bill Blass [Annotator's Note: William Ralph Bass], the clothing designer, was a member of that unit. The film at the World War 2 Museum [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana] on the unit was financed by the niece of one of the artists from the unit. The 603rd handled the tanks and stuff like that.

Anderson Wilson was on leave in Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] when the war ended. When they had first arrived in Paris, the tanks were still burning in the streets. The Americans backed off and let de Gaulle [Annotator's Note: French Army General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, President of France] come in and liberate it. In every village they went to, the churches were reopened. It was a sight to see. Later, when the war ended, Wilson was standing at a plate glass window when a serviceman came busting through it. He went up on the Eifel Tower to the first deck. He came back to the United States on 23 June 1945 by a Navy transport. He came back first class, good food. Those ships were stable. He came into Hampton Roads, Virginia and kissed the ground. He does not think anyone was ever discharged from the 23rd [Annotator's Note: 23rd Headquarters Special Troops]. He went to Camp Rucker, Alabama [Annotator's Note: now Fort Rucker] and was discharged from a different unit that was organized to discharge them. There is nothing on his discharge paperwork that indicates he was in the 23rd. Wilson now sees a lot of stuff the media puts out that we should not be talking about. Some things the public does not need to know. We have some trying times ahead of us. Soldiers in war today do not know who the enemy is. He did a lot of assignments that meant going into town and giving misinformation about troop movements. He liked that assignment.