Rebecca Siegel

By Naperville Magazine
January 2026 View more Spotlight

By Jeff Banowetz

This Lisle author dives into the top-secret trickery of World War II

Rebecca Siegel first came to the Chicago area for graduate school at Loyola, where she expected to earn a PhD in English literature. But it didn’t take her long to figure out that career track wasn’t for her. “I realized quickly that I made a huge mistake,” she recalls with a laugh. She finished up her master’s degree and then pivoted to a job with a children’s book publisher in Chicago, which proved to be a much better fit. “I ended up loving it,” she says of her time on the editing side of the publishing industry. In 2017, she began writing herself and has since produced a wide range of books and essays for younger readers. Her book, To Fly Among the Stars, which covers women participants in the American astronaut program in the 1960s, was named a National Science Teaching Association Outstanding Science Trade Book in 2020. She’s covered topics ranging from famous shipwrecks to the Loch Ness monster, typically targeted at middle readers.

Her latest book, How the Ghost Army Hoodwinked Hitler: The Story of American Artistry and Deception in World War II, was released in November, and highlights a little-known U.S. Army unit that used trickery to gain an advantage over the Axis powers in Europe.

Q: The story involves the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the Ghost Army, which used methods such as inflatable tanks and pyrotechnics to stage fake military maneuvers. It sounds like the idea for a Hollywood movie.
A: You think this can’t be true. It’s one of the stories where every layer you peel back gets even more fantastical. So they used inflatables—that’s wild. And then you realize that they also used scripts and props and had acting and dialog. And then you peel it back even further to see that half of these guys ended up as incredibly famous artists.

Q: Your book highlights the role artists played in World War II, using skills that aren’t typically part of war.
A: I take my subjects very seriously because I want to make sure I’m presenting material to kids in a way that doesn’t glorify war. I don’t want to discount some of the really hard parts of history. But I also want to make sure that I’m showing kids different types of people who can do heroic things. A lot of the men in this unit were very peaceful artists who were not violent guys, who did not want to go to war. One of the men I profile in the book is Bernie Bluestein; he’s actually local, from a northern suburb. He’s an artist, and he didn’t want to go to war. And I find that perspective so valuable to share, that not everybody was a gung-ho GI Joe.

Q: Do you think this book will get kids interested in learning more about this time in history?
A: I hope so. I do view this story as a vehicle to explain the war in the larger context by focusing on something really narrow and small. I write in depth about three members of the group, giving you a human entry into the story.

Q: What do you love about your book projects?
A: I feel so lucky that I get to do this job because it’s like a fantasy. I get to go on all of these little adventures when I’m writing these books. Like in To Fly Among the Stars, I learned how to fly an airplane. And for this book, I had to go to the National Archives and go through recently declassified military files, and I got to talk about all this spy stuff. A couple of years ago, I wrote a book about the Loch Ness monster, so I had to go to Scotland to hunt for it, which was hilarious and so fun.

Q: Was it hard to report that the Loch Ness Monster isn’t real?
A: It was a little tricky because it’s a bit of a bummer of a starting point, which is that it’s a hoax. She’s not real. But the book tells the story of a hoax that was basically a prank that snowballed wildly out of control. It was fueled by fake news, so the book is really about fake news culture in the 1930s and how all these things came together to form a perfect storm for everybody to briefly believe in a monster. So the story itself is wild.

Photos: Rebecca Siegel