Infantryman get a close-up look at the M2A1 medium tank during a lull in the 'fighting' at the Louisiana Maneuvers (Courtesy National Archives)

The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: to prepare America’s soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world.

It rained on Monday morning Sept. 15 over all Louisiana. From low, darkening clouds the drops spattered on the State’s good highways, on its hundreds of marshy mud roads, on its pine forests, and on its deep swamps full of quicksand.

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The rain fell, too, on 350,000 U.S. soldiers and 50,000 U.S. Army vehicles as they fought the greatest sham battle in U.S. history. The attack had come before dawn. With two fast-moving, hard-hitting armored divisions leading the way, Lieutenant General Ben Lear, commander of the Second (Red) Army, had pushed his troops across the muddy Red River, was already sending long tentacles down the highways to the south, where Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third (Blue) Army lay in wait. Overhead, armadas of pursuit planes fought great dogfights, while sleek A-20A attack bombers and Navy dive bombers strafed the columns of tanks and trucks moving up to the front.

That excerpt from the Oct. 6, 1941, issue of Life opened a multipage feature article on the largest mass training maneuvers undertaken by the U.S. Army to date. The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: to prepare America’s soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world.

In the early spring of 1940, the U.S. military faced a seemingly insurmountable task. With Poland overrun by German armored columns now poised to strike at France, and China under assault by Japan, America’s commanders had to prepare the U.S. military for war. The problem was not a dearth of troops—after Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg rolled through Poland in September 1939, Congress had mobilized the National Guard and Reserve and approved an increase in the size of the Army. It was that the existing troops were poorly trained or not trained at all.

No one was more acutely aware of this than Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall. A student of history, Marshall was certain American boys were as courageous as any German or Japanese soldier, but they lacked sufficient training and combat experience—and time was short. Marshall concluded that what America’s burgeoning ranks needed was a complex training exercise, an exacting test in an environment that would closely approximate the realities of the battlefield.

To help implement his idea, Marshall called on Lt. Gen. Stanley D. Embick, a veteran soldier and commander of the Third U.S. Army, headquartered in Atlanta. Marshall directed Embick to find a suitable location where thousands of U.S. troops could be deployed in a series of maneuvers to test their readiness. Armed with these instructions and accompanied by his aide, Major Mark Clark, Embick traveled to central Louisiana, where the Army had trained many of its soldiers during World War I. With a tattered road map as a guide, Embick and Clark tramped through Louisiana’s backcountry, noting the roads, trails, swamps and forests.

Sparsely populated, thick with undergrowth and uncharted swamps, and scarred by rural traces that turn to muck at the slightest hint of rain, central Louisiana was an ideal place to prepare an army, with vast tracts of land that could accommodate the large-scale maneuvers the Army needed to conduct. The north-central part of the state is home to Kisatchie National Forest, a 604,000-acre virtual wilderness of pinewood hills. Just south of the national forest was Camp Evangeline, a 23,000-acre tract established by the Army in 1930. By linking the two tracts, the military had a ready-made training ground. But Embick determined the training area needed to be larger still. So the Army secured Louisiana’s permission to conduct maneuvers in rural areas south of the national forest. Embick and state officials worked quickly to iron out the details, and by early June 1940 the Army had secured the right to deploy across thousands of square miles in Grant, Natchitoches, Winn, Rapides, Vernon, Claiborne and Webster parishes.

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