Embick went even further, securing use rights to large tracts of land in East Texas that bordered the primary Louisiana deployment grounds. Like central Louisiana, East Texas was then sparsely populated, with a network of unfinished roads that would challenge military topographers and unit commanders. The 3,400 square miles of combined maneuver area was also laced with rivers—the Sabine and Calcasieu to the west and the Red to the north—natural barriers that would present valuable training obstacles for the engineer units obliged to bridge them.

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Like Marshall, Embick had closely followed the German conquest of Poland. While he believed the maneuvers would be a good opportunity to test the Army’s new halftrack-mounted 75mm antitank gun, he and his planners also hoped to answer other questions: Could mobile units adequately replace horse cavalry? Could the Army’s newly formed paratrooper units actually be dropped en masse? Would armored units be able to maneuver effectively in difficult terrain and uncertain weather conditions? Would the Army’s new three-regiment “triangle divisions” maneuver more efficiently than the old four-regiment “square divisions”? Furthermore, Marshall was keen to see whether a professional officer corps of rising colonels and brigadier generals could command large units operating over vast tracts of territory, as they would be called on to do in the brewing war. Lt. Gen. Krueger later described what Marshall and America’s other senior commanders were looking for in their officers—men who possessed “broad vision, progressive ideas, a thorough grasp of the magnitude of the problems involved in handling an army, and lots of initiative and resourcefulness.”

While it was one thing to find the right region for the maneuvers, it was another to make certain the maneuvers were challenging and instructive. Throughout the spring of 1940, Embick and his staff worked tirelessly to devise a series of increasingly difficult tests that would prepare soldiers for the battlefield and test command arrangements from the squad level to full army level. Embick wanted to test units under as many different conditions as possible, to see whether they could communicate with each other, deploy according to schedules and, perhaps most important, cover long distances at night. The exercises were designed to be exhaustive—and exhausting: There’d be scant sleep on a real battlefield, so there would be little time for relaxation in Texas and Louisiana.

Embick sought logistics assistance from senior armored and infantry corps commanders, who insisted the maneuvers be as realistic as possible. Loudspeakers would blare the recorded sounds of battle, canister smoke would shroud the battlefield, and bags of white sand would be dropped from aircraft to simulate the impact of artillery shells. U.S. Army Air Corps spotter and reconnaissance planes would gather intelligence, while transports would deliver troops to newly constructed airfields. Planners stockpiled millions of rounds of blank ammunition, and Embick established rules to govern when units would join the line of fire and what kinds of “casualties” they’d suffer. His goal was not only to determine who could “kill” whom, but also to test the time it took medical units to transfer the “wounded” to rear-area combat hospitals. Finally, Embick appointed and trained hundreds of maneuver “umpires,” who, armed with clipboards and armbands, would monitor and assess units and leaders according to a complex grading system.

While the umpires’ conclusions were important, even more important, from Embick’s perspective, was feedback from individual commanders, who were to assess their own performance and that of their troops. Embick’s goal was not to determine winners and losers of the exercises, but to create an effective training regimen for the coming war.

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