By April 1940, all was ready for the Louisiana Maneuvers. There were to be two events in the spring and autumn of 1940 and two more the following year, with the largest, most complex and most important to be held in September 1941.

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The 1940 maneuvers began in May with 70,000 soldiers, who trained and “fought” in four separate exercises of three days each, beginning on May 9. These first maneuvers, Embick said, were “experiments,” not contests. The first was to see whether armored units could actually mobilize and travel long distances. To test this, the War Department ordered Maj. Gen. Walter C. Short’s IV Corps to move from its Fort Benning headquarters in Georgia to Louisiana—550 miles in six days, the longest motor march ever undertaken by the U.S. Army. Soon after arriving in Louisiana, IV Corps was thrown into a series of corps-on-corps exercises that pitted Short’s armored columns (the “Blue Army”) against Krueger’s IX Corps (the “Red Army”). As military historian Christopher Gabel noted:

In the first exercise, Red Army took the offensive, crossing the Calcasieu while Blue Army defended the river line. In the second exercise, Blue Army attacked, enveloping both flanks of the Red force. The third maneuver again saw Blue on the attack, this time with penetrations of the Red line at Slagle and Hornbeck. In the fourth exercise, the provisional tank brigade and the 7th Mechanized Cavalry Brigade were combined into a provisional division totaling some 382 tanks—the first armored division in Army history. This force spearheaded a Red Army attack, which the Blue force countered with an antitank defense extending as far east as Gorum and Flatwoods.

Embick followed up, crisscrossing the “battlefield” to question commanders and soldiers on both sides and reaching some preliminary conclusions on America’s combat readiness. What he found was not encouraging—the Army evidently had a lot to learn about mobile warfare. Vehicle breakdowns, repair team shortages, repeated traffic jams and poorly worded orders were all common. More important, senior commanders’ failure to lead from the front led to uncoordinated attacks and jumbled defenses. “Commanders and staffs mistakenly believed that they could run the war from headquarters,” Gabel noted, “relying on maps and telephones, much as they had in the static warfare of 1918.”

In the wake of the May war games, several senior tank experts, including Colonel George S. Patton Jr., recommended the Army create separate armored divisions that could operate unencumbered by infantry or horse cavalry units. The recommendation was forwarded to Marshall, who quickly established a special armored training school at Fort Knox, Ky.

While Embick bemoaned the performance of the armored units and the lack of communication between senior commanders and their frontline units, he was satisfied that young recruits were in good physical condition and would perform well in the event of war. And despite his disappointment that few senior officers manned the front with their troops, Embick was pleased to find the Army had created a dedicated officer corps comprising some of the nation’s best military minds. Among those who participated in the maneuvers and went on to assume major leadership roles in World War II were Clark, Patton and Lt. Col. Omar Bradley. Perhaps the most outstanding young commander of the 1940 maneuvers was Colonel Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell. During a key moment in the face-off between the Blue and Red armies, Stilwell commanded a “blitzkrieg” invasion of northern Louisiana with a flying column of tanks—just the kind of attack German General Heinz Guderian was then planning against France. Impressed, Embick and the umpires passed Stilwell’s name up the chain of command. After Pearl Harbor, Marshall appointed Stilwell to lead Allied troops against the Japanese in Burma and China.

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