The 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers were held over three weeks in August and three weeks in September. To coordinate them, Marshall replaced Embick, who was retiring, with Brig. Gen. Lesley “Whitey” McNair, commandant of the Army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The self-effacing McNair, whom Marshall described as “the brains of the Army,” had not only crafted the military’s 13-week basic training regimen, he had reoriented and reformed Leavenworth’s curriculum, passing on to Marshall the names of his best students. Like Marshall, McNair understood the challenges the U.S. faced in fighting the Germans and Japanese and was concerned about his service’s poor preparation. He decided to enlarge on what Embick had started, replacing the 70,000-soldier exercise of 1940 with the largest peacetime exercise in American history. “We didn’t know how soon war would come,” McNair later observed, “but we knew it was coming, and we had to get together something of an army pretty darn fast.”

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McNair conceived a groundbreaking war game that mobilized 400,000 soldiers in two armies—the Red, or “Kotmk,” representing Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and Kentucky; and the Blue, or “Almat,” comprising Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. The armies would contend for control of the Mississippi River. As in Embick’s 1940 maneuvers, umpires would grade individual leaders and units on leadership and combat skills. Senior officers were warned to ensure proper supply and preparation of their troops. Communications systems that had plagued Embick the year before were improved with upgraded equipment, including new radios for senior commanders and their subordinates. This time, McNair insisted, senior commanders were to be as close to the front as the situation demanded. In June, July and August, corps deployments tested coordination between air and ground reconnaissance units, while a second set of corps-on-corps exercises honed combat leadership skills.

Marshall focused considerable time on the 1941 maneuvers, calling them “a combat college for troop leading” and a laboratory to test the “new armored, antitank and air forces that had come of age since 1918.” He personally observed many of the corps- and division-level maneuvers and, in the autumn, an expanded training exercise in the hills of North and South Carolina. But the major focus was on the Red vs. Blue conflict in Louisiana and East Texas. The mock war began on September 15—just three months before Pearl Harbor—and pitted Lt. Gen. Ben Lear’s Second (Red) Army against Krueger’s Third (Blue) Army. Lear’s goal was to defeat the Blue Army and occupy Louisiana. A hard-bitten, gruff-talking disciplinarian, Lear was not well liked by his troops, but he had an eye for detail and was surrounded by a cadre of talented and aggressive officers, including veterans of Embick’s 1940 exercises. Among them was Patton, whom Lear tasked to lead a lightning combined-arms strike against Krueger’s Louisiana defenses.

Krueger, an aging veteran and competitive taskmaster who too quickly bristled at unintended slights, desperately wanted to beat Lear. He gathered a staff of brainy if little-known assistants, including Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower as his chief of staff. Eisenhower was an old friend of Patton and, in May, began meticulously planning Louisiana’s defenses against Patton’s tanks. Marshall, who had doubts about Eisenhower, accepted Krueger’s word that “Ike” was a brilliant planner and tough soldier.

Krueger’s judgment of Eisenhower was soon proven on the Louisiana battlefield. Lear’s army crossed the Red River on September 15 with Patton’s tanks in the lead. Eisenhower was ready. Three of Krueger’s mobile corps rapidly responded to the Red Army threat and moved to pin it against the river. Patton laughed off the threat, even circulating an offer to subordinates of $50 to any man who captured “a certain SOB called Eisenhower.” Unperturbed, Ike and Krueger ordered their armored units to flank Patton and prevent a breakout. Umpires deemed the maneuver successful. The first part of the war was over. The Blue Army, and Eisenhower, had won.

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