It is now well-known American military lore that in his desk drawer in Washington, Marshall kept “a little black book” (one he once waved at a reporter, just to prove it existed) in which he listed those officers he believed would lead the nation in battle against the Axis. The list had grown through the years. McNair was on it, as were Bradley, Stilwell, Clark and Patton. By the end of the Louisiana Maneuvers, Marshall had added Eisenhower to his list. Three months later, eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he brought Ike to Washington. Within months, the newly promoted brigadier general was in London, planning the invasion of North Africa. Within two years he was supreme allied commander and Marshall’s eyes and ears in Europe.

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Marshall was not the only one impressed by Eisenhower. The young officer also entranced journalists covering the Louisiana Maneuvers, front-pages fodder through 1941. CBS reporter Eric Sevareid eyed Krueger’s staff and concluded that Eisenhower “makes more sense than any of the rest of them.” Drew Pearson, perhaps the best-known reporter of his day, agreed, telling his readers that Eisenhower “conceived and directed the strategy that routed [Lear’s] Second Army,” and that the balding lieutenant colonel was endowed with “a steel-trap mind plus unusual physical vigor.”

Such reports wouldn’t have swayed Marshall—after all, no one on his list had actually been tested in combat. Still, the Louisiana Maneuvers had reinforced the chief of staff’s faith in realistic training. The Army he had built in just two whirlwind years had not been blooded, but Marshall was confident it would acquit itself well. And while he had taken note of Eisenhower’s talent, he was even more buoyed by Patton’s aggressive battlefield tactics.

Following his failed breakout from the Red River “beachhead,” Patton was made a commander in Krueger’s Red Army, which would take the offensive during the second set of exercises. In the latter part of September, as McNair watched in amazement, Patton led his armored corps in a massed flanking attack against the Blue Army’s defense in depth. Patton’s 2nd Armored Division advanced 200 miles through northern Louisiana and East Texas in three days, enveloping Lear’s flank. It was a brilliant maneuver. Lear’s army thus surrounded, McNair suspended the exercise.

McNair and Krueger spent the following weeks reviewing lists of senior officers, culling those who had failed the test of the Louisiana Maneuvers. Those who survived the process were marked for combat commands. Those who did not were shunted off to other service or retired. Lear was charged with training the Second Army and later replaced McNair, who died in Normandy, as the Army’s chief trainer. But Louisiana had sealed Lear’s fate: He would never obtain the combat command he desired. Krueger, thought too old to command, was sidelined as head of the Southern Defense Command. But in January 1943, General Douglas MacArthur told Marshall he wanted Krueger to head up the new Sixth U.S. Army, based in Australia. Krueger went on to become one of the toughest, if now largely forgotten, combat leaders of World War II. Of course, history records the achievements of Patton, Clark, Bradley and Eisenhower, who replicated in Europe what they first practiced in central Louisiana.

Were the Louisiana Maneuvers a success? The ever-critical McNair praised the exercises, but was quick to point out they had revealed some weaknesses: “The principal weakness was deficiency in small-unit training due fundamentally to inadequate leadership.” If there is one hero of the maneuvers, it is McNair, who was everywhere at once, watching and taking notes. From these notes McNair—whom Marshall appointed commanding general of Army Ground Forces—shaped the most intensive and physically demanding training regimen for regular soldiers in American history. Over the next four years, until he was killed while watching the soldiers he had trained advance into Normandy, McNair molded the cadre of sergeants who became the backbone of the Army—the small-unit leaders he worried about during the steamy Louisiana summer of 1941.

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