In September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army put half a million soldiers and 19 divisions into the pine woods of west Louisiana for the largest peacetime military exercise in American history. It was the final dress rehearsal for the war that everyone in Washington already knew was coming.
George C. Marshall organized it. Dwight Eisenhower was the chief of staff of the 'Blue Army.' George Patton commanded a tank brigade and crossed the Red River on wooden pontoon bridges that the Army Corps of Engineers built in eighteen hours. Omar Bradley was there. Mark Clark was there. Walter Krueger was there. The Louisiana Maneuvers were the place where Marshall watched his officers in the field and decided which of them would get the big commands in Europe and the Pacific — and which would be quietly retired. More generals were promoted or sidelined based on what they did in those two weeks than in any other exercise in Army history.
The physical footprint is still here. Camp Polk (now Fort Johnson) was built in June 1941 specifically to stage the maneuvers. Peason Ridge, 33,000 acres of live-fire training ground, was carved out by buying out three communities. The old pontoon-bridge site on the Red River has a monument. The Louisiana Maneuvers Monument in Leesville lists the units that fought the mock battles. If you drive any farm-to-market road in Vernon Parish, you are driving on ground where the men who won World War II learned how to do it.
