Because London and Paris were not being bombed at this moment, some even thought that it might be possible to restart peace talks with Hitler. The Harvard Crimson ran a series of hopeful editorials pleading for a negotiated settlement between Germany and the Allied powers. One of the Crimson editors, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, son of the American ambassador to England, wrote to his father in early 1940 to report: “Everyone is getting much more confident about our staying out of the war but that of course is probably because there is such a lull over there.”15
As military activity reached a virtual standstill and the diplomatic front became quiet, the volume of press coverage shrank during the winter months. Foreign affairs had dominated front pages in the fall, but by February such articles were scarce. In their place were silly stories, such as “Real, Phoney War Finds George Snoring Peacefully,” the tale of George, a toothless, 120-year-old alligator in the London Zoo, who had been asleep since the beginning of the Phoney War and not affected at all by food rationing.16
On February 23, 1940, as Marshall argued for funds before skeptical members of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, he addressed the issue of the Phoney War: “If Europe blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere.”17 Marshall believed that the conflagration would come soon enough, and he told the committee he was doing all he could to get ready for it by obtaining the arms and equipment needed to outfit an Army of one million men.
At the time of this testimony, Marshall had already begun to inform Congress of his plans to test his new triangular divisions in large-scale maneuvers. During the course of the hearings, Marshall disclosed that in addition to maneuvers scheduled to take place in May somewhere along the Gulf Coast, which had already been revealed, three other exercises would be held in August 1940.18
To many members of Congress the concept of such maneuvers was new. Some knew about the “sham battles” or “sham wars” staged earlier in which two opposing forces in formation fired blanks at one another while civilians watched the show from a safe distance, as had been true of the 1939 Manassas maneuver, but this was an entirely different operation mounted on a large scale for a period of days or weeks.19
Under Marshall’s direction, a maneuver was envisioned as a carefully prepared operation, undertaken for training soldiers in the field in large numbers, concentrated at great distances from their normal home stations. These maneuvers would have as much to do with troop movements, communication between units, and logistics as they would with the actual faux combat. Aircraft from both the Army Air Corps and the Navy would be involved. And unlike the 1939 exercises in Manassas and Plattsburg, which were straightforward, scripted attack-and-defend operations, these maneuvers would allow officers on the ground to operate as they would in a real war, without a script, and thus serve as a test of tactical leadership.
Marshall knew exactly what he was looking for as a stage for the maneuvers: a largely underpopulated area able to sustain the damage and destruction that the maneuvers would inevitably produce. Scouts went out all over the United States to locate ideal areas. After studying their reports, Marshall finally decided on the lower Sabine River area for the first exercise. The river formed a natural border between Texas and Louisiana, and the area long ago had been involved in boundary disputes between the United States and Mexico. The mock war zone selected was a sparsely populated, reptile-rich swampy area presenting its own set of challenges. The front for the staged warfare would extend along the river for 25 to 30 miles.
The exact location of the first of these events had been kept under wraps until February 7, 1940, when Senator John Holmes Overton Sr. (Democrat of Louisiana) announced to the press that he had gotten word directly from Marshall that the maneuvers would take place in Louisiana. Marshall had told the senator that the Army needed a large area with plenty of rivers as obstacles for a mobile infantry to overcome. Overton was pleased, as he saw the maneuvers as a boon to Louisiana’s economy. He estimated that the cost of the exercise would be $28 million; Louisiana would receive a large slice of that amount.20
Gaining permission to trespass on private land was a process that moved rapidly once the mock war zone had been mapped out. Some 6,500 individual and mostly small landowners signed on granting access to 3,400 square miles. A mere three and a half square miles were denied outright, and there was an additional ten square miles where the owner could not be found. By the time the maneuvers were ready to start, more than two million acres had been set aside for the mock war. The area was almost three times the size of Rhode Island.21,*
As the Phoney War dragged on overseas, Marshall gradually brought other southern politicians into his plans. On March 21, Marshall told Representative William M. Colmer (Democrat of Mississippi) that in the early part of May, 36,000 troops would pass through his state as they traveled from Fort Benning, Georgia, to the Sabine River in Louisiana for the exercises, which would soon be known far and wide as the Louisiana Maneuvers. These maneuvers were scheduled to begin on May 5 and end on May 23.22
But war games were one thing and war another. One effect of the Phoney War on the United States was that in the spring of 1940, public opinion was strongly opposed to American involvement. One poll, taken in March, held that 96.4 percent of Americans were against going to war with Germany.23
To many, Marshall’s requests for more troops and equipment were regarded as “mere warmongering,” in the words of Marshall’s wife, Katherine. As if to underscore the point, on April 3, 1940, the House Appropriations Committee—the same body that Marshall had warned about the coming blaze—cut the modest defense budget by 10 percent, more than $67 million below the amount requested by the president. Among the items cut was $12 million for a cold-weather air-training base in Alaska, which caused Marshall to be “very much concerned,” as the base was needed to protect naval bases planned for the Aleutian Islands as well as the rest of Alaska—all of which would be a prime invasion point for Imperial Japan if it attacked North America. Without the new base, Alaska’s defense would rest on the occupants of some wooden barracks constructed in Sitka about 40 years earlier.24 The cuts were especially damaging to the Army Air Corps, which had requested 496 new aircraft but was granted only 57.25
“One thing is certain,” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said of Hitler on April 4, 1940, in a speech delivered in Central Hall, Westminster. “He missed the bus.” Five days later, Chamberlain was proven disastrously wrong when the Phoney War came to an abrupt end. Germany invaded Denmark, which surrendered in only six hours, and at the same time Nazi warships entered Norwegian waters, attacking ships and landing troops that began to occupy key cities by the end of the day.26
The next morning’s eight-column headline in the New York Times read: GERMANS OCCUPY DENMARK, ATTACK OSLO. By the next day, as the Associated Press announced, a new Norwegian government had been formed under the leadership of Vidkun Quisling, the head of the Norwegian Nazi Party. Almost immediately, the name Quisling became a powerful eponym for collaborator and traitor. Despite the Nazi flag flying over Oslo and the flight of the royal family and much of the government to the north, the Norwegian resistance and the regular army continued to fight, along with expeditionary forces sent by the British and the French.27
The Louisiana Maneuvers of 1940 were billed as the greatest military maneuver in U.S. history. Seventy thousand uniformed army men from camps and bases in 33 states began assembling in two locations in the Deep South in March. Texas was sending the greatest number of men to the event, 12,000, and Georgia and New York State provided 7,000 apiece. The 70,000 troops represented about half the standing U.S. Army. In addition, the Army was sending almost all of its 400 or so working tanks, including several of experimental design, along with 340 armored vehicles and 3,000 trucks. One hundred and twenty-eight aircraft, including bombers and pursuit, attack, and observation aircraft, would take part in the games.
Units were assigned to one of two armies, which