Blue (East) is a small nation with a common boundary at the Sabine River with another small nation, Red (West). Blue has a small army, normally scattered throughout the country. Red has an even smaller army. These troops, however, are highly trained and are concentrated along the border.
Boundary disputes, local border incidents and alien minorities have resulted in increasing tension between the two nations. On April 20, the Red government provocatively announced it would hold its spring maneuvers just west of the Sabine River.
The Blue government became alarmed, increased its garrison at its border town of Alexandria and announced that it would move its Army to the vicinity of Alexandria for large-scale maneuvers.
The Red Army was to be the aggressor nation, schooled in the tactics of blitzkrieg, and the Blue, the defending force, protecting its national border along the Sabine River from a foreign invader. The Sabine, much of which marks the Texas-Louisiana line, was also regarded by many as the border between the Old South and the Southwest, so the sense of it as a national border was not far-fetched.
As the director of the maneuvers, Marshall was quick to point out that these exercises would have importance far greater than that normally attributed to war games. These maneuvers would be unscripted and, as in real war, based on “free play.” Commanders would be tested on the ground, where their errors and achievements would be boldly displayed. The maneuvers were meant to be a test of man, machine, and command. The maneuvers were to allow American troops to test tactics similar to those the Nazis were employing in Europe and to learn how to defend against them.28
The exercises would test not only the new triangular divisions but also the methods of marching men into battle. Gone were the close formations of 1917–18. Advancing or retreating troops would now move through the underbrush, spaced several yards apart in irregular patterns, an approach exemplifying the differences between the old square divisions and the new triangular ones.29
The stated premise of the maneuvers was that they were designed to test American forces in case of an invasion of North America, but this would be essentially a cover story, as Roosevelt, Marshall, and everyone else involved in the event knew they were also an early test of an expeditionary army.
Because the news of what was happening in Europe dominated the headlines and the front pages of newspapers in the United States, news of these maneuvers tended to fall on the back pages of news sections in papers outside the region. The events became a boon to the daily newspapers of the Deep South and the Gulf Coast, however, which often played the maneuvers as front-page news; BIG BATTLE EXPECTED IN MANEUVERS TODAY was the lead story on May 5 in a Columbus, Georgia, daily.30
Although members of Congress and the press were allowed to witness the maneuvers, foreign military attachés would not be invited for a number of reasons but especially to prevent the disclosure of tactics the Army was developing with regard to the use of its newest weapons and revised structure.31 The United States was beginning to fully awaken to the reality that some were out to do it harm. Although details were scarce, at least one dispatch filed by Henry N. Dorris of the New York Times mentioned that he had been privately informed by several National Guard officers of “fifth column activities”—espionage and/or sabotage—in their units and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been called in to “uproot” such elements.32
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Once assembled, for the remainder of March and April the two armies trained and prepared for the battle ahead. The Red Army recruited thousands of civilian volunteers from several states to act as spotters of enemy aircraft. The lion’s share of the spotters were members of the American Legion, and the name of their unit was the Third Army Aircraft Warning Service. Volunteers clamored to join this force.33
Getting men and machines in place for the maneuvers showed that despite shortages, the Army had the ability to move motorized columns quickly over long distances, as 41,000 men of the Blue Army moved 600 miles in six days from Georgia through Alabama and Mississippi to converge on Alexandria, Louisiana. The feat—achieved thanks to the use of a large number of trucks to transport men and horses as well as weapons—was immediately termed the largest and fastest mass movement of armed troops ever witnessed in the United States during peacetime.34
On May 8, 1940, all but a few of the Army’s 70 generals were present to observe the maneuvers in Louisiana. It was the greatest assemblage of American generals ever in one place. The Associated Press described the initial ground attack, which began at 4:30 a.m. on May 9 as the smaller Red Army drove east out of Texas toward the Blue Army: “Detouring, doubling back in sudden withdrawals and heavily camouflaged with green boughs, the big armored trucks roared down back roads and country lanes, awakening farmers, and setting their dogs to howling.”35
The predawn attack by horse and mechanized units was halted only temporarily by the Blue Army, which was unable to summon its reserves in time.
Within a few hours, the Red Army had forded the shallow, murky Sabine River, and its First Cavalry had thundered into Leesville, 20 miles east of the river. Other Red units captured Slagle, DeRidder, Hornbeck, and Robeline. The Blue Army forces defending Louisiana suffered a stunning defeat under a battering attack by mechanized troops. The Red Air Corps then gained further ground, theoretically destroying Mississippi River bridges at Vicksburg and New Orleans, virtually isolating the Blues. One element of the Red Army moved quickly toward Alexandria, the Blue capital, but just as it began to look like the objective was in sight it ran into a large Blue Army force that had dug in on the grounds of a local college. In New Orleans, the Red’s Fifth Division rolled into the city in a 60-mile-long procession.
The Associated Press report called the defeat of the Blue Army “bewildering” and noted that in order to keep the maneuvers going, umpires ruled that Blue troops could move across certain bridges that had been “destroyed” by Red warplanes. A reporter embedded with the Blue Army declared it unprepared for war.36
The first of three planned phases of these maneuvers ended on May 9 with the apparent defeat of the Blue Army, although the generals running the operation reminded the press that this was not a contest and that keeping score was inappropriate. At this point in the maneuvers, it was up to the press to decide who had won and lost, which it did in dispatches that told of a quick, decisive, and bewildering Blue defeat.37
In Europe the next day, in excess of two million German troops invaded France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands, employing blitzkrieg tactics.* Reaction came in many forms and forums, including prophetically on Wall Street, where stocks hit the low point of the year the next day. By contrast, the stocks of steel, copper, and aircraft and munitions makers shot up. What Charles F. Speare of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) described as the “peace stocks” took a beating. The market seemed to be betting on nothing less than total war for the United States.38
Word of the Nazi invasion of France and the Low Countries spread quickly among those participating in the maneuvers. An Associated Press dispatch filed from Louisiana described “a sobering atmosphere of grim reality” settling over the mock battlefields. The only official statement came from Lieutenant General Stanley D. Emrick, commander of the Third Army, who said at a press conference: “The Army is ready for any ‘M’ day to defend this country.” M day in Army parlance then stood for general mobilization day, and despite Emrick’s confidence, as the maneuvers continued they showed that the Army was ill prepared for such a mobilization.
While the maneuvers were still underway, Marshall testified before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, pointing out that the armies involved had no reserves in terms of men or materiel: “In other words, if they were bombed