That situation was beginning to change, slowly, in the early months of 1940, as more and more money was being laid out for arms and munitions, and the new factories to produce them were coming online. On May 16, six days after the Nazi attack on France and the Low Countries, President Roosevelt appeared personally before both houses of Congress and called for “arms to make our defenses invulnerable, our security absolute.” He asked for new arms appropriations of $1.182 billion and then urged the aircraft industry to establish a production capacity of 50,000 warplanes per year.40
During the second phase of the exercises in Louisiana, the tide turned quickly. Now the Red Army was suddenly overwhelmed and unprepared for war; its only hope was to bring reinforcements to the front, with which it tried to repel a Blue attack. But the Blue Army was successful, driving the Reds back to the Sabine River and into Texas. The Red forces, outnumbered three to two, were simply unable to hold their positions against the highly mobile teams of the Blue Army.
The final phase of the maneuvers lined the two armies up along a 60-mile front. After two days of stalemate, the Blue Army defeated the Red Army. The final engagement was, however, based on imaginary numbers and assumptions, as the aircraft that actually attacked the other side were so small in number that the judges had to multiply their impact to get a score. Rather than display American airpower, the exercises were a display of its total inadequacy. One reporter, noting the reliance on imaginary aircraft to stage an attack, compared the simulation of war to nothing more than a penny firecracker.41
These maneuvers revealed how ill prepared the Army was for waging the kind of well-led mobile warfare being waged in Europe by the Germans. At one level, problems such as a shortage of reliable tanks and trucks and repair teams to keep these vehicles moving could be solved with money, but the greater problem was the failure of leadership. Commanders in Louisiana chose to lead from behind their lines rather than out in front with their troops. “Commanders and staffs mistakenly believed that they could run the war from headquarters,” Army historian Christopher R. Gabel concluded, “relying on maps and telephones, much as they had in the static warfare of 1918.” The result, on display in Louisiana, was that both offense and defense were poorly coordinated.42
The most severe early criticism came on May 27, in a room full of senior officers at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. The bearer of bad news was Major General Herbert J. Brees, the chief control officer for the maneuvers. “If results would not have been so tragic,” he said, “some of the so-called attacks without use of supporting weapons were so absurd as to be farcical.”
Brees claimed that officers at all levels, showing a disinclination to move across country to engage the enemy, had failed to play the game. Because of poor or absent communication, there were instances of friendly troops firing into one another. He also cited the officers for not ordering the infantry out of their vehicles and into the field to engage the enemy. “You can’t fight in a truck,” he shouted.
As tough as he was on the officers, Brees praised the men under them: “My hat is off to our enlisted men, be they private, corporal or sergeant.” His highest praise was reserved for the non-commissioned officers—enlisted men who had risen to the rank of sergeant and whom he termed the backbone of the Army—who “acted on their own, intelligently, with initiative, with a keen and complete understanding of what it was all about and what they were trying to do.” Finally, Brees called for a major increase in the number of armored vehicles: “We need more tanks—light, medium and heavy.”43
Good intelligence and airborne reconnaissance were lacking. To some, the exercises took on the aura of comic opera, complete with slapstick props. Trucks were dispatched with the word TANK written on their canvas covers. Stovepipes served as stand-ins for mortars, and broomsticks mounted on wood blocks acted as machine guns. As one of the supply officers later said, it was galling to see what should have been the most powerful army in the world “playing soldiers.”44
Time pointed out the lack of Air Corps participation, practically no realistic antiaircraft practice, and no practice whatsoever with and against parachute troops—which the U.S. Army had not yet officially recognized as a functional element. The magazine too dismissed the exercises as kids playing soldiers: “Overnight, the pleasant doings in Louisiana became old-fashioned nonsense. Against Europe’s total war, the U.S. Army looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”45
Noting the costs, more than 200 injuries, and the accidental deaths of a dozen men, several members of Congress questioned the validity of the exercises. One of the problems underscored by the maneuvers was the fact that any camaraderie and shared experience among the soldiers who had trained over the course of many weeks were lost when the exercises were over, as the men were dispersed to points as far away as Fort Lewis, Washington, 13 days away by truck under ideal conditions and precise planning.
Nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler listened to an unnamed general boast that action in Louisiana proved the U.S. Regular Army was as tough as the German army. Pegler took strong exception, pointing out that the Regular Army was badly scattered and could not possibly be assembled quickly in the continental United States during an emergency.46
One of the most direct critiques came from reporter T. A. Price of the Dallas Morning News, who began by pointing out the “alarming inadequacy” of the combat aircraft available, in both the exercises and the Army at large. But his strongest criticism concerned the fact that two armies—one highly mechanized and mobile (Blue) and the other preponderantly infantry (Red)—had been created at great expense and were now being sent home. Relying on comments from officers on the scene, Price insisted that the armies created for Louisiana should be held intact as a model for other armies that would be needed in the future. If allowed to disperse, he noted: “We not only will have no Army but will have torn up the only model we ever have made for an Army. Most of the sweat, toil and improvement in morale that have been won here will have been lost forever.”47
One of the participants in the Maneuvers was Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who had also served in the 1939 exercises in Plattsburg, New York. Lodge was now a captain in the cavalry reserves assigned to Patton’s Second Armored Division as a staff officer. The grandson of his namesake, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, he was clearly the most important political figure in uniform in Louisiana. Speaking to an Associated Press reporter during the maneuvers, he noted shortages in manpower and tanks and called for the immediate creation of a Regular Army of 750,000 men, a demand he repeated on the Senate floor when he returned to Washington. Lodge told the Senate that the shortages were “very grave deficiencies.” Money was needed to effect such changes, and Lodge immediately began to help Marshall convince Congress to increase Army appropriations to improve the nation’s military readiness.
Lodge’s strongest demand in terms of weaponry was for more tanks. Referring to his recent days in Louisiana he testified: “I have recently seen all the tanks in the United States, about 400 in number, or about one finger of the fanlike German advance about which we have read, or about the number destroyed in two days of fighting in the current European War. The Germans have a rough total of 3,000.” Lodge went on to point out that all but a few of the tanks held by the United States were light tanks weighing in at 12 tons or less, whereas some of the Nazi tanks were 80-ton giants.48
Marshall, who had hoped to attend the maneuvers himself but was unable to because of the press of events in Washington, carefully reviewed the reports from Louisiana and expressed his dismay in “the ragged performance of officers and troops and the lack of realism.” He immediately began thinking ahead to a second round of maneuvers, in 1941.49
In perspective, the 1940 Louisiana Maneuvers were in the words of military historian Mary Katherine Barbier: “significant because it was the first of its kind. Never before had the Army practiced for war on such a vast scale during peacetime.”50
Only African American newspapers reported that a division of black troops in the Blue Army had taken part in the second and third phases