Louisiana Maneuvers (1940-1941)

I have taken part in several of the large scale maneuvers : "Kernal Usher", Cobra Gold, Team Spirit, Bright Star, CAX 29 Palms, CMTC Ft. Irwin, CMTC Hohenfells and endless hours at Camp Pendleton up and down hills yelling "butter butter bang bang".

With the exception of Hohenfells and Irwin the large maneuvers did not produce a winner or a loser. The operations were more a test of Logistics and deployment than they were a test of combat prowess. Regardless of wether you were the defender or attacker you were graded on how well you conducted operations and then you'd switch sides.

At Irwin and Hohenfells there were winners and losers as the entire battlefield, "The Box", was fully intigrated and monitored. Imagine a huge game of "Laser tag" with Tanks, Helicopters, Land Mines and Airstrikes. What makes this possible is the use of MILES (Military Laser Engagement System) gear for everyting from individual troops to helicopters and the ability to track the system.

Brad

 

"Embick sought logistics assistance from senior armored and infantry corps commanders, who insisted the maneuvers be as realistic as possible. Loudspeakers would blare the recorded sounds of battle, canister smoke would shroud the battlefield, and bags of white sand would be dropped from aircraft to simulate the impact of artillery shells. U.S. Army Air Corps spotter and reconnaissance planes would gather intelligence, while transports would deliver troops to newly constructed airfields. Planners stockpiled millions of rounds of blank ammunition, and Embick established rules to govern when units would join the line of fire and what kinds of “casualties” they’d suffer. His goal was not only to determine who could “kill” whom, but also to test the time it took medical units to transfer the “wounded” to rear-area combat hospitals. Finally, Embick appointed and trained hundreds of maneuver “umpires,” who, armed with clipboards and armbands, would monitor and assess units and leaders according to a complex grading system.
While the umpires’ conclusions were important, even more important, from Embick’s perspective, was feedback from individual commanders, who were to assess their own performance and that of their troops. Embick’s goal was not to determine winners and losers of the exercises, but to create an effective training regimen for the coming war."

"The 1940 maneuvers began in May with 70,000 soldiers, who trained and “fought” in four separate exercises of three days each, beginning on May 9. These first maneuvers, Embick said, were “experiments,” not contests. The first was to see whether armored units could actually mobilize and travel long distances. To test this, the War Department ordered Maj. Gen. Walter C. Short’s IV Corps to move from its Fort Benning headquarters in Georgia to Louisiana—550 miles in six days, the longest motor march ever undertaken by the U.S. Army. Soon after arriving in Louisiana, IV Corps was thrown into a series of corps-on-corps exercises that pitted Short’s armored columns (the “Blue Army”) against Krueger’s IX Corps (the “Red Army”). As military historian Christopher Gabel noted:
In the first exercise, Red Army took the offensive, crossing the Calcasieu while Blue Army defended the river line. In the second exercise, Blue Army attacked, enveloping both flanks of the Red force. The third maneuver again saw Blue on the attack, this time with penetrations of the Red line at Slagle and Hornbeck. In the fourth exercise, the provisional tank brigade and the 7th Mechanized Cavalry Brigade were combined into a provisional division totaling some 382 tanks—the first armored division in Army history. This force spearheaded a Red Army attack, which the Blue force countered with an antitank defense extending as far east as Gorum and Flatwoods.
Embick followed up, crisscrossing the “battlefield” to question commanders and soldiers on both sides and reaching some preliminary conclusions on America’s combat readiness. What he found was not encouraging—the Army evidently had a lot to learn about mobile warfare. Vehicle breakdowns, repair team shortages, repeated traffic jams and poorly worded orders were all common. More important, senior commanders’ failure to lead from the front led to uncoordinated attacks and jumbled defenses. “Commanders and staffs mistakenly believed that they could run the war from headquarters,” Gabel noted, “relying on maps and telephones, much as they had in the static warfare of 1918.”

Louisiana Maneuvers (1940-41) » HistoryNet

 

Back to the casualities suffered during the Manuvers,

CASUALTIES

[SIZE=+2]SOME BOYS REALLY GOT HURT[/SIZE]
">[SIZE=-1]ON STRETCHERS AT LAKE CHARLES STATION, CASUALTIES FROM 43RD EVACUATION HOSPITAL WAIT FOR TRAIN TO TAKE THEM TO NEW ORLEANS FIELD HOSPITAL Photo Credit: Dmitri Kessel/Ralph Morse/TIMEPIX[/SIZE]
The only great fact of war missing in maneuvers is fear of death. Guns shoot banks. Planes bomb trucks with flour bags. Prisoners are set free unhurt.
But there are real casualties. Boys on stretchers (above) have honest-to-God cases of strained backs, fractured knees, food poisoning Below, in an evacuation hospital, Army surgeons are performing a real operation for appendicitis. On opposite page, Private Le Roy Beyer looks out from an Army ambulance after the rim of a tire lie was changing hit him in the head.
[SIZE=-1]IN ARMY HOSPITAL AT JONESBORO, SURGEONS PERFORM EMERGENCY APPENDECTOMY. DURING MANEUVERS, HOSPITALS AVERAGE 100-200 SICK AND INJURED SOLDIERS A DAY Photo Credit: Dmitri Kessel/Ralph Morse/TIMEPIX[/SIZE]Before fighting started, the Army expected that, in two weeks some 40,000 soldiers would be hospitalized. It also expected 136 deaths. When, therefore, at the end of the first week of war 17 soldiers had been killed (seven by motor accidents, one by suicide, two by drowning, two by disease, five by airplanes), the Army was relieved.

 

Umpire Manual

FM 105-5
War Department Field Manual
10 March 1944​

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Umpire Manual​

 

A little about the 4th Division and the maneuvers,

"As war clouds engulfed Europe, the 4th Division was reactivated on June 1, 1940 at Fort Benning, Georgia as America began to increase the size of our armed forces. Selected to act as an experimental unit for the development of methods recently demonstrated by the German blitz through Belgium and France, the 4th Motorized Division began a three year, wide-open experiment. From August 1940 through August 1943, the division participated in the Louisiana Maneuvers, was moved to the newly opened Camp Gordon, GA where they participated in the Carolina Maneuvers, and was moved to Fort Dix, New Jersey before being redesignated the 4th Infantry Division. A movement in September 1943 to Camp Gordon Johnston, Florida gave the division realistic amphibious training in preparation for the assault on fortress Europe."

Camp Gordon Johnston Association

 

Hey JC, you seem to have more information concerning the Louisiana Manuevers than the Louisiana Manuevers Museum at Camp Beauregard, Louisiana does. Well, I really haven't been there in about 11 years, so there's no telling what they have now. Hopefully the curator there has the same access to information that you do.

 

LOL Thanks A-58. There is always more info and stories coming out .

 

15th Cav 1941

 

That had to be a bumpy landing.

 

I recall that Eisenhower's meteoric rise owed in part to his role in the Louisiana maneouvers, in which he both succeded in defending against with a mechanized command and attacking with one. Of course, he was not the only commander to see his fortunes made in the mameouvers as George S. Patton also scored a brilliant win after he was assigned under Eisenhower to fight. That was his famous "cheating" of the wargame, by making a forced march with his armor arond and out of the designated excercise grounds. =)

 

BtW, there were umpires present with both units at different levels and would observe the maneouvers of the opposing forces and call out the "losers" and write them of as casaulties.

 

I have always like watching the Jeep being put through these kinds of manuevers.

 

Paratroop drop Louisiana Maneuvers

 

Lessons of the Cumberland

Monday, Nov. 02, 1942



Along Tennessee's Cumberland River, Army maneuvers reached their climax. Foot soldiers and jeepers, tankers, airmen and artillerymen tried every trick, threw everything they had except real ammunition, tramping out a problem. The problem: can a tank blitz be slowed and even halted. Answer: by well-organized opposition, yes. The engineers with tank traps did the job of slowing, but the star of the action last week—as in the whole two previous months of maneuvers—was the Second Army's tank destroyer battalion. The Cumberland's will-o'-the-wisp struck, destroyed, disappeared and struck again.
What the IDs Did. One sunny afternoon two battalions of 28-ton General Grants crunched along through the rolling hills. Heavy hitters of the northbound, attacking Blue corps, they were headed for the last roundup of the outnumbered defending Red Army. Triumphantly, the two battalions split to do a pincers on the Red's last redoubt. Then came disaster. From hidden positions in the dense cedar groves and yellow-brown hickory and maple woods flags waved, signifying heavy-caliber anti-tank fire. Grinning umpires scurried out in jeeps to rule that tank after tank was blown to hell & gone.
"It's them damned TDs again," growled a sweating sergeant. "I don't see how they git all over the whole damned countryside." The tank side finally won according to plan in this action through "superior masses of other arms, including air."
The TD battalion is commanded by a red-faced, rednecked, reddish-mustached, beetle-browed Irishman, Lieut. Colonel James Joseph Deery, 40, who talked himself (age 17) into the Army in World War I, graduated from West Point in 1925. The battalion, first Army anti-tank outfit, was organized only two weeks before last year's Louisiana maneuvers where it raised hob with Major General George Patton's famed tanks.
After Pearl Harbor the Colonel went to General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth for a refresher course. When he rejoined his men, they were at Major General Andrew D. Bruce's new tank destroyer school at Camp Hood, Tex. (TIME, July 13), proud of setting records in the school's tough commando obstacle course. Not to be outdone, the Colonel then set the record for battalion commanders.
When the destroyermen hit Tennessee, they had had three months of experience fighting tanks, began to bewitch and bewilder their opponents, almost swept them into the Cumberland time after time. They never seemed to sleep during a maneuver. They figured out where the tanks were likely to come (and usually they guessed right), then lay in wait to enfilade them, fleeing during the confusion, firing again from another angle. They reconnoitered all night, all day, maintained constant. radio communication with all units.
Pacesetter was the thick-chested Commander (see cut), bellowing orders over the radio in his command car, biting into apples between orders. For him a permanent command post was his car under a tree, camouflaged to be invisible 50 yards away, fixed so that by knocking down two branches it could move out straight ahead.
What the Generals Said. At each critique, the tired, dirty men of Lieut. General Ben Lear's Second Army waited to hear whether the generals thought they were ready for combat (TIME, Oct. 19). Last week the generals said yes, with qualifications:
Said small, keen Lieut. General Lesley
J. ("Whitey") McNair, ground forces chief who came down from Washington to see part of the finale in a jeep: "Yes, I have seen combat-worthy units on these maneuvers. Not all of them are combat worthy, of course."
After last year's Louisiana maneuvers he criticized leadership and discipline (TIME, Sept. 29, 1941). This year he gave a pat on the back. Lear's forces have lost many officers to new units in formation (U.S. division increase in one year: 27 to 72). But leadership, said McNair, is excellent among the higher officers. As for discipline: "Last year, the maneuvers stopped when men gathered around a pop vendor. They filled themselves full of pop, then they couldn't march or fight. I haven't seen any of that this year."
The men were harder than last year, but "what they need is whatever it takes to keep them going when they are cold, wet, tired and hungry." He recommended marching five miles an hour (which requires some running) with full pack. One outfit showed General McNair results; on a problem lasting three nights and four days without letup, hungry, cold and tired, the unit marched 35 miles with full pack in one day.
Last week General Lear urged his commanders to "kill the academic and unimaginative outlook ... so to train their subordinates that they are physically and emotionally prepared for the realities of war. . . . We will not find any Japanese in the southwestern Pacific who will permit us to go along with our eyes closed, our guns unloaded and our weapons buried beneath a mass of bedding rolls." He illustrated :
^ He found a captain and a soldier in a jeep taking breakfast to an outpost of four soldiers five miles away. "I think," said the General, "he should have been inspecting his command and had that task accomplished by one of the cooks. . . ."
> In Hartsville one morning General Lear found a sergeant and twelve men, unaware of an enemy battalion near by. The sergeant was lost and was doing nothing about it. "I emphatically told him to go and look for a fight."
> In a tent at the command post, the general found the whole staff having an animated conversation while the radio, unheeded, gave essential information.
>But the standout virtue of troops throughout the maneuvers was the initiative of small, isolated units (see cut, p. 68). One OCS graduate with only eight men captured 18 vehicles and a tank in one morning. Another small unit raided the Blues through an entire problem, was never captured.
All hands praised the men for "doing their damndest," for their serious attention to camouflage, their slit trenches. There was praise for the improvement in supply, for the way the generals profited from mistakes, for the way the men kept themselves and their machines off the roads. Lay observers, remembering Bataan, thought the first burst of real fire would cure lots of minor troubles.

Lessons of the Cumberland - TIME

 

Yes, I know what you mean. I saw a show on The History Channel a while back about the jeep, it's developement stages and employment. The field testing was quite enjoying. I'm sure a lot of GI's lost teeth and got a lot of broken bones during that phase of jeep testing.

 

Yeah back when the History Channel actually broadcast "history" of any sort. Fortunately I taped the entire run of "Automobiles", and that was the show that had the development on the Jeep in a hour segment. There was also another section called 4x4 in the one "Modern Marvels" that had both the Jeep and Land Rover covered. Loved 'em both, taped same.

I would double that vote on lost teeth, those little buggers could really buck. When I was a kid on the farm in Montana's Hi-Line I managed to plunk my Dad's CJ2 into a pond clear up to the hood. Had the windsheild down and strapped to the hood, and so all you could see was me from the shoulders up sitting in a pond. Took me two days to get it out of there, and another two weeks to get all the water out of all the places water can get, re-lube everything, change all the ignition system parts, and make the little bugger run again.

This was where my interest in the internal combustion engine began, at age eleven. Yeah I was driving that thing then, I had my own "new" (used) 1959 CJ5 for going to school when I was 14. Over the years I rebuilt both of them a couple of times, they both still serve on the farm.