#Ww2 air combat maneuvers full#
#Ww2 air combat maneuvers series#

But Embick determined the training area needed to be larger still. By linking the two tracts, the military had a ready-made training ground. Just south of the national forest was Camp Evangeline, a 23,000-acre tract established by the Army in 1930. The north-central part of the state is home to Kisatchie National Forest, a 604,000-acre virtual wilderness of pinewood hills. Sparsely populated, thick with undergrowth and uncharted swamps, and scarred by rural traces that turn to muck at the slightest hint of rain, central Louisiana was an ideal place to prepare an army, with vast tracts of land that could accommodate the large-scale maneuvers the Army needed to conduct. With a tattered road map as a guide, Embick and Clark tramped through Louisiana’s backcountry, noting the roads, trails, swamps and forests. Armed with these instructions and accompanied by his aide, Major Mark Clark, Embick traveled to central Louisiana, where the Army had trained many of its soldiers during World War I.

#Ww2 air combat maneuvers series#

troops could be deployed in a series of maneuvers to test their readiness. Marshall directed Embick to find a suitable location where thousands of U.S. Embick, a veteran soldier and commander of the Third U.S. To help implement his idea, Marshall called on Lt.

Marshall concluded that what America’s burgeoning ranks needed was a complex training exercise, an exacting test in an environment that would closely approximate the realities of the battlefield. A student of history, Marshall was certain American boys were as courageous as any German or Japanese soldier, but they lacked sufficient training and combat experience-and time was short. No one was more acutely aware of this than Army Chief of Staff General George C. It was that the existing troops were poorly trained or not trained at all. The problem was not a dearth of troops-after Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg rolled through Poland in September 1939, Congress had mobilized the National Guard and Reserve and approved an increase in the size of the Army. With Poland overrun by German armored columns now poised to strike at France, and China under assault by Japan, America’s commanders had to prepare the U.S. military faced a seemingly insurmountable task. The mock battles of what became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers had one purpose: to prepare America’s soldiers for the war that had already begun in Europe and was threatening to spread around the world. 6, 1941, issue of Life opened a multipage feature article on the largest mass training maneuvers undertaken by the U.S. Overhead, armadas of pursuit planes fought great dogfights, while sleek A-20A attack bombers and Navy dive bombers strafed the columns of tanks and trucks moving up to the front. With two fast-moving, hard-hitting armored divisions leading the way, Lieutenant General Ben Lear, commander of the Second (Red) Army, had pushed his troops across the muddy Red River, was already sending long tentacles down the highways to the south, where Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third (Blue) Army lay in wait. Army vehicles as they fought the greatest sham battle in U.S.

#Ww2 air combat maneuvers full#

From low, darkening clouds the drops spattered on the State’s good highways, on its hundreds of marshy mud roads, on its pine forests, and on its deep swamps full of quicksand.