Making mistakes in Louisiana instead of in Europe in the face of a real enemy made a lot of sense to Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. His Texas-Louisiana Maneuvers in 1941 dispatched nineteen divisions, over 400,000 troops, to engage in mock conflict over 3,400 square miles of Southern Louisiana turf. Marshall fervently hoped that the exercise would reveal any weaknesses in organization, tactics, equipment, and personnel.
Expensive and dangerous, the exercise cost twenty-one million dollars and the Army knew that, making mistakes, they would suffer deaths and casualties.
Link to another story “Training the 93rd at Livingston”
The segregated 93rd Engineers moved into a pasture near Kinder Louisiana and covered it with two-man pup tents. They built ‘turnouts’, large wide spaces to allow tanks and artillery to maneuver. They reinforced or rebuilt bridges to accommodate the weight of war machinery. While everybody else trained, the 93rd did what Engineering regiments do—they built.
During the second week of the 93rd’s road construction work, a hurricane hammered the coast. Rain drenched the fields and pastures and swelled the rivers. Mud stood ankle deep and chiggers and rats and venomous snakes threatened everywhere.
The Red Army initially deployed with 130,000 troops and 600 tanks from Shreveport in Northwest Louisiana. The Blue Army, 215,000 troops and three anti-tank divisions, charged up from Lake Charles in Southwest Louisiana.
Reporter Leon Kay informed readers of the Amarillo Daily News that the two armies fell on each other with tanks and artillery along a thirty-mile front. The maneuvers, he wrote, “looked like anything but games. I watched light and medium tanks crashing amid clouds of red dust through the pine woods of Louisiana with the crew manning the guns as if they actually were moving into enemy lines.” When Private James D. Robinson died under his overturned tank, he brought a gruesome realism to the exercise.
The black soldiers of the 93rd laid logs to simulate mine fields along the flank of the 3rd Army. They built “prisoner of war camps” and demolished bridges on the 3rd Army’s east flank.
In all twenty-four soldiers died during the maneuvers–seven in motor vehicle accidents, five in airplane crashes. Seven men drowned, two died from diseases, one died when struck by lightning, one died from heart attack and one committed suicide.
The maneuvers done and the maneuverer’s departed, the black men of the 93rd remained in the field to clean up. They rebuilt fences, graded tank rutted fields back smooth, and rebuilt small bridges that hadn’t survived the battle.