Jim Bradshaw: When the nation's top brass 'invaded' Louisiana

It took more than three hours for 8,000 soldiers and a thousand-plus trucks to move through Opelousas on Saturday, May 11, 1940, and they were moving as quickly as they could.
It was quite a show and people turned out to watch. According to the Opelousas Clarion-News, the hundreds of onlookers who lined Union Street to cheer for the convoy included “veterans, young Sub-Debs thrilled by the soldiers in khaki, housewives and businessmen.”
The soldiers left St. Martinville earlier in the day, and were on its last leg of a 550-mile trip to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, to take part in the first of a series of exercises to see if the army was really ready for a war.
It was important to find out because Hitler’s troops were surging through France, and, like it or not, there was a real chance that American GIs would be drawn into the war in Europe.
One of the first things the War Department wanted to know was whether armored units could mobilize quickly and travel long distances.
To test this, the department ordered the longest march ever undertaken by the U.S. Army, moving men and materiel from Alabama through south Louisiana.
It involved 1,200 trucks pulling  trailers laden with supplies, more trucks towing five-ton artillery pieces, and dozens of mess trucks that let cooks prepare meals while the men were on the move, because the march schedule “left little time for meals.”
The troops stopped in Mobile and New Orleans before taking a short rest in St. Martinville. According to the Teche News, they put up “pup-tents, kitchens and other necessary requirements for a comfortable day and a half stand.”
The trucks guzzled 40,000 gallons of gasoline during the trip, which was just one part of the logistic headache.
The solution, according to one news account, was to send supply trucks ahead of the convoy to leave drums of gasoline along the route. Vehicles in the convoy could stop and pick up the nearest drum when they ran low, hoping that it wasn’t empty.
There have been suggestions that this wasn’t a completely satisfactory solution. It seems that more than one farm tractor and pickup truck filled its tank with gasoline supplied by Uncle Sam.
Ten airplanes flew above the 75-mile-long column of trucks, “giving them instructions … by two-way radio.” The pilots talked mostly to a band of  motorcycle riders leading the way and clearing traffic.
It’s not clear just how well that traffic clearing actually worked.
As the Daily World reported, “It takes the division three hours to pass a given point since it stretched out over 75 miles of highway, but officials state it probably will require longer than that to pass through Opelousas because the maneuvers are being designed as not to interfere with regular highway traffic.”
It’s pretty unlikely that a 75-mile-long parade of army vehicles led by motorcycles “clearing the way” didn’t interfere just a little bit with everyday traffic,
The soldiers moving through St. Martinville and Opelousas were part of an army of 75,000 men who were divided into the Red Army and the Blue Army at Camp Beauregard, and who staged mock battles against each other.
The upshot of those fake battles was that the U.S. Army was woefully unprepared for a real war.
More war games were held in Louisiana in the summer of 1941, when  Brig. Gen. Lesley “Whitey” McNair, commanded what is still  the largest peacetime exercise in American history.
“We didn’t know how soon war would come,” McNair later observed, “but we knew it was coming, and we had to get together something of an army pretty darn fast.”
Two young officers who made names for themselves during the 1941 games played big roles in eventually getting things together.
One of the most extraordinary feats of the training exercises was pulled off by George Patton, who led a flanking maneuver that involved moving a caravan of tanks nearly 300 miles to help the Blue Army “capture” Shreveport. He became legendary for his use of armor in World War II
The other was Dwight Eisenhower, whose keen planning so impressed Secretary of War George Marshall that he brought him to Washington. Within months, Eisenhower was planning the invasion of North Africa, the first major U.S. campaign in World War II.
Then, as the planning for the D-Day invasion of Europe began, Eisenhower became the Supreme Allied Commander, the job that catapulted him into the presidency.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.