On the other side of Germany’s western border the French held their annual maneuvers on a similar scale. However, French generals tended to be considerably older than their German opposite numbers. As a result many of the exercises, instead of representing dry runs for war, sometimes degenerated into elaborate retirement ceremonies.20 At a time when one technological innovation rapidly followed upon another, maneuvers were often used to test new kinds of equipment and weapons. Among them were heavy artillery, the telegraph, wireless communications, as well as motor cars and aircraft. Indeed the exercises provided some of the few occasions when the formidable task of integrating all these into a single smooth-functioning team could be attempted at all. For example, the French maneuvers in 1909 included thirteen aircraft and four dirigibles that flew reconnaissance missions. At the time French heavier-than-air aviation in particular was the most highly developed in the world. Foreign observers were suitably impressed and went on to launch their own efforts.
A year later the Italian Army held a somewhat similar wargame in Monferrato, a hilly region in the northwestern part of the country. Two army corps, a blue one and a red one, maneuvered against one another. Each of them was allocated four aircraft. As was characteristic at the time, and as was also the case in other countries, some of those were privately owned and operated. Since the Italians only had two airships they were put at the disposal of the two commanders, the blue and the red, on alternate days. A detailed description of the moves and countermoves does not appear to be available. Still, the “lessons learnt” from these maneuvers were quite interesting. The airships duly flew reconnaissance missions over a large area. They even helped the “blue” force to take the “red” one in the flank, a maneuver that decided the outcome of the “campaign.”
By contrast, the aircraft’s ability to do the same was limited by the fact that their pilots were too busy handling the controls. Both airships and aircraft had their performance degraded by the stormy weather, and indeed several of the former were immobilized. Neither, it turned out, could operate without a fairly extensive supporting infrastructure if they were to achieve anything at all.21 These were important insights, but their value was somewhat diminished by the fact that both aircraft and dirigibles were permitted to fly around without anybody firing at them, notwithstanding the fact that experiments with anti-aircraft defenses had started a few years earlier and quickly brought out the vulnerability of the lumbering dirigibles when flying at low altitude. It was by no means the last time that maneuvers were rigged in this way: in fact organizing maneuvers that will not be biased, at least in the view of one of the participating sides, appears to be all but impossible.
During the interwar years the armies of several countries used maneuvers in order to test their embryonic armored forces. Particularly important in this respect was Britain’s Experimental Mechanized Force. Instigated by the later to be famous Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, the brigade-sized Force began its official existence on Salisbury Plain in August 1927. It consisted of a Flank Reconnaissance Group equipped with armored cars, a Main Reconnaissance Group with tankettes, a Royal Tank Battalion with forty-eight Vickers I medium tanks, a battalion of mechanized infantry, a field artillery battalion with both towed and self-propelled guns, a mechanized light artillery battalion, and a company of mechanized engineers. Communications were provided by 150 wireless sets which supplemented the traditional dispatch riders. Most of the equipment dated back to 1918 and was nothing if not motley. Still the brigade represented the first all-mechanized, all-motorized force in history.22 Supported by Royal Air Force aircraft, in both 1927 and 1928 it “fought” traditional infantry and cavalry units under the watchful eyes of senior officers (who rode enormous open staff cars), and their parasol-carrying ladies.
A dramatic account of the maneuvers in question comes from the American Popular Mechanics magazine, written, as its motto said, “so you can understand it.”23
An army of ‘robots’, mechanical monsters carrying gas-masked men, was mobilized recently [by] the British Army . . . Little two-passenger tanks . . . sped across the fields on endless treads, or switched in a twinkling to rubber-tired wheels and dashed down clear roads. Four-passenger tanks, with guns in conning towers, huge battle tanks, mounting small field artillery, heavy anti-aircraft guns on tractor mounts, and tanks equipped with wireless. Overhead attack and pursuit airplanes soared and dipped while they sprayed the advancing steel armies with bursts of machine gun fire. The maneuvers continued day and night under conditions as nearly as those of actual war as could be produced . . . The engagement was like an evil dream with mythical gray monsters spitting flame and death . . . “Road bombed out of existence,” was the message flashed back from the wireless scouts. “Make your own way across country,” came the command. Then the mechanical army moved . . . Suddenly three airplanes, like falcons, dropped out of the bank of leaden clouds . . . The unprotected vehicles out in the open field, balancing precariously as their speed increased, hurried for the shelter of the trees. Men in the dragons opened fire with their rifles as the falcons swooped down.
To be sure, not everything functioned perfectly. In particular, coordinating the different units proved to be beyond the commander’s powers. The umpires judged the Force to have been, if not a great success then at any rate a good beginning on which the future could be built. The Secretary of War disagreed, however, and it was dismantled.24
Meanwhile in Germany, the army of the Weimar Republic, or Reichswehr as it was known, was taking up the tradition of holding maneuvers that World War I had interrupted. During the years immediately after the armistice the scale on which they were held was necessarily small. By 1926, though, it became possible to hold two separate exercises, one in East Prussia and one in southwestern Germany.25 Between them they involved six of the seven available divisions either wholly or in part. Typically for the Germans, who sought to avoid Schematismus (roughly, the unthinking adherence to fixed patterns) above all, scenarios were extremely varied. On top of this, commanders were given considerable freedom to act as they saw fit. The American military attaché present, Truman Smith, was particularly impressed by the high caliber of the umpires. They were, he wrote, thorough, sufficient, and efficient, using their sound training to issue their decisions with commendable promptness and judgment. The US Army had nothing similar to this. The exercises did not try to reconstruct the trench warfare of 1914–18. Instead there was an emphasis on mobile warfare and on coordinated teamwork by various arms such as infantry, artillery (carefully camouflaged so as to be invisible from the air), and cavalry. The last-named never rode in mass but always operated in small groups, “fighting” dismounted.
The maneuvers, which made tremendous demands on the troops’ physique, also included a river crossing and a night attack. A new tactic, said to have been invented by the future Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at the time he commanded a company on the Italian Front in 1917–18, and consisting of using indirect fire from heavy machine guns instead of artillery to cover an attack, was also practiced. Above all, and again reflecting innovations introduced during the last years of the war, German commanders on maneuver did not try to maintain a continuous front. It took Smith some time to realize that this was not due to any lack of command and control, let alone of tactical and operational expertise, but to a new doctrine that insisted on units exploiting gaps in the defense and pushing boldly ahead without regard to their flanks.
In one post-maneuver report, the general commanding one side praised the troops for their efforts but wrote that the officers were still not up to par – a most unusual thing to do, as anyone who has served in almost any military knows. By the late 1920s the number of motor vehicles operated by the Reichswehr and involved in the maneuvers was growing. Logistic vehicles, tracked artillery tractors, and even self-propelled artillery on tracks started making their appearance. In 1927, the same year the British maneuvers were held, a complete motorized regiment participated for the first time and attempts
were made to coordinate it with a cavalry division in a common operation. Experimentation went on and on: in 1932, for the first time, Krupp-built “tractors” (in reality Mark I light tanks, minus their turrets) figured as the most important component of one of the forces involved, though the problem of coordinating them with the more traditional, slow-moving infantry and artillery remained unsolved.26 In the same year each division received a permanent reconnaissance battalion. It consisted of a motorized headquarters, a signals platoon, an armored car platoon, an anti-tank platoon, a machine-gun troop, a bicycle company, and a cavalry troop – an organization, as it turned out, that was far too complex to work.
Since the Treaty of Versailles had prohibited the Reichswehr from operating tanks, trucks were dressed up with mockups made of cardboard. Local children who had come to watch would sometimes use pencils to punch holes in them, causing commanders to gnash their teeth in impotent fury.27 Once rearmament had begun and general conscription been reintroduced in 1935 the picture began to change very rapidly, as armored formations were created and showed themselves on maneuver. At first it was mainly a question of making the various elements work together and demonstrating that capability to skeptical senior commanders. Also, the need to constantly give up stems to help establish new units meant that many formations were rendered dysfunctional for considerable periods of time. By 1937, though, sufficient progress had been made to allow the old tradition of full-scale, two-sided maneuvers to be resumed. In the event the maneuvers in question also proved to be the last, for the looming Czechoslovak crisis caused those scheduled for the next year to be cancelled.
In charge of the 1937 exercise was the then Major General Franz Halder, an training expert who, a year later, was promoted to chief of the Army General Staff.28 As he wrote at the time, the maneuvers provided a singular opportunity to gain some insight into the approaching reality of war – a war which, for the first time, would involve large-scale armored formations commanded by wireless.29 The location selected was Mecklenburg, a flat, thinly populated region in northern Germany which afforded the necessary space. No fewer than 160,000 troops, 25,000 horses, 21,700 motor vehicles, and 830 tanks – about two divisions – participated. They represented what was probably the largest and certainly the most modern armored force assembled in history until that time. As so often, details concerning the scenario that the two “armies” were presented with and the moves they made are hard to obtain. What we do know is that Hitler, who was present, was excited by the spectacle, almost jumping up and down as he told Guderian, the officer in charge of the armored forces, that those forces were just what he needed to carry out his program.30
By Reichswehr standards, wrote the above-mentioned Truman Smith in reference to the 1924 German maneuvers, the exercises at Fort Leavenworth were “archaic.” Far from permitting commanders to improvise and avoiding Schematismus, they approached war as if it was a question of solving mathematical equations.31 Not everybody was content with this situation. Among the observers at the 1927 British maneuvers was US Secretary of War Dwight F. Davis (1879–1945), best remembered for the Davis Cup named after him. Impressed by what he had seen, in 1928 he set up an experimental mechanized brigade at Fort Meade, MD. However, so antiquated was the available equipment that it had to be disbanded after three months. The one that replaced it later on was no larger. From 1865 to 1940, nothing characterized US Army maneuvers as much as their small, almost Lilliputian, size. Foreign armies regularly concentrated tens of thousands of men and even more and put them through their paces. Not so the American Army which, owing to its small size, and since its units were scattered in penny packets all over a vast continent, always had great trouble putting together as much as a division. By and large, this meant that any experiments that could be conducted, and lessons learnt, were limited almost exclusively to the tactical sphere.
For example, in October 1929 the largest cavalry exercise since the Civil War was held, with 4,000 men, 3,200 horses, and 1,500 mules taking part. Grouped into two brigades, they engaged in mock combat “over [the] gulches, hillocks, and sagebrush plains” of western Texas. To avoid the attention of the Army Air Corps reconnaissance aircraft flying overhead, white horses were supposed to be painted brown.32 Other experiments were conducted on an even smaller scale. As late as 1937–9, so limited were the army’s resources that, attempting to determine whether the traditional four brigades in each division should be reduced to three, it was only able to field one complete formation of that kind. Its opponent, known as the Provisional Infantry Division (PID) had to be specially formed for the occasion by drawing on troops from all over the United States. Since men and commanders take time to learn to work together, obviously that was no way to rule on such an important issue.33
In the winter of 1940, its complacency shaken by the spectacular German victory over Poland, the US Army embarked on the greatest and most rapid expansion in its history. In overall charge was General George Marshall, the steely-eyed chief of staff whom Churchill later called “the organizer of victory.” Marshall delegated the task of holding the maneuvers to his de facto deputy, General Stanley Embick.34 A huge area – ultimately it was to include some 630,000 acres in Louisiana and Texas – was selected. Sparsely populated, sporting thick undergrowth and uncharted swamps, scarred by rural traces that turn to muck at the slightest hint of rain, and crossed by several rivers, it was ideal for the purpose at hand. By May 1940 everything was ready and the maneuvers, involving the participation of approximately 70,000 men, could get under way. First Red Army took the offensive, crossing the Calcasieu in the face of the defenses put up by Blue. The second and the third exercises witnessed various attacks and counterattacks by the two sides. Finally the army’s two armored brigades were provisionally joined together, thus forming America’s first armored division: they were used by Red to spearhead a mock attack on Blue.
Army Air Corps aircraft flying overhead gathered intelligence and transports delivered troops to newly constructed airfields. Millions of rounds of blank ammunition were issued and used by the troops; to add realism, loudspeakers blared out the recorded sounds of battle, canister smoke shrouded the battlefield, and aircraft dropped white sand bags to simulate the impact of artillery shells and bombs. The entire show – in the US as elsewhere, maneuvers tended to attract spectators like flies – was supervised by hundreds of umpires equipped with armbands and clipboards. They determined the outcome of combat and assessed units and leaders according to a complicated grading system devised by Marshall and his subordinates. Among the participants were Mark Clark, George Patton, and Joe Stilwell. The last-named commanded the “Red” armored division, a task he carried out with commendable efficiency.
At the time these officers carried the ranks of colonel and lieutenant colonel. Neither in 1917–18 nor during the peace that followed did they have the opportunity to exercise command on anything remotely like the scale now being demanded of them. What combat experience they had gathered either dated to the trenches of World War I or to various small-scale campaigns, especially in Latin America and the Pacific Islands. Scant wonder that Embick, who had spent his time crisscrossing the maneuver area observing and questioning commanders, was not very happy with what he had seen. Broken-down vehicles and poorly planned movements that resulted in traffic jams were common. So were failures to coordinate various arms and units as well as the habit, inherited from the past, of trying to exercise command from the rear instead of from the front as modern mobile warfare demanded. He was, however, encouraged by the quality of the troops, raw as they were, of whom he wrote that they did their best and even displayed considerable enthusiasm for their tasks.
In the summer of 1941 the maneuvers were repeated. The man in charge was Embick’s successor, General Leslie McNair. His chief concern was to make the exercise as realistic as possible by avoiding elaborate scenarios and giving the commanding generals on each side only enough information to enable them to operate freely against one another. The
scale of the maneuvers was gigantic: over 350,000 men and 50,000 vehicles took part. Just one of the two “armies” involved received no fewer than four million 0.30 caliber blanks and 170,000 anti-tank rounds, far more than had originally been allocated for the entire 1940–1 calendar year.35 Nothing like this had ever been seen on US territory before, and nothing remotely like this was to be staged later.
A conscious attempt was also made to correct the deficiencies that had come to light in the previous year. They included logistics, communications, traffic control, and the tendency of too many aging commanders to exercise their functions from the rear rather than the front. Much attention was paid to air-to-ground cooperation. Hopelessly neglected during the interwar years, that field was ultimately to emerge as one of the US Army’s great strengths. The umpires’ manual, which in the absence of live fire would have to determine the outcome of “combat” and thus played a critical role in assessing the exercise, was completely rewritten. As the “war” opened on September 15, the Red Army, approaching from the east, and the Blue one, coming from the west, fought for control of the Mississippi River in an entire series of complicated moves and counter-moves. The star of the day turned out to be a little-known colonel named Dwight Eisenhower. Acting as chief of staff to the Red Army, he successfully countered an attempt by Patton, who commanded the spearhead of Blue, to cross the river and decide the “campaign.” Later in the maneuvers Patton, who at that time was the more senior of the two, redeemed himself by leading an armored corps in a massive flanking attack against Blue’s positions. Following a 200-mile advance he surrounded his opponent. McNair was impressed and told Marshall as much; from this time on, both officers found the road to high command open to them.
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