By Alex Demas
Department of Agriculture

KISATCHIE, LA. — It’s 1941. Monday morning, mid-September, has dawned rainy and overcast. Gray clouds hang over the sweltering heat of south Louisiana. Deep in the tall pines of Kisatchie National Forest, a tense, humid calm coils around the thick trees. Shortly, though, it would be shattered by the largest military action to have ever taken place in North America.

In the early hours of Sept. 15, the tanks and infantry of the Red Army collided with the defending Blue Army, eventually bringing more than 400,000 men into battle between the Sabine and Red Rivers of western Louisiana. For the next several days, bombers buzzed overhead, artillery threw round after round, and men, horses and tanks vied for control over the piney woodlands in and around Kisatchie National Forest.

Fortunately, though, all of the rounds were fake, the bombs were bags of flour, and the fighting wasn’t real. Both the Red Army and the Blue Army were made up of the units from the U.S. Army, conducting a drill that became known as the Louisiana Maneuvers.

Brig. Gen. Omar Bradley, left, and Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair during the Louisiana maneuvers. Photo from the Library of Congress courtesy of USDA.

Preparing for War

By 1941, Europe had already been at war for two years. Nazi Germany’s lightning invasions across France and central Europe, and Japan’s invasion of China all alarmed U.S. policymakers and military leaders. However, Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, realized the necessity of making the U.S. military ready for what seemed like an inevitable conflict with the Axis forces.

But to train the numbers of men he knew would be required, Marshall needed a place big enough and open enough to conduct complex maneuvers. He found it in Kisatchie National Forest, in southwest Louisiana.

It is here that new doctrines would be tried, old traditions evaluated to see if they still held up, and new officers put to the test. War has changed dramatically since the last time the U.S. military was involved, and Marshall wanted to make sure the U.S. wasn’t caught unprepared.

“I want the mistakes made down in Louisiana and not over in Europe, and the only way to do this thing is to try it out, and if it doesn’t work, find out what we need to make it work”, Marshall said.

Camp Claiborne under construction. U.S. Army photo provided.

To the Forests of Louisiana

The Kisatchie, established in 1930, has several districts located throughout the state. Two of them, the Calcasieu Ranger District and the Catahoula Ranger District, played a vital role in the Louisiana Maneuvers.

On the Calcasieu Ranger District, Camp Claiborne was established. Men from all over the United States began gathering in August of 1941 in Camp Claiborne to begin the Louisiana Maneuvers. Most were unfamiliar with the swampy, piney woods they found themselves in, and for many, this was their first time away from home.

Fortunately, locals were pleased to see them, and the soldiers were welcomed with open arms. In fact, many locals even allowed the soldiers to stay in their homes during the maneuvers. Even future luminaries like George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed in towns along the outskirts of the national forest.

So many soldiers arrived over the next few weeks that Camp Claiborne became the largest military installation in the U.S. and the third largest city in Louisiana.

Meanwhile, north in the Catahoula Ranger District, Camp Livingston was established, and thousands more soldiers streamed in.

Tanks cross a pontoon bridge over the Red River during the Louisiana Maneuvers. U.S. Army photo provided.

Sham Battle, Real Experience, Vital Lessons

The Louisiana Maneuvers took place across a few weeks of September 1941, in two phases. In each phase, the forces were divided into a Red Army and a Blue Army and given objectives. The Blue Army won both maneuvers, largely due to leadership from Patton and Eisenhower.

Although the battle was a mere exercise, the effort did exactly what Marshall and others hoped it would. The demonstration showed what tactics would work and which wouldn’t, the importance of new technologies and strategies, and the experience needed by the rising officer corps.

The timing could not have been better. No sooner was the final report turned in than the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into World War II.

Hundreds of thousands of men were trained in Camps Claiborne and Livingston. Men would send postcards home to their families and loved ones. One such postcard is here. Photo from the Digital Commonwealth, Massachusetts Collection Online, Boston Public Library, the Tichnor Brothers Collection.

America’s Battlefield Training Ground

The end of the Louisiana Maneuvers did not mean the end of Kisatchie National Forest’s role in preparing America’s soldiers for combat. In fact, more than a million men would move through Camps Claiborne and Livingston during the war, training in areas as diverse as infantry, airborne, engineering, tanks and medical.

Camp Claiborne was the birthplace of famous units like the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Airborne Division. Notable officers like Omar Bradley and Matthew Ridgway spent time under Kisatchie’s pine trees training troops. The 761st Tank Battalion, a predominantly Black unit known as the Black Panthers, also trained at Camp Claiborne.

The USDA Forest Service provided training and assistance with logging for forestry battalions. Soldiers learned how to log and provide lumber for their units, and many of them would go on to serve in Europe and the Pacific, building roads and other infrastructure.

Over the course of the war, thousands of Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and removed to locations far away, in poor conditions, where they were held under suspicion of disloyalty due to their ethnicity. Image courtesy of Clem Albers, War Relocation Authority.

Japanese Internment Camp

Unfortunately, a darker side of Camps Claiborne and Livingston existed. A part of Camp Livingston was initially planned to take in prisoners of war. However, the U.S. decided to imprison Americans of Japanese descent in internment camps for fears they would be disloyal to the U.S., resulting in hundreds of Japanese Americans being taken to Camp Livingston and interned there as well.

While the Japanese American civilians were imprisoned at Camp Livingston, Japanese Americans who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. military in the 100th Infantry Battalion, part of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, received training nearby at Camp Claiborne. In 1943, the Japanese Americans were removed from Camp Livingston and sent to other camps. Most of them would not be freed until after the war ended.

Pictured is Longleaf Vista overlook. USDA Forest Service photo by Erich Vallery.

From Training Ground back to Timber Land

Today, the footsteps of soldiers and the hum of trucks have largely given way to the cries of cicadas and the calls of birds like the red-cockaded woodpeckers and red-tailed hawks. Camps Claiborne and Livingston were shuttered not long after the end of the war, their buildings mostly removed, and their equipment diverted to other bases.

Camp Polk, a third facility developed for the Louisiana Maneuvers, would become Fort Polk (today Fort Johnson), where military exercises are routinely executed on shared land with the national forest. But the days when hundreds of thousands of Americans from the entire country would march beneath the pine trees of Kisatchie are long gone.

Today, the old camps can be seen through scenic trails maintained by forest staff. Little Creek and Hickman Trails wind their way around old Camp Livingston, and the Claiborne Trails system takes hikers and cyclists through the overgrown streets of Camp Claiborne.

“Our forest is committed to preserve the legacy of these camps,” shared Lisa W. Lewis, Forest Supervisor of the Kisatchie National Forest. “Through our preservation efforts we honor the sacrifices of all the men and women who trained at these historic sites who served our Nation with dedication, commitment, and valor during World War II.”