HOMEGROWN WAR GAMES

IN SEPTEMBER 1941, as German troops raced toward Moscow and Japan extended its reach across the East, the United States was still playing war games. Throughout that month, the U.S. Army staged the Louisiana Maneuvers, the most extensive field exercises in its history. Thousands of nascent GIs in World War I–style helmets fought sham battles across central Louisiana’s prairies, cotton fields, and pine-covered hills. Today travelers come to the region to see antebellum plantations and Civil War sites, but for me it was the Second World War that beckoned. Seventy-six Septembers after the 1941 maneuvers, I rented a car and explored the “battlefields” of Louisiana.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 forced preparedness on America, and in 1940 the army selected central