From 1940 to 1944, American soldiers took part in the Louisiana Maneuvers, a series of annual war games whose most remembered exercises came in 1940 and 1941. These operations tested soldiers, weapons, and senior officers, and helped determine who could command large infantry and armored divisions. In May 1940, seventy thousand soldiers fought in four three-day exercises, including a test of long-distance armored movement in which Maj. Gen. Walter C. Short's IV Corps traveled 550 miles from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Louisiana in six days, the longest motor march ever undertaken by the United States. In 1941, the "Big One" set the Red and Blue armies against each other over three weeks in August and three weeks in September, and Brig. Gen. Lesley "Whitey" McNair developed a vast war game involving more than 400,000 soldiers, the largest mass-training effort undertaken by the US Army as of 2013. During the second campaign of the 1941 maneuvers, General Patton led tanks nearly 300 miles in a flanking movement that helped Krueger's Blue Army take Shreveport from Lt. Gen. Ben Lear's anti-tank defenses. The maneuvers gave troops wartime experience without battle casualties, though some men died in accidents, and taught important lessons about tanks, jeeps, anti-tank weapons, air defense systems, difficult terrain, and the use of the new M-1 rifle and Thompson submachine gun. They also helped officers such as Patton and Eisenhower master mechanized warfare, convinced military leaders to phase out cavalry units in favor of mechanized vehicles, and influenced George C. Marshall's judgments about future commanders, including Lesley McNair, Omar Bradley, Joseph Stilwell, Mark Clark, Patton, and later Eisenhower, whom Marshall brought to Washington before Eisenhower went on to plan the invasion of North Africa and then serve as Supreme Allied Commander. Louisiana's rough terrain, unmarked roads, swamps, marshes, river bottoms, and changing elevations made it an ideal training ground, and the Army secured access to more than 300,000 acres, including 259,400 acres in the Kisatchie Forest. The maneuvers deeply affected local communities as soldiers camped in pastures, barns, porches, and fields, residents and troops traded help and supplies, and roads filled with columns of men, trucks, tanks, and horses, though soldiers also tore down fences, used farm woodpiles, and foraged for cavalry mounts. Leesville became a strategic point through the construction of Camp Polk in 1940 and through its position near Peason Ridge, where Krueger's anti-tank units stopped Lear's assault during the first exercises of the 1941 maneuvers.