Central Louisiana played a vital role in preparing the nation's military for World War II, beginning with the Louisiana Maneuvers in 1940. From 1940 to 1943, these maneuvers were the largest peacetime exercises in American military history, spanning more than 3,400 square miles of central Louisiana, primarily between the Sabine and Red Rivers. Officers including Major General Walter Short, Brigadier General Adna Chaffee, Colonel George S. Patton, Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lieutenant Colonel Omar Bradley took part and later became highly decorated military leaders in World War II. The region's landscape provided testing grounds for large mechanized vehicles and tanks against mostly mounted cavalry troops under realistic fighting conditions, and it served as a laboratory for strategies and innovations such as C-rations, mobile kitchens, and hospitals. Lessons learned there helped the U.S. Army adapt to faster-moving infantry divisions and hastened the decline of horse-mounted cavalry as tanks and other mechanized equipment took its place. In August 1940, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall visited Louisiana and declared that central Louisiana provided the finest military training areas he had ever seen. In 1941, land from Kisatchie National Forest was transferred to the United States Department of War to establish Camps Claiborne, Livingston, and Polk. Soon afterward, within a 50-mile radius of Alexandria, Louisiana, four major Army training camps, four Army airfields, and numerous bombing and artillery ranges were built to meet expanding military needs. The U.S. Army sought to establish 100 divisions for the war in the European, North African, and Pacific theaters, and from 1941 to 1945 it activated 89 divisions. Of those, 45 trained at Camp Claiborne, Livingston, or Polk, and more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers trained at Camp Claiborne alone.