Unleashing the Army in Clinton County: The 1939 Maneuvers

In late August of 1939 our county saw an event the likes of which it had not seen since the late summer of 1814, an army on the march. There were throughout the towns of Beekmantown, Saranac, Plattsburgh (town and city), Schuyler Falls, Peru, Black Brook, and Au Sable 52,000 troops taking part in military operations. To put this into perspective, the whole of Clinton County would have only a population of 54,006 as of the 1940 census. Thus the 1939 maneuvers essentially doubled the County’s population overnight. Since the repulsion of the British invasion of 1814 there had not been an Army in our area, but thankfully this force was different. The force in question was the First United States Army, and it was here for large scale training maneuvers.

The 1st Army included the First Infantry Division, including Plattsburgh’s own 26th Infantry Regiment, the 27th Division of the New York National Guard, the 44th Division of New York and New Jersey National Guard troops, 43rd Division of Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine troops, and the 26th Division of Massachusetts and New Hampshire troops. Smaller units included the 7th Cavalry Brigade which brought with it virtually the entire force of tanks held by the U.S. Army at the time, and the 110th Cavalry regiment which was, like most of the Army’s cavalry, still horse mounted. The Guardsmen of the 1st Army were under the command of LTG Hugh Drum, the namesake of the modern Fort Drum in Watertown, NY.

To support these 52,000 men there was a nearly inconceivable task in the offing, feeding them. To give an idea of the scale dealt with here the supplies brought in, mainly by rail, included 167 tons of beef, 234 tons of bread, 328 tons of potatoes, 140 tons of cabbage, 14 tons of bacon, and over 1.35 million eggs. Not all of the foodstuffs were brought in, however. Several local businesses secured contracts to feed this Army. These included Bouyea Bakery, Plattsburgh Dairy, and Lombardoni Fruit Company who all supplied the obvious.

These men were here to train for a war that many of our nation’s military men had seen coming since the last one ended in 1918 but that there was little popular appetite to prepare for. After all, as far as we were concerned the war had not even started yet. Due to this there were many foreign military attaches in attendance as observers at the war games as was standard peacetime protocol. There were observers present from 17 nations including Great Britain, the Republic of China, Germany, and Japan. Since the end of the Great War, the U.S. Army which had boasted 4,000,000 men at the end of the war, had been eviscerated by budget and manpower cuts to the point that these maneuvers employed nearly ten percent of the Army’s total force. The tank corps for example, that had been in its infancy at the end of the last war, and which would be so critical to victory in Europe soon, had been left to wither on the vine mainly due to the lack of a national appetite for military research or preparation after the “War to end all Wars.” Seven days after the Plattsburgh maneuvers ended, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

The 1939 Maneuvers were the first in a series of major training exercises conducted by the U.S. Army just before the sudden entrance of the nation into the Second World War. This series of maneuvers, which culminated with the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers were a critical stress test of the U.S. Army’s ability to fight a modern war after over 20 years of generalized neglect of military affairs. The 1939 Plattsburgh Maneuvers showed that the Army was in essence less prepared for war than it had been in 1917 on the eve of our entrance into the First World War. As such, the maneuvers were an integral part of the preparation process that led to the mass reorganization, reequipping, and generalized rebuilding of the U.S. Army that went on to prove correct the opinion held by the German observer at Plattsburgh in 1939 that there were no better soldiers than the men of the U.S. Army and National Guard through their performance, once properly trained, equipped and led, in the Second World War.

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