The culmination of his prewar training came in the Louisiana maneuvers of 1941, the largest and most realistic held in the United States to that point. Third Army decisively defeated Lt. Gen. Ben Lear's opposing Second Army in wide-ranging war games that got national publicity, and in which Eisenhower was credited with devising Third Army's plan of battle.

Marshall's Protege

Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought an American declaration of war on the Axis Powers, Col. Walter Bedell Smith telephoned Third Army's chief of staff. Smith, Secretary of the General Staff in the War Department, told Eisenhower that General George C. Marshall wanted him in Washington immediately. Marshall knew Eisenhower by reputation as a man who would assume responsibility, but he put that reputation to a test immediately. When Eisenhower reported for duty, Marshall posed a problem to which he already knew the answer. He asked for a recommendation on how the entire Pacific strategy should be handled. Eisenhower returned to the Chief of Staff s office a few hours later and briefed a strategic concept with which Marshall agreed. The Chief of Staff ended the interview with clear instructions. 'Eisenhower,' he said, 'the Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.'

That conversation set the tone of the relationship between the two men. Eisenhower approached his job by trying to put himself into Marshall's place and resolve a problem the way his chief would do it, had he the time. The results were good, and Marshall soon gave Eisenhower increasingly demanding problems that tested his abilities to the fullest. His assignment in War Plans Division, where he was the responsible staff officer for arranging support for the Philippines and Far East in general, turned out to have problems with no reasonable solution. The ultimately fruitless attempt to help the Army's defenders of the Philippines, stranded by the calamity that had befallen the Pacific Fleet, dominated Eisenhower's attention for months. While struggling with that task he also began to deal with other and broader issues. At the end of December 1941, for example, he accompanied Marshall to the Arcadia Conference at which the United States