The defense city · an overview

1939 — present

Why the work came here: Fort Wayne's defense industry grew from the same base as its civil industry — magnet wire, motors and electrical manufacturing, deep in the interior, on three railroads' and three rivers' ground — and from 1939 onward the federal government and its primes treated the city as a place where precision electrical work could be done at scale, safe from coastal attack. The Second World War made the pattern: GE building aircraft superchargers in a government-financed plant, Magnavox building military electronics, Harvester building trucks, and local lore — repeated in print but carried here as lore — ranking the city high on enemy target lists for exactly that concentration. After 1945 the pattern persisted through the Cold War and past it: the same campuses, under successive corporate names, built the radios, sonobuoys, engine controls and satellite imagers of the entries below. In the present century the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership counts the region's defense and aerospace employment at more than 10,000 people across the eleven-county region, and the primes named in the Fort Wayne record are BAE Systems, L3Harris, Raytheon (RTX) and Ultra — the first three with Fort Wayne plants or campuses of their own, the fourth just across the Whitley County line on the old Magnavox sonobuoy line. Federal figures circulated by the region's advocates put Department of Defense funding to Allen County defense companies at more than one billion dollars in 2015–2020 alone. The entries that follow take each line on its own documented record.

Sources:

1. Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership figures, as reported in regional business coverage (2026) — defense and aerospace employment above 10,000 across the region; the anchor primes named as BAE Systems, Raytheon Technologies, L3Harris Technologies and Ultra Maritime.
2. Greater Fort Wayne / regional showcase materials — Department of Defense funding to Allen County defense companies above one billion dollars, 2015–2020; about 21,000 veterans in Allen County.
3. B. J. Hollars, "Fort Wayne Is Still Seventh on Hitler's List" — the target-list tradition, carried in the text above as lore; the wartime product litany (superchargers, magnet wire, sonar systems) as the essay states it.