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1941 — 1945
One installation: Baer Field was Fort Wayne's Second World War installation, and in the sources consulted it stands alone. No separate ordnance depot, general hospital, or prisoner-of-war camp in Fort Wayne itself is documented in the sources reached for this chapter: Indiana's documented POW system ran through camps elsewhere in the state, and no Fort Wayne camp appears in the record consulted. Smith Field, the city's municipal airport on the north side, remained a civil field (its later control-tower closure in the 1981 PATCO strike is noted in the Wars record). The wartime military presence beyond Baer Field was machinery rather than real estate — the selective service boards and recruiting stations of the draft entry below, the troop trains and canteens of the WWI-pattern home front carried in the war chapters, and the war plants of the defense-industry entries that follow, of which GE's government-built Taylor Street supercharger plant was functionally a federal war plant on a company campus. Where a negative matters to the record, this chapter states it as a negative of the sources consulted, not as a proof that nothing existed.
Sources:
- The wars record — the Baer Field chapter, on Baer Field as Fort Wayne's wartime installation, and the Smith Field tower note.
- Searches of the official and county sources located no Fort Wayne depot, hospital or POW camp.