Fort Wayne was seventh on Hitler's bombing list.

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Famous Stories & the Record

WAR

As history. Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler's List is the title of Michael Martone's 1990 book, catalogued as fiction; Martone has said he set out to build a Midwestern mythology. A 2016 Michigan Quarterly Review investigation searched the History Center's Fort Wayne Civil Defense Council Records (1939–1947): curator Walter Font is “familiar with the legend, though he's never seen any written record,” and historian John Beatty: “It's become quite a myth… I've never seen any bombing list.”

The substrate that makes the myth plausible: wartime production at Harvester, GE, Magnavox, Tokheim and Rea, and the Camp Scott POW camp. Tell that story as itself, it needs no list.

Source: Michigan Quarterly Review investigation (2016), sites.lsa.umich.edu

The substrate deserves its own telling, because it is better than the myth. Camp Thomas A. Scott was built in August 1942 northeast of McMillen Park, between the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and Moeller Road east of Wayne Trace, to train the Army's Railroad Operating Battalions — seven battalions passed through in 1942–44 — and was named for the Pennsylvania Railroad's first president. In the fall of 1944 it was converted, guard towers and barbed wire, into a branch prisoner-of-war camp of Camp Perry, Ohio, and held more than 600 German prisoners, most of them Afrika Korps veterans, with some Italians taken at Anzio and Monte Cassino; the prisoners worked industrial and farm jobs across the area in the wartime labour shortage. The camp commander, Capt. Frank Bodenhorn, was a Fort Wayne man of German descent. The camp closed on 16 November 1945, the prisoners were repatriated, and the barracks were considered for GI housing. The ground is now the Camp Scott Wetlands Nature Preserve. A city that held a POW camp full of Afrika Korps veterans never needed a bombing list to know the war had reached it.

Added sources: Camp Thomas A. Scott summary; Hawfield, “Cityscapes,” News-Sentinel, 15 December 1990, via ACGSI's Camp Scott page

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