The truck and utility course: the works that served the wars

ROW 8 · BOUNDARY WHOLE — SOUTH BEND / MISHAWAKA; NO TRUCK WORKS ON THIS GROUND

No truck or utility works has stood on this ground — the making layer is plain — and the county's truck course is two works in two cities, printed whole at boundary size: Studebaker's war trucks (South Bend). Studebaker had sold commercial trucks since 1927 and militarized K-series trucks to European buyers from the late 1930s (about 2,000 K25s in 1940, mostly to France). Its defining wartime product, the US6 2½-ton 6×6 cargo truck, entered production in South Bend in June 1941; 4,724 were built that year, and by August 1945 the South Bend lines had produced 197,678 US6 trucks in all configurations (Reo built 22,204 more under the same design at Lansing) — more than half shipped to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, where the truck was nicknamed the "Studer" and later reverse-engineered into the ZIS-151; fleets of them also built the Alaska Highway. Alongside the trucks, South Bend built the Weasel — the lightweight tracked cargo carrier developed in secrecy from Geoffrey Pyke's snow-vehicle concept, produced as the T15/M28 and M29 (the amphibious M29C Water Weasel from July 1943) to a total of 15,124 — and 63,789 Wright Cyclone R-1820 engines for the B-17, across its South Bend, Fort Wayne and Chicago plants. The collapse and the afterlife print in the marque article: civilian truck production ended with South Bend's automobile lines in December 1963, and the works' military-vehicle succession passed to the county's second works.

The mail-Jeep succession and AM General (Mishawaka). The utility line that outlived Studebaker descends from Willys-Overland's wartime Jeep through Kaiser — which bought Studebaker's former Chippewa Avenue plant in South Bend in 1964 in the CLUI record's account — into AM General, the division (later company) that built the DJ-5 Dispatcher, the right-hand-drive mail Jeep of the U.S. Postal Service's delivery decades, and then the HMMWV, the Humvee: the first production Humvee came off the Mishawaka line in 1984 in the land-use record's dating, and more than 100,000 followed in the next decade. AM General's plants stand in Mishawaka — their true addresses are the next article's business — building military Humvees and, in the commercial plant, the civilian Hummer H1 and the GM Hummer H2 under contract (2002–2009 in the trade record), with the commercial plant passing after AM General's sale of it through SF Motors / Electric Last Mile to Mullen, whose Mishawaka operation stands closed in the current directory record. The revival pattern the template expects prints here as fact: the truck giant of this county did not revive — its military half persists at Mishawaka under its own name, and its civilian half is a closed plant and a succession of electric-vehicle ventures. Granger's ground touches the whole course only as roads do: US6s, mail Jeeps and Humvees have run its streets for eighty years, built fifteen minutes away, in other cities' names.

Sources:

1. Hemmings, "South Bend Stalwarts"; Military Trader, "Studebaker and the rest of the WWII story" — US6 production June 1941–August 1945, 197,678 built; the Weasel course and totals (15,124 with the Texas State thesis record); 63,789 R-1820 engines.
2. Studebaker truck history (Studebaker Drivers Club record) — the 1940 K25 exports; US6 forms and running gear; the South Bend production start.
3. Center for Land Use Interpretation, AM General Mishawaka Plant record — first HMMWV off the line 1984; 100,000+ in the following decade; the Kaiser purchase of Studebaker's South Bend facilities (1964); AM General's South Bend base and Willys descent.
4. IEDC / Area Development records (2018–2020) — the commercial plant's passage to SF Motors and Electric Last Mile; see auto-living-plant for addresses.