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1918–1919, and the later wars tested · township-tested
The county's staged homecoming is documented whole for exactly one war, and it is the first. South Bend met the armistice in the streets on November 11, 1918 (South Bend News-Times, that day's issue), and it met the men with a parade the following spring. The News-Times of April 24, 1919 — preserved in Hoosier State Chronicles, the state's digital newspaper program — carries the arrangements whole: merchants agreed to release their veteran employees, many closing outright, for the "Welcome Home" parade of soldiers, sailors, and marines on Saturday afternoon (April 26, 1919); the men mobilized at Leeper Park at 1:30 p.m. and the parade moved at 2:30 under Col. George W. Freyermuth, in charge of all military features, with named officers for the aviation and signal corps, artillery, infantry, naval, quartermaster, engineer, and medical divisions; the reception committee's reviewing stand stood at the courthouse; and the invitation ran explicitly to "all the veterans from the surrounding towns and county." The township test is answered in the parade's own terms: Clay and Harris Township men came home as county men, in a county muster staged in the county seat — no township-staged return, no Granger-ground ceremony, appears anywhere in the record, for 1919 or after.
For the later wars the open record thins to the honest line. Searches of the open web record for a staged South Bend homecoming of 1945–46, for Korean and Vietnam-era staged returns, and for a Michiana Desert Storm welcome-home parade of 1991 returned the national pattern — the 1991 national celebrations in Washington (June 8, 1991) and New York — and neighbouring cities' records, but no South Bend staged return; the Tribune's archive for 1945–46 is not open-web reachable, and it is named as the settling source for the Second World War's local course rather than the gap being filled by inference. What the record does show is where the public ritual went: the welcome-home function passed to the standing institutions dug in this section — the Memorial Day observance that has run a century without a break (art-56-2), the Stand Down that musters services for the newest veterans each July (art-56-7), and the posts whose halls are the county's permanent welcome. The row is closed at that strength: 1919 dug whole from the contemporary newspaper; the later staged returns tested negative in the open record, searches shown; the township share — attendance as county men, ceremony on city ground — stated for every war alike.