The Second World War: the County's 430

1941 – 1945

The county's roll, counted: the War Department's Honor List of Dead and Missing, State of Indiana (1946) is the county's official roll of its Army and Army Air Forces dead. Transcribed name by name from the page images in the Mishawaka pass — 209 lines on the first county page, 211 on the second, 10 on the third — it tallies exactly against the Department's own printed tabulation, in all five classes: 430 names — 267 killed in action, 35 died of wounds, 106 died non-battle, 20 findings of death, 2 missing. The Navy Department's State Summary adds the sea services' dead by next-of-kin town. Neither list divides by township: the Honor List is arranged by county alone, and the sea list's towns are the cities. The honest statement of this ground's Second World War dead is therefore the one this section prints: they stand inside the county's 430 and the sea list's county names, unseparated by any federal instrument, and no township roll of the dead can be drawn from the record reached. The settling source for one is named below.

The missing: the Honor List's two missing — the class of 2 in the tabulation — are 1st Lt. Donald Q. Hopkins and Sgt. Andrew J. Kierein, the county's pair, as the Mishawaka pass joined them. Neither joins to this ground on any instrument swept; they stand in the county frame. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's Indiana report for the Second World War (edition of 11 February 2022) is the standing federal accounting against which any name's status prints, dated as of that edition.

The ground's named service: what can be named is service, from the county veterans index — the graves-and-service index that attributes its rows, where it can, to township and town. Under Granger it carries four Second World War men. Two are the CDP's own on the index's attribution: William A. Berger (WW II, buried St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park) and Ronald D. Shabala (WW II, Navy, buried in the same ground). Two are boundary — Penn Township soil with Granger addresses, printed as boundary and no more: Master Sergeant Miles Griffith Beard, Army, who "served in the Philippines" and held two Bronze Stars, buried in the memorial park's Plot 4A; and James Emery Hupp, Coast Guard, "Capt in Ferry Command" — a captain of the Air Transport Command's ferrying service, in the Coast Guard's uniform as the index gives it — buried in the same ground. The disproportion is the finding, and the remedy is a named source: the South Bend Tribune chronicled the county's service daily in its "Service Notes" column from 1941, and the St. Joseph County Public Library's index to that column (1941–1979, across three wars) is the instrument from which a township roll — the drafted, the enlisted, the wounded, the decorated, the dead, address by address — can actually be built.

The home front, at documented size: Harris and Clay in 1941–45 were what they had been in 1861: farm townships inside a county whose war sat in the cities. The draft boards, the ration boards and the bond drives were the county's, seated in South Bend and Mishawaka; the townships' part was the farms themselves — among them the largest farm in Harris Township, the University of Notre Dame's, which on Chapman's older record raised the university's beef and milk on the drained marsh — and the men.

Sources:

1. War Department, Honor List of Dead and Missing, State of Indiana (1946) — the St. Joseph County pages as transcribed and tallied in the Mishawaka pass (430; KIA 267, DOW 35, DNB 106, FOD 20, M 2); the Navy Department's State Summary (Indiana), in transcription.
2. The St. Joseph County veterans index — the four Granger-attributed Second World War rows, quoted at their strength.
3. St. Joseph County Public Library — the Military Service Notes Column Index, as described in the South Bend build.
4. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency — WWII Report for Indiana (Unaccounted For), edition of 11 February 2022.