The war flow: tanks to Tokyo, fuel cells to four air forces' bombers

1941 – 1945

The outward record at war strength: The Wars section owns the contracts and the home front; this entry owns the destinations, and the war gave Mishawaka products the widest destinations in the city's record — printed, as the record gives them, by the machines and services that carried them. From 1941 the Ball Band works fabricated self-sealing fuel cells, and in February 1942, working around the clock, its people designed and built three fuel tanks for each of the Army's B-25 bombers — a 225-gallon bulletproof cell for the bomb bay, a 160-gallon bladder for the crawlway, a 60-gallon tank in place of the lower turret — extending the bombers' range to some 2,400 miles for a mission whose purpose stayed secret while the tanks were built. The mission's destination is the documented end of the flow: on 18 April 1942 sixteen B-25s flew from the carrier Hornet and bombed Tokyo, and Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, who had visited the plant during production, afterward sent the employees a telegram of congratulations — the City of Mishawaka's own historic-markers account is the settling source, and the Ball Band file carries it whole. The wider war line, in Peter De Kever's city history's itemization, ran the same way — out of Mishawaka into the services' worldwide hands: fuel cells for the B-17, B-25, B-26 and B-29 bombers, the Navy's PBM-3 patrol bomber and the A-20C; Army raincoats; Navy deep-sea diving suits; aviator boots; gas masks in the laboratory record. The scale of the outward commitment is fixed by the strike wire of March 1943, which reported about three-fourths of the plant's output in war work at the moment its employment ran to its all-time peak of 9,446. No destination finer than the aircraft and the services is documented — no cell was ever consigned to a named squadron in the record reached — and the entry prints the flow at the record's own grain: a rubber works on the St. Joseph River whose tanks were in the first American airplanes over Tokyo, and whose bladders rode in the bombers of both the European and Pacific wars.

Sources:

1. City of Mishawaka, historic markers account of the Doolittle Raid tanks, and this build's Ball Band file — the February 1942 design and construction of the three tanks per B-25 (225-gallon, 160-gallon, 60-gallon), the 2,400-mile range, Doolittle's visit and telegram, the raid of 18 April 1942.
2. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History — fuel cells for the B-17, B-25, B-26, B-29, PBM-3 and A-20C; Army raincoats; Navy deep-sea diving suits; aviator boots; the 1943 employment peak of 9,446.
3. Eugene Register-Guard, 9 March 1943 (wire) — about three-fourths of the plant's output in war work, as carried in this build's Ball Band file.