The war years at both fields — part dug, part named gap; the base that went elsewhere

1942–1945 · Cadet Field and Bendix Field (boundary)

What is dug: the first field's war-years identity is in its name. Renamed Cadet Field, the old South Bend Airport northeast of the city had its official opening under that name reported by the Tribune on 9 August 1942, and the Tribune's reports of 23 March 1942 stand behind the cadet name in the transportation-history account — a training-flavoured name for a training-era field. At Bendix Field, the war years are carried in the flying-service record: Homer Stockert, who had established the Stockert Flying Service at Bendix Field in 1933, served as a test pilot of the P-47 Thunderbolt at Evansville during the war and returned to Bendix Field to expand the service with his wife Dora — private aviation carrying on at the county field, not a military station. The negative the row directs is printed as a negative: no Army or Navy air base was seated at either field in the record reached; South Bend's fields stayed civil and instructional while the region's wartime air-base building went elsewhere, and neither field appears as a wartime station in the sources reached. The training uses by unit and syllabus, and the base decision's own paper, are beyond the record reached. Named gap (in part): the war-years training record at unit strength. Its settling sources are the War Department / Army Air Forces airfield records and station lists, with the Tribune files of 1942–45 as cross-check.

Sources: Indiana Transportation History, quoting the Tribune of 23 March 1942 and 9 August 1942; the Stockert Flying Service record in Quentin L. Hartwig, Bendix Field (book record).