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The valley's defense city is South Bend with a Mishawaka plant, and it prints here at boundary size because Osceola's workers commuted into it — the register's 1940s union rulings at township addresses (businesses addendum, item 9) are this ground's receipt for that commute: Overview: South Bend entered the Second World War as a wagon-and-carriage city turned automobile city, and converted whole: its two great firms stopped civilian production and ran on war contracts whose combined scale remade the county's employment, while its proving ground tested the Army's vehicles. Studebaker (South Bend): just under 200,000 US6 6×6 cargo trucks (197,678 by the trade count, most going to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease); the M29 Weasel tracked carrier; and 63,789 license-built Wright R-1820 Cyclone engines for the B-17 Flying Fortress, assembled from January 1944 exclusively at the purpose-built Chippewa Avenue plant (construction January 1941–June 1942, Defense Plant Corporation financed) — total war contract value on the order of $1.2 billion, with some 17,000 wartime employees and 5,600 of its own workers in service. Its General Products Division's succession runs Kaiser Jeep → American Motors (1970) → AM General, whose military-vehicle production (the HMMWV line) is seated at Mishawaka — the valley's living defense prime, at Mishawaka's boundary size. Bendix (South Bend; Bendix Aviation): brakes, carburetors, starters and aviation components — "all the parts to keep it in the air and land it" beside Studebaker's engines — adding over 10,000 employees and 700,000 square feet during the war; its successor presence on the proving ground (Bendix took the grounds in 1966; Bosch after) is South Bend's record. Fort Wayne's firms — Magnavox, General Electric's supercharger-to-engine-controls line, the Farnsworth-to-L3Harris imager line, BAE Systems and Raytheon — are that city's whole and print in this one boundary sentence only, as the tasking rules require. Osceola's own share, tested: no defense employer, war contract or ordnance subcontract is named for any Osceola firm in the businesses record or any source reached — the town's defense-industry article is its commute, and it is printed at exactly that size.
Sources: South Bend Tribune, "169 years of South Bend military vehicle production" (2026) (the Studebaker and Bendix figures; the AM General succession); Studebaker wartime production record (the 197,678 trucks; 63,789 R-1820 engines; the Chippewa Avenue plant course), as published in the Studebaker National Museum and trade records, read November 2026; Businesses and this history (the local negative and the commuters' register lines).