The 113th Engineers' South Bend armory · the induction of January 1941

1941

When the Guard was called up for the Second World War, one of its regiments kept a battalion's rendezvous in South Bend: The 113th Engineer Regiment (Combat), Indiana National Guard, was inducted into the Army of the United States on 17 January 1941 under Colonel John W. Wheeler, and the regiment's own history of the war records where its men assembled: "Personnel assembled at unit rendezvous, which were armories located at Gary, Whiting, and South Bend, Indiana." On 25 January the regiment entrained for Camp Shelby, Mississippi, 420 officers and men strong; in April the first Selective Service trainees, 480 of them, brought it to full war strength. The regiment's war service belongs to the Wars record. For this section the fact is the station itself: in 1941 the South Bend armory was a going engineer rendezvous of the 38th Division's engineer regiment, alongside Gary and Whiting. The regiment had come to that morning off the last peacetime summer of the old Guard — its own history remembers the 1940 maneuvers in Wisconsin, in rain it calls the "Big Rain," as an ordeal nothing in France, Louisiana, New Guinea or Leyte later matched — and the men who assembled at South Bend in January 1941 were that regiment. The regiment's history does not name which of its companies kept the South Bend armory, and that company-level identity is not supplied by the record used here — the gap is named rather than filled. The 113th's line survives today as the 113th Engineer Battalion, seated at Gary; the Guard's own current listings, treated below, show no South Bend element of it now.

Sources:

1. 113th Engineers in the Pacific Theater — the regiment's own published history of its Second World War service (archive.org, full text read first-hand): the induction of 17 January 1941 under Col. John W. Wheeler, the rendezvous armories at Gary, Whiting and South Bend, the entrainment of 25 January for Camp Shelby, the strength of 420 raised to war strength by 480 Selective Service trainees in April 1941.
2. U.S. Army, "113th Engineer Battalion" coverage (army.mil, December 2025) — the battalion today: headquarters and forward support company at Gary, the 713th Sapper Company at Valparaiso, companies at Franklin and detachments at Camp Atterbury, with no South Bend element.