The honest negative · no base was ever built here

The standing fact

Finish with what is not here: South Bend never held a major active-duty installation — no fort after the French post of the old valley (which stood on Michigan ground, at Niles, and belongs to Before the City), no Army post, no naval station, no air base. The city tried twice for a wartime installation and lost twice, as the Airports record gives in full: in 1940 it bid for an Army Air Corps base and the base went to Fort Wayne, where Baer Field grew into the 122nd Fighter Wing's home; and in March 1942, under Mayor Pavey, it bid for a naval air training base and lost to Peru, Indiana. What the war brought instead was training without a base — the old municipal field renamed Cadet Field on 9 August 1942 for Civil Aeronautics Administration pilot training — and the naval school at the university, told above. The nearest standing installations are regional facts, boundary-printed as such: Grissom Air Reserve Base in Miami County, south of the city, an Air Force Reserve installation that also hosts the Indiana Wing Civil Air Patrol's headquarters; Fort Wayne's Baer Field and the 122nd Fighter Wing in Allen County, the air base South Bend bid for and Fort Wayne won; and Camp Atterbury in Johnson County, the Indiana Guard's state training center, through which this city's Guard battalions have always passed on their way to federal service. South Bend's military geography is the one this section has drawn: a county that raised regiments, a Guard battalion and a Marine company drilling on donated city acres, a university that commissioned a navy's worth of officers — and no base, ever. The record needs no larger claim.

Sources:

1. Airports leg of this record — the 1940 Army Air Corps base bid lost to Fort Wayne, the March 1942 naval air training base bid under Mayor Pavey lost to Peru, and the municipal field's renaming as Cadet Field on 9 August 1942 for CAA pilot training; no Army or Navy base was ever built at South Bend.
2. Fort Wayne leg of this record (Military, Fort Wayne full-history dump) — Baer Field and the 122nd Fighter Wing as Fort Wayne's standing installation.
3. Federal nonprofit and Civil Air Patrol listings — the Indiana Wing headquarters at Grissom Air Reserve Base (Bldg 151, Box 46, Grissom ARB), and Military Department of Indiana listings placing the 113th Engineer Battalion detachments, among other Indiana Guard elements, at Camp Atterbury.