War industry as military presence · the proving ground and the ordnance plants

1943 — the present day

The factories' own records are in the business legs; their ground's uniformed work belongs here: West of the city, the Studebaker Proving Ground — the company's test track, opened in the 1920s — was taken over by the United States Army Ordnance Department from March 1943 to June 1945 and used for the testing of trucks and armored vehicles, while the parent company built the US6 trucks, Wright Cyclone engines and Weasels whose production record is told in the Studebaker leg. The succession of that ground is unbroken military work: Bendix leased the proving ground and purchased it in 1966 — donating 195 acres of it as Bendix Woods County Park — Bosch followed in 1996, and on 1 April 2015 ownership passed to Navistar, which operates it today as the Navistar Proving Grounds, testing trucks, buses and military vehicles.

It is the one Studebaker works still doing its original work, and the work is still, in part, the Army's. In the city, the Honeywell Aerospace wheels-and-braking plant stands on ground where aircraft wheel and brake manufacturing has run since 1943 — Bendix's war work, carried through the 737, B-52 and F-35 programs in the Businesses record — and the modern form of the same presence is AM General: headquartered in South Bend, its military vehicles built just down the river in Mishawaka, a separate city whose ground this record does not absorb, as the Businesses leg boundary-prints it. and the wartime scale of Bendix as a corporation, some 900 million dollars of sales and 70,000 at peak employment in 1944, is printed there as a corporate figure, as it should be: this section claims for South Bend only what stood on South Bend ground. Read as presence, the picture is consistent with the rest of this record: South Bend's Second World War military weight was industrial and academic — an ordnance test ground, brake and engine plants, a naval training school — rather than a garrison.

Sources:

1. Studebaker leg of this record — the Army Ordnance Department's takeover of the Studebaker Proving Ground, March 1943 to June 1945, for truck and armored-vehicle testing; the US6, Wright R-1820 and Weasel production figures; and the ground's succession, Bendix (lease, then purchase 1966; 195 acres donated as Bendix Woods County Park), Bosch (1996), Navistar (ownership 1 April 2015), operating as the Navistar Proving Grounds with military-vehicle testing among its work.
2. Businesses leg of this record — the Honeywell Aerospace wheels-and-braking plant on ground in aircraft wheel and brake manufacture since 1943, the 737, B-52 and F-35 programs, AM General's South Bend headquarters with production in Mishawaka (boundary-printed there), and Bendix's wartime corporate scale printed as a corporate figure.