The first war's home front

1914 — 1918

The factory city went to war on wheels and plowshares: When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, South Bend's works turned to the war as they had in 1861: Studebaker again built wagons for the Army — the horse-drawn logistics of 1917 still ran on them — and the city's plants fed the mobilization in a hundred subcontracted parts. The war's most repeated South Bend story is carried here as Army tradition states it: that the first American shot of the war, fired on October 23, 1917, was fired by Sergeant Alexander Arch of Battery C, 6th Field Artillery — a South Bend soldier — a claim the Army's own accounts of the 1st Division repeat, and which the city has kept with pride ever since; it is printed here as the attributed tradition it is. The war years closed the immigrant century: the factories that had filled the west side with Polish parishes now ran three shifts on war orders, and the city that emerged in 1920 — 70,983 people, up by a third in a decade — was the largest, richest and most industrial South Bend had yet been. The decade that followed would test it in a stranger way.

Sources:

1. Studebaker National Museum and company histories — the firm's return to military wagon production in the First World War.
2. U.S. Army accounts of the 1st Division in the First World War — Sergeant Alexander Arch of South Bend credited with firing the first American shot of the war, October 23, 1917; carried here as the Army tradition states it.
3. U.S. Census Bureau, decennial censuses — South Bend, 70,983 in 1920.