South Bend Wars, Unrest and Disasters

Wars, Unrest & Disasters · what the wars cost this ground, and what the river and the sky have done to it

South Bend was a town of a few hundred people when its men first drilled for a war that never reached it, and a factory city of 132,000 when its sons' names filled the memorial rolls of the Second World War. Between those poles the record is unusually complete at the beginning and unusually honest at the end. For the Civil War the county histories print the companies, the rosters and the losses almost man by man, and this section follows them regiment by regiment: more than two thousand men went out of St. Joseph County, and the price can be counted company by company in the adjutant general's figures the historians compiled. For the wars of the twentieth century the counting passes to the official rolls — the state's Gold Star Honor Roll for 1914–1918, the War Department's and the Navy's casualty lists for 1941–1945, and the Defense Department's casualty file for Korea and Vietnam, from which this section counts the county's names directly. Where no consolidated official count exists in the record consulted — the Second World War's county total above all — the gap is printed as a gap, with the lists named where the count lives. The unrest is carried at the same discipline: the episodes that belong to other sections are cross-referenced at their documented size, and the one modern episode told here in full, the marches of May 2020, is told from the Tribune's own report, which records that they stayed peaceful. The disasters close the section, because on this ground disaster has a roster of its own: the fires that twice nearly ended Studebaker in the 1870s, the river's flood record and its breaking in February 2018, the tornado tracks the Weather Service surveys, and the blizzard that still stands as the measure of a South Bend winter.