The First World War · the Guard goes back, and the county goes with it

1917 – 1919

The county's standing company went to war a third time under a new name: South Bend's National Guard company — the Company F of 1898's lineage — entered federal service in 1917 and was reorganized as the Supply Company of the 137th Field Artillery; the 3rd Indiana Infantry's machine-gun company, in which South Bend men also served, became Company C of the 139th Machine Gun Battalion. Both went to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and both sailed in October 1918, weeks before the Armistice — the artillery's Corporal Louis R. Copp, a Studebaker factory hand who had enlisted in Company F on 18 June 1917, died of pneumonia at Liverpool on 23 October 1918, days after landing. Around the Guard companies went the whole county: volunteers into the Regulars, the Navy's radio branch at Great Lakes, the aviation sections, and at least one man — Raymond Peter Holycross, a South Bend carpenter — into the Canadian Expeditionary Force, enlisting on 1 April 1917, five days before his own country declared war.

The factory rolls and the service rolls are the same rolls read twice: the state's Gold Star entries for this county name the Studebaker factory, the Oliver Plow Works and the Singer works as the employers of man after man. The home front that fed, financed and nursed this effort — the Liberty Loans, the draft boards, the Red Cross and the influenza autumn of 1918 — is told in this history’s home-front record, which follows the wars in this document; the survey record here is the service and its price, which the state itself compiled, county by county, in 1921. No published consolidated total of the county's servicemen was located in the record consulted: Indiana's full roster of its WWI service stands in the Statement of Service Cards at the Indiana Archives and Records Administration — some 135,800 cards statewide — and the county's share of them is carried as a named gap rather than a guess.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Commission, Indiana World War Records: Gold Star Honor Roll (1921), St. Joseph County section — the entries for Copp (Company F, Indiana National Guard; Supply Company, 137th Field Artillery; Camp Shelby), Baumgartner (Machine Gun Company, 3rd Infantry; Company C, 139th Machine Gun Battalion), Daniels, Holycross and the factory employers named throughout.
2. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Indiana World War I Statement of Service Cards (indexed at FamilySearch as Indiana, World War I, Enrollment Cards, 1919; 135,800 records) — the state's full service roster, against which the absence of a published county total is stated.