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1941 – 1945
South Bend's Second World War was fought on two fronts, and both are documented: The production front — Studebaker's 197,678 US6 trucks and its Wright Cyclone engine lines, Bendix's brakes and aviation equipment, and the rest of the arsenal record — is told in the Studebaker and Businesses sections and is cross-referenced here, not retold. The service front wrote itself daily in the hometown paper: from 1941 the South Bend Tribune ran its "Service Notes" column — county citizens drafted, enlisted, promoted, transferred, wounded, decorated, missing and killed — and the South Bend library's index to that column, covering 1941 through 1979 across three wars, is the nearest thing this county has to a running roster of its service. The university on the hill kept its own count in its own way: the Notre Dame Religious Bulletin of 3 May 1945 prints "Notre Dame Men Dead in Service — 223 reported to date," a running list, still growing in the war's last spring, that names South Bend's own among the university's dead — Capt. James P. Birder, class of '44; Capt. Frank T. Farrell, '39; Lt. William M. Fox, ex-'38; Cpl.
George R. Jackman, ex-'42; S. Sgt. Daniel P. Farley, ex-'38; Cpl. Dewey C. Mann, ex-'45; Ens. John A. Miller, ex-'43; Lt. Robert J. Simonds, ex-'88 as the Bulletin prints it. The county's men and women served in every theater and every service; the Guard lineage of 1898 and 1917 went out again in the 137th Field Artillery's successor battalions of the 38th Division's artillery — a regimental-history detail this section does not print beyond the lineage, which the Military section carries. What this section will not do is invent the county's totals: no consolidated official count of St. Joseph County's Second World War servicemen, and no single official county death total, is published in the record consulted, and both are carried as gaps with their sources named in the following entry.
Sources:
- St. Joseph County Public Library, Military Service Notes Column Index — the Tribune's "Service Notes" column (1941–1979: World War II, Korea and Vietnam), its scope and citation system as the library describes them.
- Notre Dame Religious Bulletin, 3 May 1945 (University of Notre Dame Archives) — "Notre Dame Men Dead in Service: 223 reported to date," with the South Bend hometowns named in the list.
- The Studebaker and Businesses sections of this history — the war-production record cross-referenced.