Quote Originally Posted by Detroitnerd View Post
Oh, simmer down. I'm talking about the post-World War II period.

As for your contention, um, riiiiggghhht. It was just a coinkydink that all the Detroit auto companies were fully unionized by 1941, and then suddenly Uncle Sam got so worried about that cold weather.
In 1940, the government built the Detroit Tank Arsenal out in Warren. To this day, that is the center of automotive research and development for the US Army. It employs quite a few civil service engineers at the high end of the civil service pay scale. Both the Abrams Tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle were developed there. Most of the M48 and the M60 series tanks were built on a GOCO basis by Chrysler [[union shop).

Camp Custer in Battle Creek [[my father did ROTC summer camp there in 1934) was not selected for retention due to climate [[in the Truman admin). Fort Brady in Rexford, MI was declared surplus in 1944 [[FDR).

Michigan did have a significant number of post-war gun and NIKE air defense installations and Selfridge AFB had interceptors until the beginning of the ballistic missile age made anti-bomber defenses obsolete. Detroit was considered to be a high priority target.

If you take a list of all of the posts, camps, and stations in the US Army during WWII, you can see that posts were closed in all of the northern states [[red and blue) and retained in the southern states [[mostly Democratic). This selection of which posts to close and which posts to retain was done during the Truman administration. The basis was strictly which posts gave the most effective training days. San Antonio, TX has always had a large number of air fields because it has the most available clear flying days.