Nearly 3,500 of Belleville's 30,000 citizens participated in World War II. Over 200 of
them had been killed by January 1945, months before the war finally ended. Belleville
sought to attract returning servicemen. The Open Door to Belleville, a booklet
prepared for the veterans in 1944, spoke of the town's many employment opportunities.
It pointed out that Belleville had some sixty plants making forty-six different products.
Jobs meant a lot to men who had had no peacetime work over the four years of the war
and who may have been unemployed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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