History
Activated in 1949 as a C-46 Commando Troop Carrier Wing. Ordered to Active Service on 1 April 1951 for duty during the Korean War. The 403d was one of the six units initially assigned to the Eighteenth Air Force, Tactical Air Command, was eventually sent to the Far East.
The 403d mobilized at Portland Municipal Airport, Oregon. The wing trained at home in its C-46s and participated in Eighteenth Air Force’s routine training exercises for the next eleven months. On 11 February 1952, however, the Eighteenth Air Force directed it to transfer its C-46s and prepare to move overseas by 25 March 1952. By 14 April, it was in place at Ashiya AB, Kyushu, Japan. There it acquired a second group and some independent squadrons.
Upon arrival at Ashiya, the 403d immediataly converted to C-119s. This action finally solved the Far East Air Force’s year-old problem of providing the Army with sufficient lift to handle the 187th Regimental Combat Team intact. The new arrangement was soon put to the test. In May 1952, the 403d airlifted the 187th Regimnental Combat Team to Pusan in an expedited movement incident to the quelling of a communist prisoner-of-war riot at Koje-do Island. The wing’s subsequent operations encompassed airborne assault training, airdrop resupply, air landed resupply, and air movement of complete units in the Far East. It engaged in a number of airborne training missions with the 137th Regimental Combat Team. In October 1952 the wing participated in an airborne feint which was part of a United Nations Command amphibious demonstration off eastern Korea
After it had served the prescribed twenty-one months on active military service, the 403d Troop Carrier Wing was inactivated on 1 January, and returned to reserve status.
Read more about this topic: 403d Wing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)