The 91st Air Division (91st AD) is an inactive United States Air Force organization. Its last assignment was with Continental Air Forces, assigned to First Air Force, being stationed at Newark Municipal Airport, New Jersey. It was inactivated on 24 June 1949.
During World War II, the 91st Photographic Wing was the primary source of aerial photography and visual intelligence and mapping for Fifth Air Force in the Southwest Pacific theater. Its assigned units flying unarmed over enemy territory, photographing Japanese airfields, harbors, beach defenses, and personnel areas in New Guinea, the Bismarcks, Borneo, and the southern Philippines. They also reconnoitered target areas and enemy troop positions to provide intelligence for Air Force and Army units.
Liaison aircraft assigned to the wing rescued Allied fliers forced down in Pacific jungles, and evacuated wounded personnel from forward areas. Frequently fighters, assigned to subordinate units, attacked gun emplacements, bridges, supply dumps, and other installations in support of ground troops.
In 1945, as the war with Japan came to a close, the subordinate units flew photographic missions over Kyūshū. After hostilities ceased, these flights continued, and the aerial photographs obtained helped to locate prisoner of war (POW) camps and in assessing damage done to the Japanese communications system. Inactivated in Japan during early 1946.
Activated as part of the Air Force Reserve at Newark Airport, New Jersey in late 1946 controlling tactical reconnaissance units. The organization was redesignated as an Air Division in April 1948 as part of the realignment of the United States Air Force command echelon structure. It was primarily an administrative organization. It inactivated in 1949.
The Strategic Air Command assigned the designation 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing to its first global strategic reconnaissance and aerial mapping unit in 1948 as part of its policy of designating new units with ones having a World War II combat history. However, there is no relationship or lineage between the units.
Famous quotes containing the words air and/or division:
“Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)