Operations
The 96th Bombardment Wing's units entered combat in early 1944, bombing oil refineries, marshaling yards, steel plants, and tank factories plus numerous other assorted targets in the European theater. In September 1944, some of the units ceased bombardment missions and instead flew gasoline for Army units to airfields in France. Others air-dropped supplies to Allied troops during the airborne attack on Holland that same month. During the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 through January 1945, subordinate units of the 97th aided Allied ground forces by bombing German transportation lines. Besides strategic bombardment, they also dropped supplies to Allied troops during the airborne assault across the Rhine River in March 1945.
Returned to the United States in summer, 1945. Programmed to become a B-29 Superfortress command wing, however inactivated at the end of the Pacific War.
Active in the Reserves from June 1947 to June 1949, the organization was redesignated as a division in April 1948.
Read more about this topic: 96th Air Division
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)