History
see main article Far East Air Force (United States)
With its origins going back almost a century to 1912, the command was officially established on 6 May 1941 as the Philippine Department Air Force at Nichols Field, Luzon, Philippines. Fifth Air Force was a United States Army Air Forces combat air force in the Pacific Theater of World War II, engaging in combat operations primarily in the Southwest Pacific AOR.
During World War II, Fifth Air Force units first engaged the Japanese during the Philippines Campaign (1941–1942), then afterward withdrawing to Australia after the Japanese conquest of the islands. Rearmed, it engaged the Japanese in New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies and then as part of the liberating forces in the Philippines Campaign (1944–45). In the postwar era, Fifth Air Force was the primary USAF occupation force in Japan. During the Korean War, Fifth Air Force was the primary command and control organization for USAF forces engaged in combat operations over Korea, and during the Cold War was the main USAF defense force in Japan.
Read more about this topic: Fifth Air Force
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“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)