History
Formed under III Bomber Command in early 1943 as a B-26 Marauder medium bomber squadron. Trained for duty in Europe with Ninth Air Force. Engaged in combat beginning in early 1944, attacked tactical targets in France, Low Countries and Germany supporting Allied ground forces advancing after D-Day in Northern France Campaign and the Western Allied invasion of Germany, 1945. Received A-26 Invaders in April 1945, however did not use in combat. After V-E Day, demobilized personnel while being part of the Army of Occupation in Germany and inactivated in early 1946.
It provided operational and maintenance support for all Department of Defense test aircraft staging out of Holloman Air Force Base from, 1982-1990. The squadron flew developmental test and evaluation missions and has supported DOD test flights on White Sands Missile Range since 1991.
Read more about this topic: 586th Flight Test Squadron
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“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)