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:
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)