15th Wing
active United States Air Force formation
The 15th Wing is a wing of the United States Air Force at Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii. The wing reports to 11th Air Force, Headquartered at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.
Its history goes back to just before World War II, when the 15th Pursuit Group was organized at Wheeler Field, Hawaii from elements of the 18th Pursuit Group. The group's combat effectiveness was largely destroyed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Remanned and re-equipped as the 15th Fighter Group, it remained in the Hawaiian islands to provide for the air defense of the islands, although it deployed squadrons and detachments to the Central and Western Pacific areas. It later became a Twentieth Air Force very long range fighter group on Iwo Jima, escorting Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers that attacked the Japanese home Islands. In April 1945 the group earned a Distinguished Unit Citation for combat action over Japan. Following the end of the war, the group returned to Hawaii, where it was inactivated in 1946.
The group was again activated in 1955 to replace the 518th Air Defense Group as part of Air Defense Command's Project Arrow, which replaced units formed during the Cold War with those that had a distinguished history in the two world wars. It performed the air defense mission at Niagara Falls Municipal Airport, New York until it was discontinued in 1960 and its mission assumed by the New York Air National Guard.
The public source identifies “15th Wing” as active United States Air Force formation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around 15th, Wing and active.
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This entry incorporates text from “15th Wing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.