311th Air Division
military unit

The 311th Air Division is an inactive United States Air Force organization. Its last assignment was with Strategic Air Command at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, where it was inactivated on 1 November 1949. The division was first activated in 1944 as the 311th Photographic Wing. Although it was stationed in the United States, throughout its existence, the unit was responsible for the control of long range reconnaissance units in multiple theaters.
History
The 311th first came into existence in February 1944 as the 311th Photographic Wing at Bolling Field in Washington, DC and was assigned to nearby Headquarters, Army Air Forces. Initially, the wing acted as a task force headquarters with no permanently assigned units. In March, the 1st Photographic Group at Peterson Field, Colorado and the 11th Photographic Group at MacDill Field, Florida, were assigned to the wing. These two groups had squadrons performing mapping and charting functions in the US and in overseas theaters. In October 1944, the two groups were disbanded, and their squadrons were assigned directly to the 311th Wing.
The flying squadrons transferred to the wing were the 1st, 2d, 4th and 19th Photographic Charting Squadrons; the 6th and 16th Photographic Squadrons and the 91st Photographic Mapping Squadron.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16057531. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “311th Air Division” 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.