44th Missile Wing
military unit
The 44th Missile Wing is an inactive United States Air Force unit. Its last assignment was with Twentieth Air Force, at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, where it was inactivated on 4 July 1994.
For over 40 years the 44th was a front-line Strategic Air Command wing, initially as a Boeing B-47 Stratojet medium bomber unit in the 1950s. With the phaseout of the B-47, the wing became a LGM-30 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile unit in the 1960s, being inactivated in 1994 as part of the drawdown of U.S. strategic forces after the end of the Cold War.
History
Bombardment Wing
The 44th Bombardment Wing, Medium was established in late December 1950. The new wing was organized at March Air Force Base, California where it received Boeing B-29 Superfortresses along with some TB-29s. It depended on 22d Bombardment Wing for initial cadre and help in becoming organized.
The wing moved to Lake Charles Air Force Base, Louisiana on 1 August 1951; its mission was to train B-29 and RB-29 aircrews and mechanics for combat duty with units engaged in Korean War combat duty with Far East Air Forces. From 10 October 1951 to 15 May 1952, trained all elements of the 68th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing.
Replaced the propeller-driven B-29s with new Boeing B-47E Stratojet swept-wing medium bombers in 1953, capable of flying at high subsonic speeds and primarily designed for penetrating the airspace of the Soviet Union.
“44th Missile Wing” enters the record as military unit. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what 44th, Missile and Wing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4638081. Authority coordinates are 44.145, -103.104. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1950, 1951 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “44th Missile 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.