501st Combat Support Wing
military unit
The 501st Combat Support Wing is an administrative support wing of the United States Air Force, based at RAF Fairford, United Kingdom. It is one of three wings located in the United Kingdom as components of the Third Air Force and United States Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa (USAFE).
History
The first predecessor of the 501st Wing was activated on 1 June 1944 as the 501st Bombardment Group at Dalhart Army Air Field, Texas for training with Boeing B-29 Superfortresses. Its components were the 21st, 41st and 485th Bombardment Squadrons. In August, the 501st Group and its squadrons moved to Harvard Army Air Field, Nebraska and began to equip with Superfortresses. The group completed its training and departed for the Pacific on 7 March 1945.
The group was equipped with the Bell Aircraft manufactured B-29B, which was designed to save weight by removing all of the guns and sighting equipment used on other B-29s, except the tail gun, allowing the B-29B to fly a little higher and a little further. The B-29B also had two new radar units installed, the AN/APQ-7 Eagle radar for bombing and navigation and the AN/APG-15 for aiming the tail gun. These two radar units gave the B-29B a distinctive shape as the APQ-7 antenna appeared as a small wing under the fuselage, between the two bomb bay doors and the APG-15 added a ball shaped antenna to the tail of the aircraft below the tail guns.
The group arrived at its combat station, Northwest Field on Guam on 14 April 1945.
The public source identifies “501st Combat Support Wing” as military unit. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around 501st, Combat and Support.
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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 Mar 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4639771. Authority coordinates are 51.378, -1.302. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “501st Combat Support 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.