633rd Special Operations Wing
military unit
The 333d Special Operations Wing is an inactive United States Air Force unit. It was active from July 1968 through March 1970 at Pleiku Air Base, South Vietnam. In 1985, the wing was consolidated with the 333d Bombardment Group as the 333d Special Operations Wing.
History
World War II
Heavy bomber training unit
The 333d Bombardment Group, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress Operational Training Unit (OTU) assigned to Second Air Force, was established at Topeka Army Air Base, Kansas in July 1942. The 333d's original components were the 466th, 467th, 468th and 469th Bombardment Squadrons. The squadrons were all initially formed at Salt Lake City Army Air Base, and did not join group headquarters at Topeka until late August.
The OTU program involved the use of an oversized parent unit to provide cadres to "satellite groups". In February 1943 it moved to Dalhart Army Air Field, Texas, and shifted its mission to become a Replacement Training Unit (RTU). RTUs were also oversized units, but trained individual pilots or aircrews for shipment to theaters of operation. However, the Army Air Forces found that standard military units like the 333d, based on relatively inflexible tables of organization, were not proving well adapted to the training mission.
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This entry incorporates text from “633rd Special Operations 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.