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The Norma Brown Building at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Luis Loza Gutierrez)
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17th Training Wing preserves heritage
Posted 4/11/2007
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by John Garrett, Ph.D.
17th Training Wing Historian
4/11/2007 - GOODFELLOW AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFNEWS) -- The end of the Cold War left the United States needing fewer forces. A smaller force required fewer bases to support it and, organizationally, fewer units to hold it. For the Air Force, as it set about eliminating excess bases through the Base Realignment and Closure process and excess wings through inactivations, it quickly became apparent that some of the wings it was standing down had important heritage associated with them.
"If we're not careful," former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak warned, "we'll whittle away at our legacy, we'll create a new kind of hollow Air Force - one that's lost its heritage, its heroes, its famous campaigns, its core values."
The Air Force set about restoring its "most distinguished flags" by starting at the beginning.
"We decided first to preserve our 13 oldest wings," General McPeak explained. One of these original 13 was the famous 17th. This was the unit that flew the Doolittle Raid. It was the first U.S. air unit to sink an enemy submarine during World War II, and the first to sink subs along both coasts. It was the first to bomb all three Axis countries, and the first to earn the French Croix de Guerre with Palm. Its personnel provided the core cadre for so many World War II bomb groups that it earned the sobriquet, "the Daddy of Them All" -- this was the kind of heritage General McPeak wanted to preserve.
So he pulled the 17th out of retirement and returned it to active duty at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, July 1, 1993. As the 17th Training Wing, the unit would produce intelligence specialists and firefighters for all the uniformed services while keeping alive the heritage of the original unit.
That heritage begins with the emblem, whose vertical line of seven black pattee crosses represents the battle campaigns in which the 95th Aero Squadron participated during World War I. But it was not until a decade later, on July 15, 1931, that the Army Air Corps first activated the 17th, combining the 95th with the 34th and 73rd Pursuit Squadrons to form the 17th Pursuit Group at March Field, Calif. There, at March, the new group operated P-12 and P-26 pursuit aircraft before transitioning to the A-17 attack bomber, when it was redesignated 17th Attack Group. In 1939 the group was redesignated again, becoming the 17th Bombardment Group (Medium) and acquiring the B-18 and B-23 bombers.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, the 17th Bombardment Group flew antisubmarine patrols from Pendleton, Ore., with the new B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. As the first operational unit to fly the B-25, the 17th claimed another first on Dec. 24, 1941 when one of its Mitchells reportedly dropped four 300-pound bombs on a Japanese submarine near the mouth of the Columbia River. Three months later and 3,000 miles away, the group became the first to sink submarines on both coasts of the United States.
By the, 120 volunteers from the group had transferred to Eglin Field, Florida, to practice short take-offs and landings for yet another first. On the morning of 18 April 1942, some 600 miles east of Japan, the aircraft carrier Hornet launched sixteen B-25s crewed by 80 Airmen for an incredibly daring assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities. A boost to American morale, the Doolittle Raid marked the first combat launch of bombers from an aircraft carrier and the first American aerial attack on the Japanese mainland. Piloting the sixteenth B-25 was 1st Lt William Farrow, a Goodfellow graduate. After completing his mission, Farrow was captured and later executed by the Japanese.
Following the Doolittle Raid the group transferred to Barksdale Field, La., to begin training on the B-26 Marauder medium bomber. In December, following the British-American landings in French North Africa, the group moved to Telergma, Algeria, to begin combat operations in the Mediterranean theater. Upon the expulsion of Axis forces from North Africa in May 1943, the 17th moved to Sedrata, Algeria, to commence air operations against Pantelleria. Five by eight miles in dimension, the Mediterranean island sheltered an important Axis airfield with hangars carved into solid rock. Its sheer cliffs provided a daunting obstacle to amphibious invasion, but precision bombardment by the 17th and other air units secured the island's surrender in less than a month through air power alone.
Through the rest of the war, from bases in Tunisia, Sardinia, Corsica, and France, the 17th bombed critical targets throughout the Mediterranean, Italy, southern France and Germany. It received a Distinguished Unit Citation for its support of the Allied drive on Rome and another for outstanding performance against ground units near Schweinfurt, Germany. For operations in Italy during April, May, and June 1944, the 17th became the first American air unit to receive the French Croix de Guerre Avec Palme. The group conducted 606 combat missions in 11 campaigns during 124 days of combat before returning to the United States after the war and inactivating in November 1945.
With war in Korea came the activation of the 17th Bombardment Wing (Light) at Pusan-East Air Base on May 10, 1952. Their hard-nosed B-26B and glass-nosed B-26C Invaders painted black, the "Black Knights" of the 17 BW logged nearly 11,000 combat sorties attacking North Korean trucks and trains on nighttime interdiction missions. Operating continuously until the end of the conflict, the wing earned another Distinguished Unit Citation and the Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation.
After the war the wing transitioned to the Martin B-57 Canberra and the Douglas B-66 Destroyer medium bombers, operating briefly at Miho Air Base in Japan and Hurlburt Field in Florida before inactivating June 25, 1958. Four years later, HQ USAF redesignated the wing as the 17th Bombardment Wing, Heavy, and assigned it to Strategic Air Command who activated it at Wright-Patterson AFB on Nov. 15,1962. There, the 17th maintained a long-range refueling and strategic bombing capability flying the KC-135 Stratotanker and the B-52 Stratofortress. The wing also provided B-52 crews for the war in Southeast Asia. One of these crews, flying a Linebacker II mission on Christmas Eve, 1972, scored the second and last B-52 kill of an enemy aircraft when gunner Albert Moore fired upon and destroyed an attacking MiG-21.
In September 1975 the wing moved without personnel to Beale AFB, Calif., where it absorbed the resources and mission of the inactivated 456th Bombardment Wing. At Beale the 17th continued to operate B-52 and KC-135 aircraft, remaining on global strategic bombardment alert until June 30, 1976.
Six years later, HQ USAF redesignated the 17th as a reconnaissance wing, activating it at RAF Alconbury in the United Kingdom on Oct. 1, 1982. Operating the TR-1 tactical reconnaissance aircraft, a larger follow-on to the U-2, the wing flew high-altitude tactical and strategic reconnaissance missions in support of U.S. and NATO objectives in Europe. As the first and only TR-1 wing in the Air Force, the 17th heavily supported Air Force intelligence requirements during the Persian Gulf War before inactivating the following summer.
The unit's redesignation as a training wing and its activation at Goodfellow AFB two years later moved it fully into the training arena while preserving its more recent association with intelligence. The wing remains true to its storied past, producing the world's best intelligence, fire protection, and special instruments mission-ready warriors for the Department of Defense.
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