:
For additional and related history, see 450th Bombardment Wing World War II The
450th Bombardment Group (Heavy) was constituted on 6 April 1943 and activated on 1 May 1943 at
Gowen Field, Idaho. The new group was moved without personnel or equipment to a temporary station at
Clovis Army Air Field, New Mexico on 21 May 1943 where the command and
headquarters of the group was assembled. On 5 July 1943, the group was reassigned to
Alamogordo Army Airfield, which was to house the Group for all phases of training with their
Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers. When the group was finally assembled for the first time at Alamogordo, many of the key positions in both the group and squadrons had been filled. Both officers and men arrived daily and little by little all sections were built up to full strength. Crews were allotted in groups of eight, twelve and forty-six bringing the strength finally on 24 August 1943 to seventy or full strength. After training was completed, the 450th was reassigned to the
Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) in Southern Italy, arriving in December 1943. It began operations with
Fifteenth Air Force in January 1944 and engaged chiefly in missions against strategic targets in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkans until April 1945. The group bombed aircraft factories, assembly plants, oil refineries, storage areas,
marshalling yards,
airfields, and other objectives. Its aircraft wore an approximation of the stars and stripes, with seven red and six white stripes on the trailing edge, and three stars in white on the blue forward portion of the fin. They also were designated with a colored, scalloped nose chevron. In early 1955, the 450th began receiving new
F-100C/D Super Sabre aircraft, replacing the older F-86s. It was the first operational TAC group to be equipped with the F-100. With the change of equipment, the group was redesignated as the
450th Fighter-Day Group on 8 March 1955. ==Lineage==