History of the French Air Force Wings since 1945 - Volume 1

Fighter wings No. 1 to 30 and the 33rd Reconnaissance Wing

Reconstituted at the end of the Second World War, the wings of the French Air Force reached their peak during the Cold War before seeing their numbers significantly reduced following the disappearance of the threat posed by the Soviet empire after its collapse. Their very existence was called into question in the 1990s, when the wings were purely and simply disbanded in favour of individual squadrons, before being ultimately re-established two decades later.
It is this history, spanning more than half a century, that this work traces — dedicated to the French fighter and reconnaissance wings from 1945 to 2015 — covering the era from piston-engined aircraft to the jet age, from the Spitfire and the Thunderbolt to the Mirage 2000 and the Rafale, by way of the Ouragan, Mystère and Mirage III. Each wing, whether still in existence today or having had only a brief existence, is described in detail through its history, its insignia, and above all its equipment, by means of hundreds of profiles — not only of every combat aircraft successively operated by each wing, but also of support aircraft and even those, such as the T-6, operated by ground-attack units specially formed in Algeria and "sponsored" by most of the fighter wings of the period.