Roger Ball!
He was the second of two children and was born on 25 January 1940 in Shandon Baptist Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. He, in every way, gave the appearance of a normal, healthy, well-developed kid of average height, slender but not skinny. History would show that he was anything but normal.
His name was John Monroe Smith, and “Roger Ball!” is his story—a tale that should be told. It intertwines the true, firsthand accounts and experiences of a fighter pilot with the significant developments in the fighter community and historical events in which Captain John Monroe Smith, USN, call sign “Hawk,” was a part. Finally, it speaks to the men who laid their careers and sometimes their very lives on the line for their shipmates and their country.
Hawk was a legend in the fighter community. During his thirty-year career, he forged a reputation as a skilled and lethal aviator in the air-to-air combat arena, a natural tactician, and consummate leader. To many, he was one of the most essential pathfinders in the modernization of the naval air war arts.
He was just a man, but his story, his life adventure, is a high-fidelity history of personal achievements for naval tactical aviation, devotion to a cause, and service to his nation. It was a time during and shortly after the Vietnam conflict that America became ideologically divided. The military was disillusioned with the intrusion of nonwarriors in the White House over the conduct of the war, and tactical aviation of all the services was struggling to catch up to the realities of the war’s hard lessons. It was a time when the Navy needed leaders and tenacious thinkers to set things right again. It was Hawk’s time!
MiG Alley
When last we left Hawk, he had completed the F-4 replacement air group (RAG) syllabus. After that, he was assigned to VF-103 Sluggers at NAS Oceana, where the TACAIR crew of CAG-3 had the opportunity to conduct dissimilar air combat training on a regular basis. This was something rather new to CAG-3. It was encouraged by Navy leadership and inspired by events in the Vietnam War and findings of Have Doughnut and other studies.
Several reports and assessments made a stinging rebuke of Navy air combat training. Findings from the then-secret Have Doughnut exploitation of the MiG-21 were even more specific. Many of the engagements took place at low altitude, an engagement zone where the Phantom supposedly enjoyed a slight performance advantage over the MiG-21. This information convinced many decision makers that more dissimilar air combat training of all types was needed, but especially low-altitude (below five thousand feet) training. CAG-3 took these reports and assessments seriously. The airwing was determined to improve training for the entire TACAIR team, especially since it appeared that Saratoga might still be ordered into the Vietnam conflict. Intelligence officers provided theater briefs on Southeast Asia; squadron weapons training officers gave presentations on MiG aircraft and Soviet weapons systems; rules of engagement were disseminated; and CAG announced “MIG Alley” open for business.
MiG Alley was a block of airspace defined by a range and bearing from the ship. Aircrews with gas at the end of their assigned mission could troll through MiG Alley for air combat training with any willing participant. The rules of engagement were standard throughout the CAG, and the restrictions against air combat training below five thousand feet were lifted.
The Greater Part of Valor
MiG Alley was a spectacular success and quickly became the high point of every launch. A-6 and A-7 aircraft assigned to ship surveillance missions made only cursory passes through assigned tracks in order to speed back to MiG Alley and “mix-it-up.” Phantoms took off from the ship and spent the first hour holding at max conserve to save enough gas to do some serious “yanking and banking.” With the high demand placed on tankers because of MiG Alley, it was rare to find one with gas to give.
When weather permitted, fighter and attack pilots bumped heads at the end of every cycle. CAG-3 aircrews had become accomplished and deadly in the air combat mission. Much of it was attitude, but a lot of it had to do with CAG Mandeville’s forward-leaning approach to air combat training, and MiG Alley had much to do with that. They were all beginning to feel their Tiger parts come alive.
Hawk and Buck Rogers cruised into MIG Alley and routinely whipped up on pilots who had the bad sense to be in the area at the same time. This experience hardened Hawk’s belief that he could hold his ground with anyone.
One day, Hawk and Buck ventured into a fight that would forever transform Hawk’s combat constitution. They launched on a day combat air patrol sortie, completed the mission, and set a course to MiG Alley. Then they cruised on the periphery. They watched for other aircraft, listened to radio transmissions on the flight common frequency. Buck tweaked the radar and assembled a threat picture. When they made their turn into the heart of MiG Alley, they had high situational awareness and a fast jet.
1 F-4 Phantom II Vs 3 A-7 Corsair IIs
Soon, Hawk picked up three A-7s on the nose, just as Buck had described. These were single-seat, single-engine, light attack aircraft flown by light attack pilots—hors d’oeuvres. Hawk smiled and thought, they don’t realize it, but they are about to become splashes of red paint on the side of my canopy. As Hawk closed, he saw A-7s from one side of the windscreen to the other— it looked like the Battle of Britain. They were everywhere. Hawk and Buck were surrounded by bad guys. Hawk engaged!
The maneuvering was incredible. There were moves and counter moves, high-G rolls over the top, rudder reversals, rolling scissors, flat-scissors, and maneuvers that defy description. Hawk maintained situational awareness and kept his airspeed up even after some hard turning and intricate vertical work. He planned to push an A-7 into a defensive turn, beat him down to a low-energy state, and then switch to another target. He forced them to expend their airspeed but wasted no time on the kill. That would come later. When finally he had all the Corsairs herded together in the same piece of sky, all in front of his aircraft, then he would selectively cull the herd.
It took some time, and he and Buck went through a lot of gas, but the plan was shaping up marvelously. It was showtime! The problem was reduced to identifying which target to shoot first. It was a feeding frenzy, and Hawk and Buck were about to dine. Hawk selected a target and focused solely on the A-7. The Corsair was nearly out of airspeed but tried desperately to keep the lift-vector pointed at Hawk’s Phantom.
1 F-4 Phantom II Vs 4 A-7 Corsair IIs
Hawk set his flaps at half, plugged in the afterburners, and eased the nose of the burly Phantom just in front of the doomed A-7. Just as Hawk started to call the shot, Buck roared in the ICS, “Yo Hawk, we’ve got an A-7 coming up on our low, left seven o’clock!”
“Ugh… what the? You’re shitting me!” There’s a fourth Corsair in here? That’s not possible! Hawk fumed. Hawk spun his head to the left. Sure enough, an A-7 had a lead tracking solution established on the Phantom and was well inside gun range. An ice-cold chill shuddered through Hawk. He was out of airspeed, altitude, luck, and for the first time, ideas. There was only one direction the fight could go that was down, and they were already close enough to the water.
Hawk wagged his wings, acknowledging the shot and signaling a knock-it-off. He headed to the marshal stack to lick his wounds and puzzle over the error of his ways. Hawk recalls this engagement very clearly. “Here, Buck and I had just outmaneuvered three A-7s, all going different directions all over the sky. We herded them up and maintained a totally offensive position. When we were about to call shots, another A-7 from nowhere literally joined us.
A gutsy guy
“The Corsair pilot’s name was Pete Taylor. He was a gutsy guy, with plenty of skill and the tactical smarts to go with it. Pete came out of the overhead in a sheer vertical move from about twenty-five thousand feet. He used his speed brakes to slow down and did a magnificent job of managing his energy to get into the fight; he saddled right in there. He didn’t call a shot, but I’d have given him credit for one. Hell, the boy was right there.
“I’ve never forgotten that experience. I couldn’t believe that anyone could have joined on my airplane the way we were maneuvering. That just couldn’t happen. It was completely unexpected.
“Prior to this fight, I would have entered almost any engagement—even a real-world engagement. If I’d been in a combat situation and seen multiple MiG-21s, I would have jumped into the middle of it without a second thought … never batted an eye. I looked at multi-bogey environments, not so much as a threat to be wary of, but as a target-rich environment with great opportunity for combat and MiG kills.
“I had tremendous confidence in my airplane, my RIO, and my own skills. My Phantom had superior acceleration, power, and weapons. When I strapped in, I felt I was unmatched by any foreign fighter pilot. I truly believed, even if I couldn’t overpower them with lethality, I could overwhelm them with will, perseverance, and aggressiveness. A super aggressive attitude in combat can shatter the confidence of your opponent. My thinking was if I could overwhelm them, I could make them run, and if they ran, they’d be that much easier to kill.
1 F-4 Phantom II Vs 4 A-7 Corsair IIs: If you’re outnumbered, you can be outmaneuvered
“I learned in one fight, if there’s enough of them, one of them, perhaps the one you don’t see, is gonna get you no matter how much energy you have or how good things are shaping up. Until that fight, I really never thought I could get shot, especially by an A-7. Erich Hartman’s maxim ‘See, decide, attack, reverse,’ made a lot more sense after that fight. You have to make the kill quickly and then get out of the fight to rebuild energy, re-assess your position, and evaluate the situation. If things appear to be in your favor, you can make a decision to go back in.
“I grew up some after that fight. I became far more conservative, far more realistic, and far more aware of other possible outcomes. Now, I believe unless your wingman is being pressed or the ship is threatened there are times when you’re smart just to avoid the fight. If you’re outnumbered, you can be outmaneuvered.”
The effect of MiG Alley was both good and bad. The pilots of CAG 3 became very proficient in honing lookout doctrine, situational awareness, and air combat discipline—skills that would help keep them alive in a combat zone. The downside was there were several near misses and one fatal mishap.
Loss of Sam Houston
A few short months into the cruise Sam Houston was lost at sea during an engagement. Hawk remembers the event too clearly. “Sam Houston departed his A-7 during a low-altitude engagement. He regained control but was too low to pull out. He ejected and impacted the water before his chute opened.”
The loss of Sam Houston hit the entire airwing like a sledgehammer. Hawk, like most of the aircrew who knew Sam, thought the world of him, as a man, an LSO, and especially as a shipmate. It was tough to deal with; in fact, it was tough to understand why it happened at all. Hawk was very familiar with several incidents resulting from air combat training. Hawk couldn’t help but remember that, “The air combat training was necessary. We really needed it, but we also needed the airmanship skills and discipline to go with it. Even in a peacetime training mission, with good weather, I watched helplessly as Don Bell went from neutral, to defensive, to out of control, and then into the water in four turns. If we were that bad in peacetime, just think how bad we’d be in wartime!”
Combat-Training Philosophy
These mishaps fortified Hawk’s belief that the Navy’s approach to improving fighter doctrine and combat expertise needed some re-tooling. Something was missing from the attack and fighter pilot ACM training but he wasn’t certain what it was. “Our ACM training seemed like a self-help program to me. The RAG combat maneuvering training was a good first step, and everybody was happy to see it, but the training in the fleet just wasn’t standardized. Our friends and shipmates were dying. It was a big problem, and I just felt that the Navy needed to fix it.
“The fighter mission is part art and part science. Given a combat scenario and a set of engagement dynamics, a good fighter pilot could develop a solution for any tactical problem. And if he could figure it out, he could teach other fighter aircrews to figure it out—and do it safely.
“I believed that there were too many fighter pilots ill-prepared for combat, and some were without the proper killer instinct to care. Adolf Galland’s quote, ‘Only the spirit of attack, born in a brave heart, will bring success to any fighter aircraft, no matter how highly developed it may be,’ is as true today as it was decades ago.
“The ability to perform the fighter mission depends on capability and mindset. Fighter pilots have to be skilled, cunning, smart, brutal, and hungry. Only a very few come by this naturally. The others have to be trained.
The smartest, most experienced fighter aircrews in the Navy
“What we really needed was the smartest, most experienced fighter aircrews in the Navy to figure out fighter tactics, and then we needed them to teach that to the fleet. We needed a schoolhouse, a clearing house that taught us how to think and respond in combat scenarios.
“I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to go about it, I just knew it needed doing.”
Hawk may not have been smart enough to figure out how to go about it, but he clearly had the wherewithal to understand the training fighter aircrew received desperately needed improving.
Photo by PH2 Bruce R. Trombecky / U.S. Navy
