Roger Ball!
He was the second of two children and 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!
Army Project 43-1
When last we left Hawk, he flew a US Army Huey Cobra as part of Army Project 43-1 (aimed at improving combat tactics for Army helicopter forces as well as Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force TACAIR communities) while he was assigned to VX-4.
Early during the project Hawk, Whiskey, and the other project aircrew quickly learned that the little helos were exceptionally tough to see low against the terrain. Hawk recalled, “There were two ways we could find them. If they hovered close to the ground, they’d kick up dust and debris. That was pretty easy to see. The other way was to get down-sun from their position. The sunlight flickering off the blades and rotor head caused rotor flicker—similar to sun-glints off of our canopies. But if they were down sun from you, or if they sat on deck with zero pitch on the blades and didn’t stir up any dust, it was damned near impossible to see them.”
During the tests, the fighters were tasked to maintain combat airspeed and altitudes commensurate with a Vietnam type ground threat scenario. Fighters searched for the helos using radar and visual cues in a grid area. If unable to detect the helos in a reasonable amount of time, ground controllers incrementally narrowed the search grid until the fighters acquired the targets. Once the Cobras were visually acquired, the fighters set up for an attack and the Cobras attempted to escape or counterattack.
Hawk commented, “We learned to maintain a good energy package when we hunted them. Three hundred fifty knots and four thousand feet was the minimum. But getting sight of them was only part of the problem.
Why AIM-7 and AIM-9 missiles didn’t work against attack helicopters
“Keeping the tally was also difficult. We had to stay close to keep them padlocked, but we didn’t always have enough altitude to set up for the desired thirty-degree dive, so we usually had to accept a ten- or fifteen-degree dive angle. That caused some problems for our radar and weapons.
“It was tough to get a radar lock against the ground clutter, and their rotor blades caused a radar return that looked a lot like a jamming strobe. Trying to lock the target, get settling time on the radar, and enough time for the Sparrow to come off the rail, fuse, and guide on a helo operating in ground clutter was really quite a challenge—in fact it was nearly impossible. Even when you did everything right, we figured the probability of a kill with a Sparrow was extremely low.
“Trying to kill it with a Sidewinder didn’t improve that probability much. We had many of the same problems. Instead of a radar acquisition problem, the seeker head had trouble looking down over land and differentiating between the heat from the terrain and heat from the helo. A lot of the time we weren’t sure what the Winder was actually growling at—the helo or the ground.
“One of our objectives was to develop tactics for the Cobras and develop them we did. The project called for several sorties with two Phantoms opposing two Huey Cobras. When the helo pilots realized they’d been spotted, they flew in a defensive orbiting laager, 180 degrees out of phase with one another. If the fighters rolled in to attack using a low dive angle, they were easy to spot and predictable.
A free-fall weapon instead of air-to-air missiles against attack helicopters
“This attack profile could easily make the fighters the target. When the Cobras saw the fighters rolling in, the helo in the best position could pull his nose up and fire his gun, rockets, or heater missile at the fighter. If he didn’t kill the fighter during the head-on pass, the other helo was usually in position to get a heater shot as the fighter pulled off.
“From a fighter perspective, we found that the attack helo in an air-to-air role proved to be a very lethal platform and nothing to be trifled with. We finally concluded that the safest way to attack a helo with a fighter was to drop a free-fall weapon on him, stay at altitude, frag him, or overpressure the rotor head, but don’t go in and mix it up. You’ll surely be surprised and just may get your ass whipped if you do.”
Hawk learned more about helicopters and the guys who flew them in just a few weeks while working the project than he had in the previous six years. “I really had no idea how deadly they could be; I thought helos were something to deliver the mail or fish you out of the water when the jet stopped flying. I guess I was super naïve, but I had no idea they could also blow your ass away.”
Photo by Rob Schleiffert from Holland via Wikipedia, PH2 Chris Holmes/U.S. Navy and SSGT BOB FEHRINGER/U.S. Army
