Have You Heard About Two Navy Skyraider Prop Job MIG-17 KILLERS In Vietnam...

Frustration and fatigue winkled its way into our intense carrier Ops' tempo. We were just 30 days into our third period at sea ' in A-1 Skyraiders.

In 4 days, I had flown 21 hours . . one bomb strike . . two ' road recces'. . plus a 7 1/2 hour RESCAP for a downed pilot.

One road recce was nothing more than harassing the enemy. On the air to ground mission, I scored one truck. But in executing a life-saving pullout [ just short of bending the Skyraider's prop in the enemy's dirt ] I also logged a couple of nice round bullet holes.
An Air Force photo-recon pilot had been shot down, way deep in the Vietnam's northwest corner. There were already RESCAP aircraft over the downed pilot, but they were running low on gas. We were needed as their replacement.
We manned up, started, then were ordered to shut down. Someone else covered the pilot, so we returned to the ready room. Two hours later we manned up. But were put on hold again. Then we were told to man up, one more time.
We were fast becoming leaders in the sweat-stained flight suit contest. A contest unique to Skyraider pilots. The winner would be the pilot who was the first one to merge both salty white armpit stains into the center of his flight suit. It was a contest made possible by the ship's laundry accepting only one dirty flight suit each week.
This time, I started, spread and locked the wings, got thumbs up, released the brakes, added full power and scanned the instruments. Everything looked good. And with the canopy open for emergency egress, everything sounded good--well at least it sounded loud.
I saw my flight leader go airborne from the port cat, with humidity so high, his flap tips drew contrails. My prop was designing corkscrew ' cons.'

We rendezvoused at 1,000 feet and headed toward a far Northwest corner of Viet Nam. The cat shot had killed my radio. My airplane had two radios, one with a relay control box allowing the low aircraft, covering the downed pilot, to transmit through my second radio to Control. I was able to get one radio working, but continued to fiddle with number one so that I could act as relay. As we went ' feet dry,' I got the radio working, then it failed again.

At 12,000 feet we were flying steadily toward the downed pilot, when suddening . .

Ed
Greathouse rolled inverted . .
. . then entered a near vertical dive with his wingman Jim Lynne.
I rolled inverted and followed them down. We were 70 miles inland. Because I had one dead radio, I did not hear Radar's warning alert :
" MiGs entering your immediate area ! "
The MiG pilots were just south of us, intercepting two other Skyraiders. They missed. But during the miss . . they had spotted us. And when we became their obvious target, Ed took us down in the ' weeds.'
We had been cruising along 170 knots at 12,000 feet. To the MiGs, we must have looked like four cartoon ( 4 ) Tweetybirds to Sylvester the Cat.
Our only hope was to get down close to the dirt, and make our turns so tight the MiG's couldn't turn with us. They would overshoot. Perhaps we could scissors behind and get a shot, before they accelerated away.
Our vertical split-S dive got up some good speed. Then, before we headed back in our carrier's direction, my habit clicked in. Any time my nose was pointed toward the ground during a mission, I'd automatically arm the weapons. I armed the guns and set up the rockets.
A rocket zipped past-heading down. A SAM missile ? Negative.
SAM missiles head up.
A second rocket slammed the ground close to Ed and Jim. All of us were under MiG attack. In the next moment, a silver MiG-17 with red marking on wings and tail streaked by Charlie and me . . while heading for Ed.
Then ' golf ball-like ' tracers streamed by my shoulders. And in my mirror, a MiG engine intake-growing larger-triggered my pulling some serious G's.
Two sizes of tracers fell away from our evasive turn. The MiG-17 pilot continued firing and he was, surprisingly, able to stay with us during much of the hard turn.
Then he overshot.
As he pulled up, Charlie got a quick shot at him. But didn't get a significant hit. The MiG climbed up to a gunnery perch position. And just he hung out up there, choosing not to attack again.

Our violent turn and jinking around, had taken us away from Ed and Jim. No longer under attack, my decision was to rejoin with them.
We had been flying down just above the trees, in and out of small valleys, when I caught a glimpse of our leader and his wingman and we headed their way. While cutting them off in a join up turn, we finessed a hill, that stood in our path.
As we flew around that small hill, we saw Ed Greathouse and Jim Lynne with a MiG-17 directly behind them, about to fire. I instantly fired a short burst at the MiG.

I missed.
But he changed his mind about shooting Lead, turned away to pull up in a climbing turn, then bent the MiG around to line up for a head-on pass at us. During the head on pass, Charlie and I both fired directly at him. For some reason the MiG-17 pilot did not shoot. But he passed so incredibly close under my fuselage, I'm quite certain his vertical fin smack-ed my tail hook. And Charlie's Skyraider ' bobbed ' in his wing tip vortex.
Both of us had fired all four guns, but not many rounds. Charlie's rounds appeared to go right down the MiG's engine intake and into its wing root. And my rounds penetrated the pilot's windscreen.
The MiG pilot never returned fire. In a turn, as we looked over our shoulders, we saw it roll inverted, strike a small hill, then explode and burn in a farm field.
As Charlie and I circled the wreckage, we were talking about going after the MiG's partner, when Ed Greathouse's cranky voice asked what we thought we were doing staying in the area, with Radar reporting numerous MiG 17's inbound to it.
Since the other radio was still tits up, we had not heard Radar's warning. But we took the hint. We eased back down into the terrain, turned towards ' feet wet ' and rejoined with Ed.

A setting sun guaranteed a night arrested landing back on the carrier. Midway's ICIC control somehow thought one of us had been shot down. But Ed Greathouse finally con- vinced them that we were OK.
And it was the North Vietnamese who were minus one.
Rarely does a night carrier landing evoke as small a scary response within a night landing pilot as ours, that night. We were so ' pumped up ' from the MiG 17 victory, we hardly noticed or were able to recall that dark night's recovery.

The politics started. Charlie and I were informed that we would get no recognition or awards for our MiG kill.
SECNAV had been aboard three days earlier when VF-21 F-4 pilots had bagged the first kills of the war. Their awards were being held until SECNAV could get to Washington, announce it to the President and present it to Congress with the plea for more funds for F-4 Phantoms to fight the air war.

Obviously, the success of primitive Skyraiders would undermine his plans.
But someone had included our kill in the daily action report. And Skyraider pilot, Ngyuen Cao Ky, the new Premier of South Vietnam, heard of it and recognized Ed Greathouse's name. He then demanded our appearance for Vietnamese awards for valor.

The next day we were guests of Premier Ky at the palace. He told us that the Skyraider MiG kill had boosted morale tremendously in his Vietnamese Skyraider squadrons.

Then the North Vietnamese pulled the MiGs for more pilot training. The only kill between July 1965 and April 1966 had been our single Navy kill in October.
We still maintain that we had embarrassed them into pulling out the MiGs.

Our squadron, was the Navy's last operational Skyraider attack squadron. We were flying a 20-year-old design that had been perfected about as far as the engineers could take it. Its time was over for making front-line attacks.
But the Skyraider was something special.
Even through my torque-correcting right leg has now shrunken to the same size as my left leg. The carbon monoxide is cleared from my blood. And the stack gas from my lungs. And I still have strong feeling, that the Skyraider was where I was meant to be flying, at that time.

Capt. Glinton B. Johnson
USNR (Ret.) [ Abridged ]

Tony:
Remember this???
Gus

Gus, I not only remember this, I knew Ed Greathouse. He was, and I hope, still is a very large man. This was one of the better stories about Ed. Not, however, the best.

The best story about Ed was when he and a wingman left the carrier for a 4 to 6 hour sortie over the "North". About 2 hours into the flight, Ed realized he had the "Green-apple-quick-step" and he needed to purge. He cleaned out his lunch box and put everything he wanted to save up on his windscreen. He then lined the lunch box with what charts he had, stripped down, hovered over the prepared box and let her rip. Satiated, he redressed and felt he could finish the mission. Lo and behold, the box began to drip. He opened the canopy about a foot and tossed the vile box out. SPLAT, the entire contents reentered the cockpit and drenched him in liquid shit. He then removed his orange/brown smelly flightsuit and threw it out with more success. He then removed his tee-shirt and skivvies and used those to clean up his helmet and the cockpit as much as he could. He came
back and landed on the carrier in hardhat and flight boots. The Captain of the ship saw him exit his aircraft and yelled, "Get that pilot up here"!
Ed was able to get to his room, don a clean flightsuit and report to the bridge. (I don't know if you have ever seen the control room of an aircraft carrier but, the Captain sits on a chair about 5 foot high to be able to see his entire domain.) When Ed told his story to the Captain, he was laughing so hard he fell out of his chair. No disciplinarian action was deemed necessary.

If you want to share this story with the group, feel free. It seems I don't have the correct addresses as I never get any feedback.