page_title: Robert T. Smith
section_title: After discharge
hierarchical_section_title: Robert T. Smith / After discharge
caption_attribution_description: Catalog #: 01361 Subject: The Flying Tigers - China Title: R.T. Smith Autographed AVG, aviation art Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive
context_page_description: Robert Tharp Smith was a World War II fighter pilot and ace, credited with 8.7, 8.9 or 9 Japanese aircraft while fighting with the American Volunteer Group.
context_section_description: Smith returned to the United States in the late spring of 1944 and was assigned as Director of Flying Training with the 441st Army Air Force Base Unit at Van Nuys, California, a P-38 training base. The Base Operations Officer at the time was Major Barry Goldwater.  He resigned from the Air Corps at the conclusion of World War II and bought a home in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California across from the Los Angeles River when it was actually a river instead of the concrete channel it is today.
  After flying DC3s and Constellations between Los Angeles and Kansas City for a year and a half with Trans-World Airlines (TWA), he wrote radio scripts for the Hopalong Cassidy Western Adventure Show, Lum and Abner, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, and the Clyde Beatty Show. He also wrote the screenplay (with Frank Taussig) for the 1953 movie Perils of the Jungle starring Clyde Beatty.  Smith was co-owner of a toy manufacturing company (Smith-Miller); developed and sold a product for conditioning automobile convertible tops (Top Secret); and worked for Roy Weatherby as a sales manager for Weatherby's Inc.
  R. T. and Barbara Smith were divorced in 1955. About this time, Smith joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation as a technical writer, working his way up through the organization, first as a military sales representative for the F-104 Starfighter, and later to open and manage a new corporate office for Lockheed in Newport News, Virginia.  (Gerhard Neumann, who joined the American Volunteer Group in China, designed the J79 jet engine used in the F-104.)  Smith served at the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve from 1949 to 1966.
  Smith married Ronni Burkett in July 1965. During the late 1960s, he joined the Flying Tiger Line, founded by Robert Prescott, a fellow pilot with the American Volunteer Group, first as Vice President for Industrial Affairs in Washington, D.C. and later as Vice President for the Far East, headquartered in Tokyo. He left the Flying Tiger Line and Tokyo in the early 1970s to live and work in Palm Springs, California.
  R. T. and Ronni Smith were divorced in the mid-1970s. He returned to the San Fernando Valley, where he wrote and published Tale of a Tiger, based on his original diary entries and several articles for Air Classics. He also established a mail-order business, selling his book and color photographs he shot while he was in the AVG and 1st Air Commando Group, including this often reproduced formation shot of the 3rd Squadron Hell's Angels taken on May 28, 1942 near the Salween River along the China-Burma border.
  He died at age 77 (the number he had selected for his first P-40 in the AVG) of lung cancer on August 21, 1995.
  Smith was survived by his sister, June, who died in 2001; three sons, Bradford, Robert, and William; and three grandchildren.
caption: Painting of Curtiss P-40 Warhawk in  the Republic of China Air Force, autographed by R.T. Smith.
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