The 1971 India-Pakistan war didn’t turn out very well from
the US’ point of view. For one particular American it went particularly bad.
Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot and the first man to break the sound
barrier, was dispatched by the US government to train Pakistani air force
pilots but ended up as target practice for the Indian Air Force, and in the
process kicked up a diplomatic storm in a war situation.
Yeager’s presence in Pakistan was one of the surprises of
the Cold War. In an article titled, “The Right Stuff in the Wrong Place,” by
Edward C. Ingraham, a former US diplomat in Pakistan, recalls how Yeager was
called to Islamabad in 1971 to head the Military Assistance Advisory Group
(MAAG) – a rather fanciful name for a bunch of thugs teaching other thugs how
to fight.
It wasn’t a terribly exciting job: “All that the chief of
the advisory group had to do was to teach Pakistanis how to use American
military equipment without killing themselves in the process,” writes Ingraham.
Among the perks Yeager enjoyed was a twin-engine Beechcraft,
an airplane supplied by the Pentagon. It was his pride and joy and he often
used the aircraft for transporting the US ambassador on fishing expeditions in
Pakistan’s northwest mountains.
Yeager: Loyal Pakistani!
Yeager may have been a celebrated American icon, but here’s
what Ingraham says about his nonchalant attitude. “We at the embassy were
increasingly preoccupied with the deepening crisis (the Pakistan Army murdered
more than 3,000,000 civilians in then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). Meetings
became more frequent and more tense. We were troubled by the complex questions
that the conflict raised. No such doubts seemed to cross the mind of Chuck
Yeager. I remember one occasion on which the ambassador asked Yeager for his
assessment of how long the Pakistani forces in the East could withstand an
all-out attack by India. “We could hold them off for maybe a month,” he
replied, “but beyond that we wouldn’t have a chance without help from outside.”
It took the rest of us a moment to fathom what he was saying, not realising at
first that “we” was West Pakistan, not the United States.”
Clearly, Yeager appeared blithely indifferent to the
Pakistani killing machine which was mowing down around 10,000 Bengalis daily
from 1970 to 1971.
After the meeting, Ingraham requested Yeager to be be a
little more even-handed in his comments. Yeager gave him a withering glance.
“Goddamn it, we’re assigned to Pakistan,” he said. “What’s wrong with being
loyal?!”
“The dictator of Pakistan at the time, the one who had
ordered the crackdown in the East, was a dim-witted general named Yahya Khan.
Way over his head in events he couldn’t begin to understand, Yahya took
increasingly to brooding and drinking,” writes Ingraham.
“In December of 1971, with Indian supplied guerrillas
applying more pressure on his beleaguered forces, Yahya decided on a last,
hopeless gesture of defiance. He ordered what was left of his armed forces to
attack India directly from the West. His air force roared across the border on
the afternoon of December 3 to bomb Indian air bases, while his army crashed
into India’s defences on the Western frontier.”
Getting Personal
Yeager’s hatred for Indians was unconcealed. According to
Ingraham, he spent the first hours of the war stalking the Indian embassy in
Islamabad, spouting curses at Indians and assuring anyone who would listen that
the Pakistani army would be in New Delhi within a week. It was the morning
after the first Pakistani airstrike that Yeager began to take the war with
India personally.
On the eve of their attack, the Pakistanis, realising the
inevitability of a massive Indian retaliation, evacuated their planes from
airfields close to the Indian border and moved them to airfields near the
Iranian border.
Strangely, no one thought to warn General Yeager.
Taking aim at Yeager
The thread of this story now passes on to
Admiral Arun Prakash. An aircraft carrier pilot in 1971, he was an Indian Navy
lieutenant on deputation with the Indian Air Force when the war broke out.
In an article he wrote for Vayu Aerospace Review in 2007,
Prakash presents a vivid account of his unexpected encounter with Yeager. As
briefings for the first wave of retaliatory strikes on Pakistan were being
conducted, Prakash had drawn a two-aircraft mission against the PAF base of Chaklala,
located south east of Islamabad.
Flying in low under the radar, they climbed to 2000 feet as
they neared the target. As Chaklala airfield came into view they scanned the
runways for Pakistani fighters but were disappointed to see only two small
planes. Dodging antiaircraft fire, Prakash blasted both to smithereens with
30mm cannon fire. One was Yeager’s Beechcraft and the other was a Twin Otter
used by Canadian UN forces.
Fishing in troubled waters
When Yeager discovered his plane was smashed, he rushed to
the US embassy in Islamabad and started yelling like a deranged maniac. His
voice resounding through the embassy, he said the Indian pilot not only knew
exactly what he was doing but had been specifically instructed by the Indian
prime minister to blast Yeager’s plane. In his autobiography, he later said
that it was the “Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger”.
Yeager pressured the US embassy in Pakistan into sending a
top priority cable to Washington that described the incident as a “deliberate
affront to the American nation and recommended immediate countermeasures”.
Basically, a desperate and distracted Yeager was calling for the American
bombing of India, something that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger were already mulling.
But, says Ingraham: “I don’t think we ever got an answer.”
With the Russians on India’s side in the conflict, the American defence
establishment had its hands full. Nobody had time for Yeager’s antics.
However, Ingraham says there are clues Yeager played an
active role in the war. A Pakistani businessman, son of a senior general, told
him “excitedly that Yeager had moved into the air force base at Peshawar and
was personally directing the grateful Pakistanis in deploying their fighter
squadrons against the Indians. Another swore he had seen Yeager emerge from a
just-landed jet fighter at the Peshawar base.
Later, in his autobiography, Yeager, the subject of Tom
Wolfe’s much-acclaimed book “The Right Stuff” and a Hollywood movie, wrote a
lot of nasty things about Indians, including downright lies about the IAF’s
performance. Among the things he wrote was the air war lasted two weeks and the
Pakistanis “kicked the Indians’ ass”, scoring a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking
out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing 34 airplanes of their own.
Beyond the fog of war
The reality is that it took the IAF just over a week to
achieve complete domination of the subcontinent’s skies. A measure of the IAF’s
air supremacy was the million-man open air rallies held by the Indian prime
minister in northern Indian cities, a week into the war. This couldn’t have
been possible if Pakistani planes were still airborne.
Sure, the IAF did lose a slightly larger number of aircraft
but this was mainly because the Indians were flying a broad range of missions.
Take the six Sukhoi-7 squadrons that were inducted into the IAF just a few
months before the war. From the morning of December 4 until the ceasefire on
December 17, these hardy fighters were responsible for the bulk of attacks by
day, flying nearly 1500 offensive sorties.
Pakistani propaganda, backed up by Yeager, had claimed 34
Sukhoi-7s destroyed, but in fact just 14 were lost. Perhaps the best rebuttal
to Yeager’s lies is military historian Pushpindar Singh Chopra’s “A Whale of a
Fighter”. He says the plane’s losses were commensurate with the scale of
effort, if not below it. “The Sukhoi-7 was said to have spawned a special breed
of pilot, combat-hardened and confident of both his and his aircraft’s
prowess,” says Chopra.
Sorties were being launched at an unprecedented rate of six
per pilot per day. Yeager himself admits “India flew numerous raids against
Pakistani airfields with brand new Sukhoi-7 bombers being escorted in with
MiG-21s”.
While Pakistani pilots were obsessed with aerial combat, IAF
tactics were highly sophisticated in nature, involving bomber escorts, tactical
recce, ground attack and dummy runs to divert Pakistani interceptors from the
main targets. Plus, the IAF had to reckon with the dozens of brand new aircraft
being supplied to Pakistan by Muslim countries like Jordan, Turkey and the UAE.
Most missions flown by Indian pilots were conducted by day
and at low level, with the pilots making repeated attacks on well defended targets.
Indian aircraft flew into Pakistani skies thick with flak, virtually non-stop
during the 14-day war. Many Bengali guerrillas later told the victorious Indian
Army that it was the epic sight of battles fought over their skies by Indian
air aces and the sight of Indian aircraft diving in on Pakistani positions that
inspired them to fight.
Indeed, Indian historians like Chopra have painstakingly
chronicled the details of virtually every sortie undertaken by the IAF and PAF
and have tabulated the losses and kills on both sides to nail the outrageous
lies that were peddled by the PAF and later gleefully published by Western
writers.
In this backdrop, the Pakistani claim (backed by Yeager)
that they won the air war is as hollow as a Chaklala swamp reed. In the Battle
of Britain during World War II, the Germans lost 2000 fewer aircraft than the
allies and yet the Luftwaffe lost that air war. Similarly, the IAF lost more
aircraft than the PAF, but the IAF came out on top. Not even Yeager’s biased
testimony can take that away from Indians.
Source: IDRUS
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