DAY 1 : PUNJAB NIGHT OF BOMBERS’ MOON

The night of Friday, December 3, was the full moon. In the Punjab plain where Pakistan, India and Kashmir meet, it was en exceptionally brilliant night : what they used to call 30 years ago a bombers’ moon. Late that afternoon Murray Sayle was driving from Peshawar to Rawalpindi, parallel with the Pakistan-Kashmir frontier on the Pakistani side of the line. Suddenly, a few Sabre jets of the Pakistan Air Force streaking towards the frontier, going low to get under the Indian radar screen.

As soon as night fell, the roads were full of Pakistan army convoys. Hundreds of trucks were rolling north, crammed with soldiers in full combat gear. Many of them were commandeered civilian vehicles, with their gaudy paint-work hastily sprayed brown and “Military Duty” stencilled on their sides. The moonlight was so bright that they were able to drive without lights. From the front row of the stalls, Sayle was watching the curtain rise on the third, decisive act of a tragedy which has been in the making since partition in 1947. The first act was the Pakistan Army’s repression of Bengali nationalism, beginning on March 25. The second act started on November 22, when the Indian Army first openly intervened in East Bengal on the side of the Mukti Bahini guerrillas.

The third act was general war, all out and on all fronts. Two countries with a combined population of 685 million people are fighting from the foothills of the Karakorums to the Great Indian desert, and from the irrigated farmlands of the Indus headwaters to the waterlogged islands at the mouth of the Ganges. The world’s fifth largest, country, Pakistan, is fighting to avoid being dismembered by the second-largest India. But the third act, general war in the west as well as in the east, began not with “Indian aggression,” as the United States hastily claimed last week, but with Pakistan’s desperate pre-emptive strike. This was what Sayle saw heading towards its target in the air and on land on the night of December 3.

AT 1.30 on Saturday morning Sayle and the other reporters in Rawalpindi were called down, red-eyed, to a briefing at Pakistan Army headquarters. There the information chief, Brigadier Abdur Rahman Siddiqui, told them India had launched a vast five-pronged land offensive, from Poonch valley in Kashmir to the Rajasthani desert. Miraculously, the Brigadier claimed, all these attacks had been halted before they penetrated a yard of Pakistani territory. It was “in retaliation,” he said, that the Pakistani Sabres had struck. A few minutes later the first air raid sirens could be heard wailing in Rawalpindi. It was not, in fact, until 2 am on Saturday, nearly nine hours after the Indian air force got off the ground.

By attacking in the West, Pakistan gambled everything on a last throw. Strategically, the plan was to imitate the Israelis’ surprise air blow of June 1967 and destroy as much as possible of the Indian air force on the ground, and then nip off Kashmir with a ground attack at its lines of communication from India. The surprise air strike failed, as we shall see, because the Indians, too, had learned the lessons of the Six Day War, and dispersed their aircraft, many of them in hardened concrete bunkers.

With increasing urgency over the last few weeks, Murray Sayle reports from Rawalpindi, General Yahya Khan has been urged by many of the officers in his inner circle to take some of the Indian pressure off East Pakistan with a series of blows in the West. The Pakistani commander in the East, Lt.-Gen. Amin Abdullah Khan Niazi, was told that he had to keep the Mukti Bahini guerrillas in check until mid-February. By that time, the beginning of the rainy season would swell the rivers and give his soldiers some protection. By that time, too Niazi was told, some sort of political compromise would have been reached, so that the guerrillas would begin to lose their support in the countryside. There was, as we shall see, some foundation for this last hope, though in the end it proved to be based on a miscalculation.

Niazi was told he could expect no reinforcements, and he was given enough supplies and ammunition to last until mid-February. But his orders were based on the assumption that the Indians would limit themselves to shelling across the border and to supporting the guerrillas. But the Indians stepped up the pressure, and from November 22 openly joined in the fighting. The only way the outnumbered Pakistanis could hold them was by laying down curtains of fire, the most tasteful possible use of ammunition. On Wednesday, December 1, Niazi reported to Yahya Khan and the military chiefs in Islamabad that his ammunition stocks would not last more than a week at the rate they were being used.

The same day an order went out to the troops in East Pakistan that ammunition was to be conserved at all costs and that every shot must be made to count. It was not an order calculated to help morale, even of the excellent troops in East Pakistan. And it convinced Yahya that a surrender on the scale of Britain’s at Singapore, which is a disaster much on the minds of the Pakistani generals, was imminent in the East unless something was done.

The plan for a lightning blow in the West came primarily from the Pakistan Air Force. The idea was much the same as the Israelis’. However, as they knew that the Indian general staff, like all other general staffs in the world, had spent the last four years studying every detail of the Israelis’ triumph, the Pakistanis realised that a straight repetition of June, 1967, was exactly what the Indians would expect. The Pakistani variation was for the surprise attack to be delivered, not at dawn, when the Israelis struck, but at dusk.

For the past few weeks, Sayle reports, files of Pakistani troops have been led through night manoeuvre - a curious exercise for an army under daily threat of attack, unless it planned to move at night itself. After weeks of agonising hesitation, a combination of factors may have helped Yahya Khan to commit himself to the final gamble. One was the urgency of Niazi’s last appeal. A second was the brilliant moon on Friday night. A third was that an additional element of surprise could be won by launching the attack on Friday, the holy day of the Muslim week. A fourth was that in 1965 the Pakistani’s had caught the Indians off their guard at the same hour. In any case time was running out. Snow in the high hills of Kashmir would make operations there harder for the attacker with every passing day.

It was clear that the decision had been taken when on Thursday, December 2, the last reserve in West Pakistan, the 7th Division stationed in Peshawar, moved forward to the front under cover of darkness. Any defensive strategy would keep the reserve in hand until the direction of the main attack from the other side had been identified. The move of the 7th Division meant that Pakistan had decided to strike first. Later on the other side of the firing line, Saeed Naqvi talked to a man who had seen Pakistan’s surprise ground attack against the Kashmir road from even closer: Major Rashid Abbasi, of Pakistan’s 13th Azad Kashmir regiment.

Major Rashid was shuddering in his stretcher in the Indian army field hospital at Chamb, his eyes bloodshot with high fever when Naqvi saw him. He had been picked up by an Indian medical team, unconscious and bleeding profusely. At 2030 hours on December 3, the Pakistani artillery opened up without warning, and a big armoured thrust went in, supported by infantry. Major Rashid led a company of the Azad Kashmir regiment to the assault of a small hill called Deva Madilea, a strategic position commanding the Indian lines. (Azad Kashmir means Free Kashmir, and Major Rashid is a Kashmiri Muslim, exiled from Poonch, which is now on the Indian side of the cease-fire line).

By 0530 on December 4 he and his company had taken possession of their objective. But when the dawn came up Indian troops opened up with machine-gun fire, and Major Rashid does not remember what happened until he woke up in the Indian field hospital. What was his mission? Naqvi asked the major: “We had instruction to liberate Kashmir,” he said from his stretcher, “to wage jihad, holy war.”

DAY 2: FAILURE OF THE PAKISTAN QUICK-KILL

A few minutes after midnight on Saturday, Mrs. Gandhi arrived back in Delhi from Calcutta, where she cut short a brief visit after she heard the news. In a radio broadcast, she said that India was on a “war footing.” Later in the day she made a statement to Parliament. The politicians banged their desks with enthusiasm and quickly passed a Defence of India bill, giving her sweeping emergency powers.

In Pakistan General Yahya Khan addressed the nation over the radio, speaking in Urdu rather than his usual English. The two speeches seemed appropriately to reflect the two national moods: unswerving moral indignation on the Indian side, more in sorrow than in anger, met by the Pakistanis with fiercely militant Islamic pride and defiance.

“Our feeling,” Mrs. Gandhi said, “is one of regret that Pakistan did not desist from the ultimate folly and sorrow, that at a time when the greatest need of this subcontinent is development, the peoples of India and Pakistan have been pushed into war. We could have lived as neighbours, but the people of West Pakistan have never had a say in their destiny.”

“God is with us in our mission,” said the President of Pakistan, the time has come for the heroic Mujahids, the soldiers of Islam, to give a crushing reply to the enemy. We have tolerated enough. Attack the enemy. Tell the enemy that every Pakistani is ready to die for his country.”

The strategies of the two combatants were as different as their war aims. Pakistan attacked in the West in an attempt to relieve the pressure on her four beleaguered divisions in the East. India’s plan was to hold the long frontier in the West, while driving ahead as fast as possible to tighten the noose round Niazi’s army in the East. Already, by the second day of the war, the two unhappily joined wings of Pakistan were severed. The last tenuous links were cut when carrier-borne aircraft from the Vikrant (formerly HMS Hercules) bombed Chittagong harbour and ground-based planes bombed Dacca airport. The Indian navy soon succeeded in blocking Karachi, as well as the East Bengal ports.

In the East, the Indians rapidly won air supremacy, claiming 14 planes shot down. But in the West the air war was less decisive. As Murray Sayle and the other reporters walked out of the briefing room in Rawalpindi into the bombers’ moonlight in the small hours of Saturday morning, a Pakistani lieutenant whispered an order to extinguish cigarettes. He seemed to be crediting the Indian pilots with superhuman night vision. Superhuman or not, it was clear within minutes that the Indian air force had not been out of action by the first strikes. The Pakistan Sabres and Mirages had hit the Indian air fields at Amritsar, Pathankot, Srinagar, Uttarlai, Faridkot and Ambala, and even as far behind the lines as Agra, city of the Taj Mahal, and Jaipur, with its fairy palace on the lake.

The lieutenant had hardly whispered his order when the first air raid sirens wailed in Islamabad - the first of nine alarms during the day. At first light Indian Russian-built SU 7 fighter-bombers attacked Islamabad-Rawalpindi airport. Later in the day the Indians shot up every military airfield in Pakistan, mainly with machine-gun fire which did little damage. A drop-tank from an SU 7 fell on a mud hut in a village near Peshawar airport and the blaze killed a family sheltering inside. But none of the well-dispersed Sabres on the airport was hit. Altogether the Indians flew 170 sorties during the day.

It was plain by evening that the Pakistanis had failed to do an Israel on the Indians. They claimed to have destroyed 56 planes. None of them were MiGs, and even if the Pakistani claims were all accurate, which seems unlikely, these losses would make very little difference to the Indians, with a strength of some 600 aircraft. At a similar stage of the Six Day War, the Israelis had put more than 400 planes out of action.

The Time zone in West Pakistan is one hour behind East Pakistan, half an hour behind India. Delhi is, therefore, 10 hour ahead of New York and Washington. So it was on Friday, Eastern Standard Time, that the United Nations in New York and the Administration in Washington learned that the third phase of the war had begun. Before the Pakistani strike the administration’s position had already been hardening against India as a result of the increasingly overt Indian support of the Mukti Bahini. So on Friday, December 3, a State Department spokesman, Charles W. Bray III, announced a decision already taken on December 2 (the day the Pakistan 7 Div. moved out of reserve in Peshawar) to cancel all remaining export licenses for military equipment, some $ 11.5 million (£4.5 million) worth, because of “continuing Indian incursion” in Bengal.

The next day, December 4, well after the Pakistanis’ pre-emptive strike, a more senior, but unidentified, State Department spokesman was even more severe about India. “India bears the major responsibility for the broader hostilities,” he said, adding, however, that “the beginning of the crisis can be fairly said to be the use of force by Pakistan. “We believe,” he said, “that India bears the major responsibility for the broader hostilities that have ensued."

It would seem that this official was using the word “crisis” in two different senses in two adjacent sentences. When he said that “the beginning of the crisis” could be said to be the use of force by Pakistan, he must have been thinking of what we called Act I - March 25. But the “broader hostilities” must mean India’s support for Bangladesh, not the beginning of general war. Three acts - Pakistan’s use of force in the Eastern sector, India’s support for Bangladesh, and the outbreak of general hostilities - have been fore-shortened into two, and the result is apparent confusion in American policy - or at least in its public rationalization.

In any case, aware of the danger to world peace represented by the war, and also by the fact that India was backed by Russia, Pakistan by China, the Americans hastened to take the issue to the United Nations. The Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, formerly requested the Security Council to act; so did Britain and seven other Security Council members. The international community had at last been moved to action.

DAY 3: RETREAT - OR FACE MUKTI

On Sunday, a change in tactics brought noticeable spurt in the Indian Army’s offensive on the Eastern front. Instead of wasting men, material and time on the conquest of well-fortified Pakistan Army positions, a two¬pronged attack was launched on Dacca. The Indians’ objective was to grab the provincial capital as quickly as possible and, by slicing the province in two, to isolate well-entrenched Pakistan Army units in both halves. These would either have to fall back on Dacca or dig in and be picked off by the Mukti Bahini or the Indian Army at their leisure. This plan had the added advantage of keeping damage to the province to a minimum - an important factor since India would be expected to help re-establish the economy were a Bangladesh government to come to power.

Forty miles to the south, another Indian column moved across the border below Comilla into the rail junction of Laksham. From here, there was an excellent road to Daudkandi, a key ferry-point on the Meghna just 22 miles east of Dacca. The operations in these areas were facilitated by Indian air supremacy. There were no tactical air strikes by the Pakistan Air Force. The Indians claimed to have destroyed all but four of the Sabres stationed in East Pakistan and these were grounded at Dacca airport by repeated Indian bombing of the only jet runway in the province. Accordingly Indian Army units investing Jessore instead of risking a head-on clash with the 5,000 to 7,000 Pakistani troops there moved to by-pass and out-flank them in the direction of Dacca.

On the Eastern border of East Bengal, an Indian Army column moving through Agartala began to move westwards towards Ashuganj, where a major bridge offered access to Dacca. Chittagong, the eastern terminal of the long supply line from Karachi, was kept bottled up by fighters operating from the Indian aircraft carrier Vikrant. And Chittagong’s vital road and railway link with Dacca and the north was threatened by an Indian Army thrust towards Feni, an important communications centre half way to Comilla.

Sunday also saw the first real battle between the Indian and Pakistan navies. The engagement took place outside Karachi. The Indian Navy claimed it had sunk the destroyer Khyber and the Destroyer-escort Shah Jahan with no damage to itself and to have shelled Karachi’s harbour installations. The Pakistan Navy admitted damage to one ship but denied the attack on Karachi port. The Indian Navy said it had also destroyed the Ghazi, one of Pakistan’s four submarines, which had been hunting the Vikrant off Vishakapatnam in the Bay of Bengal. On the western front activity was limited to border shelling and probing, obviously designed to test the enemy’s dispositions.

There were widely conflicting claims of battle damage by both sides. Each was preparing for what could be a decisive week - or a long war.

DAY 4: ENTER TANKS - AND THE VULTURES

On Monday, December 6, India made its long-expected recognition of the “Republic of Bangladesh.” Mrs. Gandhi told cheering MPs in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) that “ ... Pakistan is totally incapable of bringing the people of Bangladesh back under its control. Now that Pakistan is waging war against India, the normal hesitation on our part not to do anything which might be construed as intervention has lost its significance ” Pakistan retaliated by formally breaking off diplomatic relations with India, the first such break since both countries became independent in 1947.

In the East the fall of Feni to Indian troops cut Chittagong off completely from Dacca. The Indians now pushed on towards Ashuganj and Daudkandi where they hoped to ford the river Meghna for the assault on Dacca.

In Washington, the Administration, in an effort to pressure India to accept a cease-fire announced it was cutting off all general economic aid to India not already firmly committed; this affected $87.6 m (£35 m) of aid. Aid to Pakistan was not affected.

In the West, the Pakistanis thrust forward with all their strength against the Indian troops along the Kashmir border. The hottest fighting of the day came on the Jammu front, where two Pakistani infantry brigades, supported by tanks, assaulted a tactically important feature near Chamb, in the Jammu sector. Sunday Times reporter Saeed Naqvi managed to get there. There was heavy shelling all around as the sun went down with the sort of glow that cinema audiences would consider fake. There were sharp distinct sounds of field guns, booming mortars, and shells bursting, accompanied by the splitting screams of diving bombers. The Indian major who had volunteered to drive some reporters to a point on the bank of the Tawi river turned back because shells were falling within yards of the jeep. He and the reporters sneaked into the bunker behind the artillery position, where they had tea and chapattis.

Ahead there was tumult and destruction where the Indian and Pakistani tanks were locked in bitter combat. From a hole in the thatch roof of the bunker Naqvi could see the horizon hazy with dust whenever there was a barrage of fire from either side. The vultures had plenty to choose from - cows, buffaloes and goats killed by the Pakistani shelling, and further on where the armour and the infantry were, dead soldiers as well. The terrain is flat, then heaves a little, and then is flat again. It is ideal for tank combat. After four nights of bitter fighting, with Pakistan’s Chinese-made PT 59 tanks pitted against Indian’s Vijayantas (Indian-made Centurions) the Indian troops had withdrawn from Chamb, which lies to the east of the Tawi river. The two armies, in other words, faced one another across the little river, which is easily negotiable by tanks.

“We shall knock the hell out of them this time,” an Indian officer said, Sandhurst style. “No cease-fire this time until we take back the chunk of territory forcibly occupied by Pakistan” - in other words undo the 1948 cease-fire line and stop fighting only on the international frontier.

Pakistan is working partly on memories of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war. But while six years ago they launched the first assault with two brigades and a column of 70 tanks to reach a point 4,00 yards from Akhpur, this time they have committed six brigades and 150 tanks to achieve the same objectives. They know that this time the Indian defences are far more secure. The result is a ding-dong battle across the little river.

The road to Jammu was littered with the old and the young with untidy bundles on their heads inching their way towards Jammu on camel carts or on foot. But Naqvi reports, even in Jammu there was no peace. Pakistani mirages streaked overhead, slanting over for a dive. The Swedish L72 ack- acks went into action; tracer filling the sky like a fiery umbrella. The planes unloaded 1,000 lb bombs, and the city trembled.

By day time the Indian Gnats were up on patrol duty intercepting intruding planes or engaging them in dog fights. A hysterical crowd below screamed, clapped and cheered. But the hysteria was worst at night. Any moving vehicle was stopped or stoned, on the grounds that even parking lights would give away locations to enemy planes. This continued all along India’s most important highway, the famous Grand Trunk Road. Under cover of the blackout, the up trains carried troops and ammunition and the down ones, wounded soldiers. In the midst of all this frenzy, the last thing anyone had time to reflect on as the staggering economic burden this holocaust would place on the economy of the subcontinent.

DAY 5: WRONG HORSE FOR NIXON?

On Tuesday morning Senator Edward Kennedy got up in the United States Senate and took issue squarely with the Nixon Administration’s assessment of the war: “The war did not begin last week with military border crossings or last month with the escalation of artillery crossfire. This war began on the bloody night of March 25 with the brutal suppression by the Pakistan Army of the results of a free election. Senator Muskie, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, took very much the same line, and so did other Democrat.

In the political war of words, this massive pre-emptive strike, brought instant retaliation. That same night the White House produced for the Press a person coyly described as “a high White House official,” but who was in fact none other than Dr. Henry Kissinger, the President’s chief foreign policy adviser and the strategist of his trip to Peking which was set up with the help of the Pakistanis. Of all people, it was Senator Barry Goldwater, the former Republican presidential candidate, who broke the rules and revealed that Kissinger was the author of briefing. “I say the hell with it,” he said.

The Sunday Times Washington correspondent Henry Brandon explains the background to the Administration s policy

‘The Administration is being accused of being pro-Pakistani because it did not publicly condemn the atrocities of the Pakistani Army in East Pakistan, of being anti-Indian because it called India the “aggressor,” and of failing to exert sufficient influence in Islamabad to create conditions in East Pakistan which would have made the return of the refugees possible. The official reply to the first accusation is that the US refrained from condemning the Government of Pakistan publicly in order to preserve its influence in Islamabad. To the second charge, that the US branded India an “aggressor,” it replies that it did not think that there was a need to engage in military action. And to the third it answers that it did make a great effort to use influence with the Pakistanis. To support the last point, high officials here give a list of the following moves the administration helped to bring about

1. Since May 1, all relief supplies in East Pakistan were distributed through international agencies.

2. The Pakistani government announced a time-table for the return to civilian rule.

3. An amnesty was declared for all refugees.

4. India was offered an agreement to withdraw all Pakistani troops unilaterally from the border and to initiate negotiations with Bangladesh representatives.

The US had also Yahya Khan’s approval to establish contact with Sheikh Mujib through his defence lawyer. Furthermore the Indian Government, in the 18 meetings Secretary of Sate Rogers had with the Indian ambassador and during the seven meetings Dr. Kissinger held with him, was told that the US was convinced that political autonomy for east Bengal was inevitable, and that the US favoured it. The US informed India that Yahya Khan had agreed to negotiations with members of the Awami League in Calcutta and the US had eight contacts with them in Calcutta. The US also said it would exert itself - it had not as yet a definite promise - to ensure that the Bangladesh negotiators would be chosen by Sheikh Mujib.

However, India insisted that she would negotiate only with Sheikh Mujib, and only outside Pakistan, to make certain that he had not been brainwashed. The Senior official of the Pakistan Foreign Ministry visited Washington on November 15 and told the Americans that after the return to civilian rule, timed for December 20, it might be easier to release Sheikh Mujib, whose imprisonment had occurred under military rule. American intelligence had warned that India was getting ready to go to war. It was also India, according to American information, which took the initiative in dusting off the draft of a treaty it had discussed sometime earlier with the Soviet Union. It was, therefore, assumed that Mrs. Gandhi’s visit to Washington was only a blind; that the decision to go to war had already been taken.’

On Tuesday, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire, and for immediate withdrawal by both the Indians and Pakistanis. The vote was 104 to 11, with 10 countries, including both Britain and France, abstaining. Russia voted against the cease-fire. America and China voted for it. The cease-fire resolution, in any case, had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the fighting on the ground. In the East, the Indians pressed on into East Bengal. On the central front in the West, between Lahore and Amritsar things remained quiet. But the Indians continued to drive a column into the Indus valley, beyond the desert, and in the direction of Hyderabad, in the extreme south. In Kashmir, the Pakistanis launched a major attack in the direction of Chamb.

In the East, this was the day when Pakistani resistance ceased in the air. As we have seen the Indians had shot down all but four of the Pakistan’s Sabres. Those were grounded at Dacca because the only jet runway in the whole eastern wing of the country was out of commission. In the West, quite the reverse occurred: the air war hotted up. The Pakistanis launched repeated sorties at Indian airfields. And the Indians, free now to divert squadrons from the East, hammered away at the Pakistanis’ airfields, as MURRAY SAYLE discovered when he visited a forward Pakistan fighter base in the Punjab:

The base I visited looked from the air, as I flew in, like one of those RAF wartime strips abandoned all over Southern England where small boys fly model aeroplanes on Sundays. It was set incongruously in the flat plain of the Punjab, chequered in khaki and green. Even a close look at the ragged groves of acacia trees straggling round the runway showed no signs of military activity, and as we touched down I thought I had come to the wrong place. We barely had time to park our small Pakistan Air Force Beechcraft under the trees when the base commander Group Captain Waheed Butt (a former Pakistan air attache in London) was alongside the plane to collect us in his mud-daubed private car with the cheering news that Indian fighters were in the sector.

As he spoke the base public address system was shouting “Scramble! Scramble!” from loudspeakers slung between the trees and two Chinese- built MiG 19s were screaming down the taxi-way and were airborne in less than a minute. As they passed I caught a glimpse of drop-tanks and clusters of Side-winder air-to-air missiles slung under the down-swept wings. I joined the other pilots of the squadron waiting their turn in a half-moon of camp chairs drawn up under the trees, clowning and joking and, like fighter pilots everywhere, filling in the waiting time telling war stories. The senior pilot, Wing Commander Sayeed Hashmi, had a great story to tell, of shooting down two Indian SU 7s over the same base the day before, illustrated by swooping his hands like aeroplanes in combat.

Hashmi’s description would fit nine out of 10 of the air combats which have taken place over West Pakistan in the past week and (with roles reversed) over Western India as well. Hashmi scrambled on an alert like the one we had just heard at 1400 hours the previous afternoon. He climbed over the base, turned and four minutes later saw the two Indian SU 7s come streaking in for a low-level bombing. He dived behind them and closed to 3000 yards doing 700 knots to the 300 the Indians had slowed to for the bombing run. His cockpit indicator, he said, was “growling like mad,” indicating that his sidewinder missiles were locked on to the hot exhaust pipe of the second Indian SU 7. Then the Indian pilot saw him in his rear¬view mirror.

“Beware of the Pak in the back” was suggested in the pilots’ mess as a suitable slogan for the other side and instinctively he kicked in his after¬burner for speed to take evasive action. But the salvo of sidewinders, homed in on the resulting plume of flame from the Indian plane’s tailpipe. Hashmi, a serious 30-year-old, told his story modestly and without heroics, obviously unaware of the intriguing political implications of the fact that he had shot down a Russian-built plane with American missiles fired from a Chinese-built fighter.

By this time the two pilots who had scrambled as we arrived were on the runway, parachute breaks streaming behind as they pulled up and taxied back to their dispersal bays. The returning pilots took off their helmets and donned shaggy fur caps, a squadron custom, and the ground crews raised Muslim battle cries in a well-orchestrated chorus : “Who is the greatest of all? God is the greatest! Who is the bravest? Hashmi is the bravest!” We believe in one God,” says a hearty visiting group-captain with a handlebar moustache. “The Indians worship little stone idols - you can see them in the Hindu temples they left behind here when they ran away. That is why God is on our side. Don’t you believe in God?”’

Sayle witnessed a dogfight over the air base in which an Indian pilot was killed and apparently went out in a helicopter to recover the body. Details were missing from his cable, possibly because of censorship, though officially the Pakistanis maintain that there is none. His message continued:-

‘Ducks scramble hastily from a reedy pond; oranges wink from neat green groves and a camel plods endlessly round and round a primitive pump raising irrigation water. Suddenly our helicopter goes into violent evasive manoeuvres and we are hanging from our safety belts : the pilot jerks a thumb and we see two jet fighters, silver dots in the blue, roll over and dart down towards us. In the air the SU 7 looks very much like the MiG 19, but they roar past and we hear no crash of cannon shells. Feeling tiny and vulnerable, we head back to Rawalpindi through the gathering dusk.

The war in the West has been conclusive for neither side so far; the two air forces, both conscious that they can lose the big battles if the other gains mastery in the air, are feeling for week spots with quick jabs, committing few aeroplanes and causing little permanent damage. Plane for plane the Pakistanis seem to be winning more encounters than they are losing but they have fewer aircraft to loose. Little damage has been done to any of the Pakistani bases I have seen and reconnaissance photographs of the Indian bases which have been attacked show accurate bombing of runways, quick repairs and massive dispersal bays which have effectively prevented any Israeli-style mass destruction of aircraft on the ground. I have not yet seen reliable evidence of any aircraft being destroyed on the ground on either side. Both side have substantial air strength in reserve to throw into a decisive battle.’

DAY 6 ; ‘THE PAKS’ MORALE IS IN THEIR BOOTS’

On Wednesday, Indian aircraft bombed and strafed Karachi, and Russian- built Indian missile boats bombarded Karachi from the sea, damaging three freighters, one of them British. But the main Indian thrust of the day was on the ground, in East Bengal.

PHILIP JACOBSON, after a brief, disagreeable stint in the Presidency jail in Calcutta along with our photographer, Penny Tweedie, and three other journalists (for crossing the border without the right permission from the Indian Army) crossed again in time to watch the Indian Army's biggest success of the war to date : the capture of Jessore. This had been the HQ of the Pakistani 16th Division and the strongest fortified point on the whole western border of East Bengal. Jacobson also began to understand why Pakistani resistance was collapsing in the East.

‘The total collapse of the Pakistani Army’s resistance in Jessore is one of the most intriguing puzzles of the war in the East. For weeks, Indian Army sources and other expert observers had been predicting that a stern siege, involving heavy Indian casualties, would be needed to take the Jessore cantonment - a vast military complex covering an area of several miles just outside Jessore town.

At the beginning of last week Indian intelligence reported that a full infantry brigade - some 5,000 men - was defending the cantonment, supported by heavy artillery, about 40 tanks, a formidable network of minefields, reinforced bunkers and dug-in anti-tank emplacements. All the signs were that the Pakistanis would stand and fight. Instead, in the stringing words of Colonel P. S. Deshpande, the jaunty commanding officer of the Indian 9th Division: “They ran away.” In less than 24 hours, Indian tanks and infantry took an objective they had estimated might require up to a week’s bitter fighting. The vital Jessore airstrip was captured, literally, without a single shot being fired: “Not one round,” Colonel Deshpande repeated gleefully.

The reason for this astonishing collapse lies, more than anything else, in the utter demoralisation of most of the Pakistani Army in Bangladesh. Throughout last week, Pakistani units were surrendering without resistance. At Kalampur, the garrison of 160 men of the 31 Baluch - a good fighting regiment - gave up without firing a shot. Near Comilla, the commanding officer of the 25 Frontier Force, another good unit, surrendered with 100 of his men to a platoon of Indians. In the strategic railhead town of Akhaura, a vital link in the defence of Dacca, the Pakistanis had rushed in extra troops, armour and artillery, yet the whole force chucked it in after only symbolic resistance.

It is not hard to see why, in the vivid phrase of Colonel Deshpande “the Paks’ morale is in their boots.” Senior officers have been slipping away to Dacca with wives and families for the past fortnight. The unconfirmed rumours of special flights to get them out to West Pakistan would certainly have percolated through to the ordinary soldiers. And they already have plenty to worry about. The Indians are bombarding them through loudspeakers, leaflets and radio broadcasts with a simple but stark message: “Surrender to us before the Mukti Bahini [the Bangladesh guerrillas] get to you.”

There are some terrible scores to be settled, and the settling has already begun: the first mangled corpses of Pakistani soldiers are beginning to turn up in the scrub or floating down in the rivers in areas where the Mukti Bahini won control before the Indian Army arrived. The lightning advances of the Indian Army in last week’s fighting only added to the demoralisation of the Pakistanis. In a few areas, they have fought bravely and well: the Indians are keeping very quiet about the Hili sector where an outnumbered and totally isolated Pakistani force seems to be holding out.

Closer to Jessore, there were two sharp engagements - or “extremely good fights” in Colonel Despande’s enthusiastic phrase - but they failed to halt the headlong attack on the town and the cantonment. It is clear that the Pakistanis badly misjudged the speed of the Indian advance; in the map- lined operations room at Jessore the charts of Indian positions as seen by the defenders suggest they had not expected a full-scale attack for another day.

When the hasty evacuations began at 4.20 p.m. on Wednesday, the Indians were a bare 6,000 yards away. The Pakistanis left so hurriedly that the orders of the day were still on the duplicator and there were half-prepared meals in the officers’ mess.

The bulk of the Pakistani troops seem to have escaped, though only to the dubious security of the road to Khulna, and they seem to have taken most of their artillery pieces with them. These were probably several miles behind the cantonment and would therefore be easier to save. I saw only one burned-out Pakistani tank in the cantonment itself. The Pakistanis left behind them about 6,000 tons of ammunition and general supplies which will be badly missed in the retreat.

We had reached Jessore in what was certainly one of the most bizarre columns to pass through the gates of the cantonment. A fleet of rickety yellow taxis and venerable private cars carried us the 85 miles from Calcutta in a bone-jarring, five-hour journey. As we rattled past the frontier post at Petrapole, the first of the jubilant crowds appeared. From there right through to Jessore, 25 miles away, the road was lined with cheering, beaming villagers waving the new red, white, gold and green flag of Bangladesh and ecstatically chanting the familiar “Joi Bangla” slogan. Now that Bangladesh is victorious, the new fashion is to emphasise the Joi.

Driving through the beautifully lush countryside, a chessboard of dark green paddies, brown water and brilliant vegetation, the evidence of the Pakistani Army’s precipitate retreat was everywhere. Well concealed, reinforced bunkers had been abandoned without a fight, often with a substantial pile of arms left in them. To the surprise and relief of the Indian engineers, the retreating Pakistanis had not tried to destroy the vital tarmac road or even mine the areas around it. Even where a bridge had been blown, as at Navaron on the Betna river, the Indians were able to cut a dirt road across country and bypass the obstacle. A stream of army lorries and half-tracks was churning up swirling clouds of choking brown dust but the traffic keep moving.

It was at Jhikargacha, too, that we found the first disturbing evidence that a new wave of killing can be expected before the blood-stained nation of Bangladesh settles down to anything like normality. Sprawled by the single track railway were the bodies of three youngish men, clad only in lungis, the flowing skirt-like costume of this region. They were blindfolded, their arms and legs cruelly roped behind their backs. Their throats had cut and the blood had soaked into the dry, brown earth.

According to the villagers, the murdered men were collaborators, traitors who had helped the Pakistani troops rape, loot and murder. But nobody would admit that the Mukti Bahini had killed them. In the past few weeks, however, there have been persistent rumours that the Mukti are taking a terrible revenge on those they consider to have betrayed Bangladesh. There are dark rumours of mass “trials” at Kangaroo courts which invariably end with summary execution. Yet, like so many other places in Bangladesh, Jhikargacha has every reason to indulge its hatred. When the Pakistanis began pulling out last week, they were alleged to have massacred up to 100 villagers in a final spasm of savagery.’

DAY 7: THE HEADLONG FLIGHT FROM JESSORE

The Indian troops after taking Jessore town and Jessore cantonment, fought their way on down the road to Khulna, a major river port and one of the biggest cities in East Bengal. Again PHILIP JACOBSON was with them :

The gruesome trail that marked the headlong retreat of the Pakistan Army from its “impregnable” portion in Jessore began a few miles outside town. The tarmac road was scarred and furrowed by machine-gun bullets and rockets. A dozen burnt-out jeeps and lorries lay twisted in the ditches at either side. Then, the bodies, Pakistani regulars frozen in grotesque poses of agony. Some were charred and blackened, others had terrible, fly- covered wounds. They were the first dead Pakistani soldiers we had seen in this sector since the war began. They had been caught by Indian tanks tearing through Jessore and by jet fighters; they had abandoned their vehicles and ran vainly for the ditches. A large and cheerful crowd of locals posed proudly around the corpses, right arms erect in the “Joi Bangla!” salute.

A mile further down the road were the remains of Rupdia, a hamlet unluckily enough to be the scene of a delaying action by Pakistani infantry, desperately covering the rear of a 2,000-strong column which included almost 1,000 wives and families of officers formerly stationed at Jessore. The flattened huts were still burning and three buses used for a barricade had been raked with bullets from end to end. Moving forward through a battalion of the Madrasi Regiment - small, cheerful men who waved and smiled at everyone - our photographer Penny Tweedie and I hitched a short ride on a Russian-built T55 tank of the India 63rd Cavalry. Clanking and grinding up the narrow road, ducking the big 105 mm gun as it swivelled to point towards Pakistani positions, we arrived at the foremost point of the Indian advance. A full squadron of 14 T55s was assembling to support the Madrasis in their next push down the Khulna road.

Crouching nervously behind the comforting bulk of the tanks every time a shell from the Pakistanis 105 mm guns landed anywhere remotely near us, we watched Indian advanced units carefully probing the enemy’s positions. A company of Pakistani infantrymen - probably from the 27th Baluch Regiment - was holding up the advance with mortar and machine-gun fire; the sound of small arms fire could be heard clearly a few hundred yards away. When shelling failed to dislodge the Pakistani rearguard, the local commander Lt. Col. Naregyean - an amiable, imperturbable Madrasi - decided to call for air support. Radios crackled impressively and map references were busily exchanged and checked. Everyone looked expectantly upwards. Nothing happened for a while. Then, quite suddenly, two of the Indian Air Force’s Russian SU 7 fighters appeared high in the enormous blue sky. For a few minutes they circled gracefully, like hawks looking for prey.

Then, after a tank fired a blue smoke-maker shell, they banked into a steep dive and straightened out at tree-top level. From where we stood, I could see the flashes from the big .30 calibre machine-guns as the jets strafed Pakistani positions. When the planes turned away for their base near Calcutta, the Pakistani guns had been silenced. The tanks roared into life again and crashed away through the bright-yellow mustered fields, followed by the Madrasi infantry. “Khulna is finished,” Colonel Naregyean shouted as he sped away in his command jeep.’

DAY 8: CLOSING IN THE CAPITAL

On Friday Pakistan’s hopes for a stalemate began to collapse. In the East, Indian troops began to close on Dacca where they were awaited with calm by the Bengalis and with obvious fear by the Bihari Muslims and the Punjabis. In the West, Pakistan’s desperate thrusts into Kashmir were being held. Now came the first significant crack in Pakistan’s tightly-knit military establishment. The United Nations received an appeal from Major-General Rao Farman Ali, military adviser to the Governor of East Pakistan, asking for help in ending the war on terms which clearly admitted a Pakistani defeat.

Farman Ali asked for the UN to repatriate Pakistani troops and civilian officials to West Pakistan with guarantees of their safety until this could be arranged, in return he was prepared to offer the establishment of an elected government in East Pakistan. The Security Council had, however, barely begun to consider Farman Ali’s appeal when a message arrived from President Yahya Khan asking that it be disregarded. And in Dacca Farman Ali’s immediate superior, Lg.-Gen. A.A.K. Niazi, GOC Eastern Command, appeared in person at the Intercontinental Hotel to refute rumours that he had fled the country. “I am here commanding my troops by the will of Allah,” the general said. “And I will never desert them.”

Capitalising on General Farman Ali’s apparent break with the military command in Dacca, the Indian Chief of the Army Staff, General Sam Maneckshaw addressed a personal radio message to him advising surrender: “Resistance is senseless and will mean the death of many poor soldiers.” Maneckshaw was not exaggerating. Indian troops converging on Dacca from west, east and north had established their first bridgehead across the river Meghna. Troops were transported across the river by helicopter at Ashuganj and were only 40 miles north-east of Dacca with virtually an open road to the city. Dacca was bombed in the morning and the afternoon as it had been most days this week. The city’s inhabitants seemed to have become used to the bombings and near the airport they gathered to gawk at an unexploded 250 lb. bomb with its clear markings indicating, with some irony, that it was made in the United States.

On the Western front, in the Chamb area of Kashmir, Pakistani troops continued on the offensive. In the boldest action to date, four Pakistani battalions supported by artillery and armour, crossed the shallow Munawar Tawi river to attack Indian positions on the eastern bank. India admitted it was suffering heavy casualties as the Pakistani forces pressed the major attack in the Chamb area. At the same time there were indications that India might accept the United Nations call for a cease-fire once the Bangladesh regime had been installed in Dacca.

DAY 9: THE END OF ACT 3

By yesterday, it was clear that Act III was over. Pakistani troops were beginning to surrender in large groups in the East. The Indian armies, having crossed the last major water barriers, were already tightening the ring around Dacca. In the West, the Indians were holding fast along the cease-fire line in spite of everything the Pakistanis were throwing at them. Yet it was equally clear that Act III was not the end of the tragedy. There would have to be an Act IV.

In Delhi, Nicholas Carroll found that, understandably after the Indian successes in Bengal, the immediate future course of events was seen as beguilingly simple and apparently inevitable. The scenario, in the minds of high Indian officials, he reported, goes like this. The Pakistani troops in Bangladesh must in the end succumb. Even if a last-ditch stand in Dacca holds up the time-table, there is no way out for them.

Under the auspices of the Indian Army, two close associates of Sheikh Mujib, Syed Nazrul Islam and Tazuddin Ahmed, were due to be installed in Jessore on Saturday afternoon as respectively, President and Prime Minister of the Republic of Bangladesh. The Pakistani prisoner of war will be sent home quickly, though not out of any marked feelings of charity. (“Why should we feed those bastards?” one senior Indian official asked Carroll.) India will then withdraw her troops.

China, the Indians suppose, will go on making the threatening noises which in the Indian view are a consolatory substitute for military assistance to Pakistan. And the United States will have to swallow its disapproval and learn to live with the kind of fait accompli .... In the long run, the shattering disaster to the prestige of Pakistan’s armed services in the East must shake the prestige of the military men who dominate West Pakistan. But on the ninth day of general war, the military conflict seemed far from over. The Pakistani Army still had reserves, and its commanders still had spirit.

Indian strategists were guessing, and Pakistani officials were hinting, that ACT IV might see a do or die offensive. But in the meantime the curtain was coming down on Act III. On Saturday, after a brief period during which “a very poorly heard transmitter announcing itself as Radio Pakistan, Dacca” could still be picked up by the BBC’s monitors. Radio Dacca finally faded away. The voice of Punjabi rule in Bangladesh had, in any case, long been drowned by the shouts of “Joi Bangla!”