Bharat Rakshak

However I feel that the links should be read again and again to see the factors of surprise in the 1962 Chinese aggression.

One can see there was strategic deception that PRC used to lull the Indian decision makers- Political, military and intelligence. Yes there was the bull frog syndrome and others. However were there any greater moves that went on? The popular conception is that PRC took advantage of the Cuba crisi and launched their attack. But how and why did they build up before that to be able to launch in 1962.

But it seems likely that the forward Commanders feeling the pressure of the chinese forces knew exactly what was coming. The brilliant generals decided otherwise.

In my mind there is little or no connection with the Cuban crisis at all. The plans to use force was being looked at all the time. We chose to ignore the buildup on their side as a bluff.

Krishna Menon and Panikkar's should be held culpable for this debacle. The yes men in the army men were merely following orders.

Their actions pulled wool over the Indian's establishmet (adverse reports from MEA - Panikkar) and the def ministry (Menon) preventing India from adequately preparing to meet the PRC threat.

A soldier’s soldier

C. UDAY BHASKAR

Biography of a distinguished but a lesser-known General of the Indian Army

BORN TO DARE — The Life of Lt. Gen. Inderjit Singh Gill PVSM, MC: S. Muthiah; Penguin/Viking, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 495.


Occasionally one comes across an unusual biography which throws light on a forgotten central protagonist and in the process, illuminates a whole period of recent history. Born to Dare is one of those little gems and the author does not hide his enormous admiration and affection for his subject. This book “is by no means a military biography… (it) is the story of Inderjit Singh Gill, a rather uncommon type of person, who might have been born to dare…” avers S. Muthiah, and there is little doubt that he tells a very absorbing “story” about one of the Indian Army’s more distinguished but little-known Generals.

Inder, as he was referred to, was born in England in 1922 a few years after his father, Gurdial Singh, a medical doctor in Edinburgh married a young local girl — Rena Lister. A year later the senior Gill received the King’s Commission in the Indian Medical Service and the family moved to India and lived in different parts of the country including Bareilly, Dehradun, Vishakapatnam, Vellore and Madras. Given the practice of the times, Inder went to England in 1938 to train as an engineer but his life was overtaken by the turbulence of World War II and the tumultuous events that followed.

Unusual career

I.S. Gill (1922-2001) had a very unusual professional career that straddled three armies for he had the rare distinction of joining the British Army as a private in 1939 and was later commissioned as an officer. His heroic exploits in World War II in Greece as part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) that undertook the covert Operation Harling is little-known and Muthiah has painstakingly researched this niche. The first part of this book is a detailed account of Captain Norman (Inder) Gill’s participation in the demolition of the critical Gorgoppotamos Bridge which was to have had a strategic impact on the Rommel-Montgomery battle in North Africa that was shaping up and Muthiah is at his dramatic best in recounting this phase of Inder’s life.

Subsequent chapters trace the transition of this remarkably brave, tactically astute but consistently blunt officer from the British Army to the British Indian Army a little before India’s Independence, and finally his joining the Indian Army in January 1948. A soldier to the core, Inder Gill soon found his natural calling as a paratrooper and became a legend in his lifetime. The 1948 Kashmir operations, peacekeeping in Korea and Gaza, command of a mountain division, Director, Military Training and concurrently officiating Director, Military Operations (DMO) in the Army Head Quarters, and finally Army Commander of the Western Army before it was bifurcated, Gill was an extraordinary soldier, modest to a fault and a very caring human being whose myriad qualities of head and heart Muthiah recounts with rare empathy.

The officiating DMO during the 1971 War for Bangladesh, there are many vignettes that Muthiah alludes to which testify to the pivotal role that Gill appears to have played in that critical period. The one that stands out is Gill — then a Major General — approving the movement of a mountain brigade on December 6, 1971 into East Pakistan and standing his ground with the Army Chief, Sam Manekshaw, who was reported to have been furious with such audacity. As the book adds: “Inder insisted he had ‘in the circumstances taken the correct decision and would do so again if he remained as Officiating DMO.’ Manekshaw later confirmed the order.”

Central role

While not being a military biography in the traditional sense, there are nuances and elliptical references that merit more detailed scrutiny which would highlight the central role played by Gill in the shaping of strategic thinking in the Indian Army. The strategic use of paratroopers — so effectively demonstrated in 1971 — and grooming Sundarji to nurture mechanisation are illustrative. Gill had his shortcomings and these are recorded in some detail but what emerges finally is a luminous portrait of a soldier, who is best remembered in the poignant, evocative lines of Robert Browning (The Lost Leader), rendered by Sukhjit Singh — the Maharaja of Kapurthala — who had served with Gill. Muthiah has rendered yeoman service by putting this biography together and it should be mandatory reading for all those who have more than passing interest in matters pertaining to India’s military security — including the political and bureaucratic constituency — at a time when the Indian “fauj” is facing complex internal challenges.

A nice book review by C Uday Bhaskar on a great soldier. I had heard of Lt Gen Gill's role in the Balkans in passing but didnt know his details. I knew he was the founder of the Paratroop Regt.

We have this penchant to pick on an error and drill down on that and lose the big picture. What I asked is can we find out more about Lt gen Gill? And what we have is the error I made, which I already acknowledged, that he was the founder of the Paras!

We have this penchant to pick on an error and drill down on that and lose the big picture. What I asked is can we find out more about Lt gen Gill? And what we have is the error I made, which I already acknowledged, that he was the founder of the Paras!

So what are we going to do about it? Am sure Rakesh will support on the web pages but we need folks to gather the content. Can you be sort of a guide and folks can be in touch with you as a mentor?

Perfect. So can we get some traction here to have members contribute to the forum? Pargha, can you plese start a thread and we will ask Mandeep to mentor it. Once again thanks. I think we will do more for the forces with this than any other thing at a member level.

I feel we need to have quite a few new BR pages on leading personalities of the Indian Armed Forces.You know people like Thakur Nathu Singh, Kalwant Singh,Usman, Thorat,Mohinder Singh,Sparrow,Sagat Singh etc.The heroes to whom we owe so much.

May I suggest using Leadership in the Indian Army: Biographies of Twelve Soldiers by Major Gen. V.K Singh, as the basic primer for the people who will be contributing for it? It is available as a Google Book for brief preview. I don't have any experience developing web-content, but I can round up resources, do some basic fact checks and provide context for Pre-Independence leadership in the Indian Army (which shaped the later careers of many of the commanders Mandeep listed).

The WW II, fabled Indian 4 Infantry Division was badly mauled in Oct-Nov 1962; & their General Officer Commanding ( GOC) Maj Gen A S Pathania, Military Cross (MC) ; earned with the Frontier Force (FF, later 5 RGR); was hauled over the coals & discredited & disgraced in the media….May his soul RIP……..he passed away very recently, aged 93!

‘We grew up with khukris’
By James Delingpole

It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in one battle. But such was my privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans.

A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their unmistakable crimson-ribboned bronze crosses stuck proudly on their chests. There are currently only 10 living recipients of the Victoria Cross and three, it almost goes without saying, are Gurkhas.

Tulbahadur Pun, now 86, won his in June 1944 at the turning point of the Burma campaign, when almost all his section had been wiped out by Japanese machine guns at the Mogaung railway bridge. Firing his Bren from the hip he advanced alone under shattering fire till he reached the enemy bunker, polishing off three occupants with his khukri and causing five to flee in understandable terror.

The VC of Lachhiman Gurung (now 91) must rank among the most implausible ever. In May 1945, his forward post at Taungdaw, Burma, was attacked by 200 of the enemy. With his two comrades lying wounded at his feet, Gurung — all 4ft 6inch of him — continued to hold his position single-handed for four hours. Quite literally single-handed, for his right hand — and his right eye — had been blown away by a grenade. Calmly, he continued loading and firing his rifle with his left arm alone, killing at least 31 Japanese at point-blank range.

"But we don’t want to give the impression it’s only VCs that matter," says the Gurkhas’ lawyer Martin Howe, and he’s quite right. When VCs are involved, the government can worm its way out with special dispensations, as it did last year with Pun, after the scandalous episode in which he was initially denied permission to settle in Britain for urgent medical treatment because he had "failed to demonstrate strong ties with the UK".

It’s the other Gurkhas we should worry about: the ones who have given the best of their lives fighting for King or Queen and Country — that’s Britain, not their native Nepal — but now find themselves turned away in their hour of greatest need. Under current pettifogging regulations, only those discharged after July 1, 1997 — when the brigade’s HQ moved to the UK from Hong Kong — are eligible for "fast track" citizenship. Others — WWII veterans, the ones who served with distinction in Korea, Malaya, Borneo and the Falklands — must persuade immigration courts that they have "close ties" to the UK.

But this isn’t about justice, it’s about a cash-strapped, morally bankrupt government running scared. Eager to be seen to be tough on immigration and panicked by the extra burden that will be placed on the Treasury, the government is fighting the case tooth and nail.

It’s picked the wrong fight, though. Absolutely no one outside ministries of defence and home has any sympathy with its position. "Immigration is not normally a popular subject, but on this occasion we’ve got the whole country behind us," says Howe. According to one estimate, the total additional cost to the Treasury, should the Gurkhas win, will be around £200 million. "Beer money," says Howe. Well, not always, perhaps — but definitely where the Gurkhas are concerned. The British public just can’t get enough of them. We’ve been blood brothers since the Anglo-Nepalese war ended (in a draw: you can’t win against Gurkhas) in 1816 and we’re not about to sever that tie over a sum constituting roughly one-third of what the MoD spends every year on compensation claims.

Since 1817, Gurkhas have fought alongside British troops pretty much every war. Around 100,000 of them fought in the First World War; around 250,000 in the second. In that period, almost 50,000 of them died in action, 150,000 were seriously wounded, and they earned themselves 6,500 military decorations, including 13 individual VCs and another 13 regimental VCs. There are currently around 17,000 applications for the 230 places offered in the Brigade of Gurkhas each year. To qualify you must be able to carry a 25kg bag of rocks on a six-km run up and down vertiginous Nepalese slopes in under 35 minutes.

"You always felt safe as houses when the Gurkhas were around," recalled Alf Jordan, an 8th Army veteran who’d joined the Gurkhas’ protest march to No. 10 in a gesture of solidarity. "And they’d look after you even though half the time you didn’t know they were there." "So what is it that makes you lot so great?" I asked Bhimrajtum Bhangphe, who served in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor. "Where you grow up kicking footballs, we grow up playing with bows and arrows and our khukris which we use for everything, even sharpening our pencils. That is our tradition because we want to be the best fighters on the planet," he said. "But our secret for winning the war is love. We love each other. We respect our comrades. They also have an inspirational motto "Better to die than be a coward". Can you think of any people on earth more deserving of UK’s hospitality than the smiling, noble warrior race that gave us men like Lachhiman Gurung and Tulbahadur Pun?

Some images from the 1965 war:

Abandoned Indian Army vehicles in the River Ravi after a local Pakistani advance...
-Vivek