In an interview to The Indian Express last week, Air Chief SP Tyagi, concerned over his force’s fleet strength, said he had asked the Government to “order more aircraft of the types we already operate” since numbers were heading toward unacceptable levels. Plans for 126 new fighters and their induction could take 15 years and “we can’t afford to wait that long... our only option is to get something in a hurry”. Pointing to more F-16s for Islamabad and the induction into PAF of Chinese JF-17s in large numbers from next year, Tyagi warned that Pakistan would have greater fighter density than India for a country its size.
There is a familiar ring to his concerns, a sense of déjà vu that takes you back 40 years: the run-up to the 1965 Indo-Pak war, and the war itself, were the IAF’s first hard lessons in the “dangers of neglecting offensive and support capabilities”. In what is one of the most graphic and honest accounts of the war, PVS Jagan Mohan and Samir Chopra’s The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965 (Manohar Books, 2005) introduces you to an IAF, which, on the threshold of an uncertain long-term expansion plan, is suddenly told to go to war in old, equally uncertain machines.
Vampires and Ouragans which had “no business being in the skies” at the time joined Mysteres, Hunters and Gnats to take on the PAF’s cutting edge American F-86 Sabres and F-104 Starfighters. At that time, the Sabre was “the fastest and most powerful aircraft in the subcontinent" while the Starfighter was a "missile with a man in it”. Had it not been for the men who made the IAF at the time, the 1965 war could have turned out quite differently.
The account by Mohan and Chopra, replete with interviews with pilots and veterans, squadron diaries and unpublished photographs, not only demolishes myths and counterclaims on both sides but makes one of the most critical points of all — that the 1965 operations inestimably helped prepare the IAF for a war which was to be upon it just six years later, and possibly put in perspective for the government, the immediate need for a progressive and structured modernization programme, one that would leave the ground in the late 1970s.
