1971 War – As I Saw it

[third eye]

Is he Sikh? This little 21 year old managed to destroy our 10 tanks before taking the second hit ? Can you share the source. I want to read it

any neutral source??

Please go through this :

https://defence.pk/threads/a-touching-tale-of-71-war.38768/

 

[Reichsmarschall]

wiki is neutral

Eww Battle of tyres So much for authenticity

Please go through this :

https://defence.pk/threads/a-touching-tale-of-71-war.38768/

I am reproducing an article whose links I cannot provide

 

[Areesh]

Is he Sikh? This little 21 year old managed to destroy our 10 tanks before taking the second hit ? Can you share the source. I want to read it

What kind of an Indian are you? You don't even know Khetarpal?

 

[niaz]

There is little doubt that soldiers and officers of the lower rank fought bravely. In most armies, officers up to the battalion commander are promoted strictly on merit therefore are good fighting men. But Colonels don’t win the battles. Wars may be started by the politicians but are conducted by the Generals. In a battle and in a war, what really matters is the end result. Pak soldiers fought bravely, so what? It was still an ignoble defeat.

Let me be blunt. During peacetime, armed services personnel enjoy many privileges and a pampered life in clean cantonments. However during war, they are expected to die for their country and not timidly surrender.

I do not suffer from ‘Martyr’ complex. I would have preferred that all the 90,000 soldiers were killed or injured as that would have been less painful than the unconditional surrender.

Whether we were right in a military crackdown in East Pakistan; with hindsight, ‘No’. What many soldiers did to the East Pakistanis was also very wrong. But once started, it was the duty of Army to continue the fight until the last man. Result many not have been different and Indians would still have won. However, assuming that 4 Pak soldiers killed just one Indian, 90,000 soldiers would have inflicted 22,000 dead and twice as many wounded. Instead, the Indian Army suffered only 1,500 dead and 4,000 wounded on the Eastern Front. Had Indian Army suffered 60,000 casualties from an army fighting 1,500 kilometres away from home, can you imagine what would be the expected losses inflicted by half a million men fighting for their home!

Indian Army brass would have to rethink ten times before starting future hostilities. However that did not happen. Gen Niazi's cowardly surrender has encouraged India to come up with offensive doctrines such as the ‘Cold Start’ and Modi to brazenly threaten us with stopping our water.

1971 is a very emotional issue for me but I do not apologise for it.

 

[Tps43]

Well Indeed 1971 is a dark year in our countries history but I still prefer If we would better had no surrendered 90k troops . All this happen due to ignorance of hiracy of Pakistan at that time .

Well Indeed 1971 is a dark year in our countries history but I still prefer If we would better had no surrendered 90k troops . All this happen due to ignorance of hiracy of Pakistan at that time .

 

[third eye]

Gen Niazi's cowardly surrender has encouraged India to come up with offensive doctrines such as the ‘Cold Start’ and Modi to brazenly threaten us with stopping our water.

Disagree here.

 

[faaiq Sheikh]

Detailed War description.. good post

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

the whole RAW operation was exposed few years before that and all culprits were caught but our politicians wanted to break pakistan at any cost

I am hearing this first time. Can you elaborate? Post sources etc.

Is he Sikh? This little 21 year old managed to destroy our 10 tanks before taking the second hit ? Can you share the source. I want to read it

Not Sikh. But I have probably read that his father hailed from 'Pakistan region'.

 

[paki_rambo]

1971 was a disaster of epic proportion on political grounds.Armed forces of Pakistan fought gallantly on the eastern front.
Even after the war Gen A A K Niazi sought a court martial to clear his name but Bhutto never allowed it.

Arun Khetarpal was just 21 and refused to abandon his half blown Tank till last breath as the gun was still working and managed to destroy 10 Pakistani Tanks before taking the second hit and KIA

There are many such situations both on India and Pakistani sides.

sounds more like Audie murphy story who took on German Forces all alone with a machine gun on a half destroyed M10 tank and killing 50 German soldiers
but how Arun destroyed 10 tanks with a machine gun can you kindly post a link here.

 

[Qutb-ud-din Aybak]

I am hearing this first time. Can you elaborate? Post sources etc.

some conspiracy was revealed and culprits were caught by ISI but later they were released due to political reasons.
In January 1968, a case infamously known as the Agartala Conspiracy Case was filed and 35 Bangalee civil and military officers were accused of treason and conspiracy against the state of Pakistan.
Agartala conspiracy was real: Mujib planned secession in 1969-daughter confesses

but mujib never wanted to involve india. He was in jail. A pakistani was in jail with him to as a servant. Mujib told him that i am afraid that he(i forgot the name he took) would go to india, which should not happen.

1971 was a disaster of epic proportion on political grounds.Armed forces of Pakistan fought gallantly on the eastern front.
Even after the war Gen A A K Niazi sought a court martial to clear his name but Bhutto never allowed it.



sounds more like Audie murphy story who took on German Forces all alone with a machine gun on a half destroyed M10 tank and killing 50 German soldiers
but how Arun destroyed 10 tanks with a machine gun can you kindly post a link here.

Pakistani soldiers in that battle showed same valour as him.
from wiki pedia:

But pakistan army also fought very bravely in that battle. even with losses they kept on coming.
Khetarpal rushed to meet the Pakistani armour and launched right into the Pakistani attack. With his troop he was able to run over the enemy advance with his tanks. However, the commander of the second tank was killed in this attack. Alone in charge, Khetarpal continued his attack on the enemy strongholds, The enemy fought very bravely and did not retreat even after losses. Disappointed by his failure so far, he desperately attacked the incoming Pakistani troops and tanks gunning down a Pakistani tank in the process. However Pakistani forces regrouped and counterattacked. In the ensuing tank battle, Lt. Arun Khetarpal with his 2 remaining tanks fought off and gunned down 10 tanks before he was killed in action.

All of those ten were not taken out by him. it was combined effort of 2 indian tanks according to indian own people.

 

[third eye]

but how Arun destroyed 10 tanks with a machine gun

Where did u get this from ?

 

[Qutb-ud-din Aybak]

I am hearing this first time. Can you elaborate? Post sources etc.

https://defence.pk/threads/agartala-conspiracy-confession-what-does-it-mean-for-our-history.196786/

A true but funny incident of 1971 war:
Indian troops under a brave and intelligent officer(i forgot his name) attacked pakistani bunkers. Pakistan army was forced to retreat. Indians captured the Posts and bunkers.
The officer(major i think by rank) decided to not build new fortification and use pakistani bunkers for defence. Later that day Pakistan army did counter attack and indian army was not able to repel it because of the one factor. the bunker they were using were designed to defend the attacks coming from opposite direction. The officer was captured as POW. He said to the Pakistani officer that "thanks God the war is over". Pakistani reminded him that war is still going on.
the sardar G reply was an rocking "Mere liye to jang khatam ho gaye ha."
translation: "but for me war it is over"

It is a true incident. Plz don't take it as a troll. I read it in a history book.

Ikram Sehgal’s great escape
Published in tribune.

I confess I have been deeply affected by Ikram Sehgal’s memoir Escape from Oblivion: The Story of a Pakistani Prisoner of War in India (OUP 2012). He carried a binary identity — born of a Punjabi father and a Bengali mother — which held only as long as East and West Pakistan held together. What devastated me was how it was invalidated by both and Ikram was handed over to India as a prisoner of war (POW). Across time, he comes across as the only morally valid reference in the story of Pakistan.

Ikram got into the army in 1965 and was commissioned into 2E Bengal Regiment where he served till 1968 before qualifying as a pilot in army aviation. On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani military cracked down on Dhaka. Ikram reached Dhaka two days later to join Logistic Flight, Eastern Command, and was told he had been posted to Sri Lanka instead. The meaning of the second transfer was lost on him. He used his ‘joining time’ period to visit 2E Bengal near the Indian border.

But 2E Bengal was in revolt. They thought he was a Punjabi commando come to kill their commander. Ikram was handed over to the Indians who took him to a camp in Agartala where the Indian Border Security Force savagely tortured him. Soldier to the core, he now posed as a rebel to survive, causing his identity crisis to become an insoluble riddle. From Agartala he was finally moved to Panagarh in West Bengal, along with other Pakistani POWs. In 1947, his father, Captain (later Lt Col) Abdul Majeed Sehgal, was demobbed from the same Panagarh to Lahore and on to Sialkot.

Ikram spent 99 days in Indian custody but escaped on the 100th day, barefoot and naked except for his underwear, in a replay of the Great Escape film, which forms the purple patch of the book. He went to Calcutta — home of his maternal grandmother — in a truck driven by Biharis. He managed to walk half-naked into the US Consulate in the city, was given shelter because of the recent Henry Kissinger-Yahya Khan plot to facilitate President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing, but was asked to leave lest the Indians got wind of it. He was given Rs1,000 as his fare to wherever he wanted to go. He plumped for New Delhi. What the ISI officer did in the Pakistan High Commission reads like fiction but it really happened. Two commandos, fully armed — AK-47, three magazines, a pistol, and some grenades — took him on a circuitous route to Kathmandu in Nepal from where he took a flight to Rangoon, and finally to Bangkok, with the weapons as hand luggage! In Bangkok, the defence attaché was intellectually incapable of grasping his now-invalidated identity. Back in Dhaka, he spent 84 days under interrogation at the HQ Inter Services Screening Committee.

In November 1971, he rejoined the Pakistan Army and served in Thar and Balochistan “but was dismissed from service two years later without any reasons for this action”.

Ikram Sehgal’s mother was an Urdu-speaking Bengali from Midnapore near Calcutta. Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy and JA Rahim were his grandmother’s first cousins. On his father’s side, his late grandfather, Haji Abdul Karim Sehgal, partly built the Marine Drive of Bombay. His grand-uncle Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah served as chief engineer at the Bombay Baroda Central India Railways. Today, Ikram runs his security firms and has gone back to Bangladesh to rejoin the 2E Bengal as an old friend and he is still a Pakistan Army soldier to the marrow. But this is what he writes about 1971: “When soldiers make war on women and children, they cease to be soldiers. That is why in the final analysis, when it came to real combat, they could not face up to bullets which is their actual job as soldiers … the terror that was unleashed by them in East Pakistan between March and November 1971 is simply inexcusable.”

What should one do when two identities are in violent clash and you are stuck in the middle? Is reality acceptable only when it is framed in black and white?

Funny incident of war from times of india.
When ignorance of Kalma made IAF pilot a Pakistan PoW
Ajay Sura | TNN | Dec 16, 2014, 06.34 PM IST
CHANDIGARH: Forty-three years ago, when young Flight Lieutenant (who retired as Air Commodore) Jawahar Lal Bhargava ejected from his aircraft in Pakistan territory after being shot down, he had almost made it to India by posing as Flt Lt Mansur Ali of Pakistan Air Force. However, as luck would have it, his ignorance about the "Kalma" (testimony of Islamic faith) made him a prisoner of war (PoW).

Talking to TOI, the 73-year-old veteran, Air Commodore Bhargava, who had to spent almost a year in Pakistan during 1971 Indo-Pak war after his HF-24 9 aircraft — popularly known as "Marut" — was shot down, recalled how an IAF pilot deals with the situation after landing in enemy territory.

Bhargava, who recently shifted to Panchkula from Gurgaon, said he took off from Air Force station Barmer (Rajasthan) on the morning of December 5, 1971, on his first sortie to launch an attack in the enemy territory.

Around 9am, his aircraft was hit by ground fire and he decided to eject. His parachute had barely opened when he touched down and the "Marut" had crashed into a sand dune.

He immediately took out some items from the survival pack, buried his G-suit under the bushes, set his watch on Pakistan standard time and started marching away from the aircraft.

While he was struggling to find some way to escape to Indian territory, he ran into three people from an adjacent village. Bhargava introduced himself as pilot Mansoor Ali of Pakistan Air Force (PAF), whose plane was shot down by Indian forces. He even showed them Pakistan currency. They took him to the village, where his real test began.


On entering the village, he was surrounded by a large number of residents. Among them was a school headmaster who was apparently not convinced that Bhargava was a PAF pilot. He started posing questions on Bhargava's native place in Pakistan. "When I said that I was from Rawalpindi, he asked me where did I stay? When I told him that I resided on Mall Road, he said I was in an Indian village. When I requested them to let me go back to Pakistan, he assured me that he was only testing me."


Bhargava planned to escape from the village at 8pm on the pretext of going to relieve himself, but to his surprise, four Pakistani rangers arrived there — apparently called by the headmaster — and began grilling him.

"They did not believe me when I reiterated that I was Mansur Ali of PAF. Around 9pm, one of them, Awaj Ali, asked me to read the Kalma. He even recited it and asked me to repeat it, but I could not. He then threatened me to tell the truth or they would extract it some other way. I told them that I was Flt Lt Jawahar Lal Bhargava of the IAF and they could do whatever they wanted to with me, even kill me," said the veteran.


Thereafter, he was blindfolded, handcuffed and handed over to the Pakistani army on December 8, 1971.

Bhargava said if he had been able to repeat the Kalma that day, he would have escaped from Pakistan that very night.

 

[SBD-3]

Let me ask very humbly, if the fall of Dacca really meant anything for us, then why was it dwarfed by only APS mourning? Everyone was talking about APS but none about what happened on the day in 1971. We don't want to learn from our history, dump the failures and move on.

 

[Hamza913]

I don't give a damn!

The Commander of the Pakistan tank battalion is said to have met the Indian battalion commander after the battle and made enquiries about 2nd Lieutenant Khetarpal's tank since he was very impressed with the gallantry of this particular tank's commander.

That doesn't mean he shot 10 tanks by himself whilst his tank was already half broken.

Comment like your was expected because it defies 1 Marde Mujahid = 10 Hindus. Cheap post!

India has yet to disprove that statement. In 1971 the Pakistani military was outnumbered 13:1 so that doesn't count.

 

[Basel]

Great read. My dad was also a POW. He was originally sent to Khulna and then later deployed in Jessore sector. He was in Fategarh camp, India.

If possible please share his memoirs here.

There is little doubt that soldiers and officers of the lower rank fought bravely. In most armies, officers up to the battalion commander are promoted strictly on merit therefore are good fighting men. But Colonels don’t win the battles. Wars may be started by the politicians but are conducted by the Generals. In a battle and in a war, what really matters is the end result. Pak soldiers fought bravely, so what? It was still an ignoble defeat.

Let me be blunt. During peacetime, armed services personnel enjoy many privileges and a pampered life in clean cantonments. However during war, they are expected to die for their country and not timidly surrender.

I do not suffer from ‘Martyr’ complex. I would have preferred that all the 90,000 soldiers were killed or injured as that would have been less painful than the unconditional surrender.

Whether we were right in a military crackdown in East Pakistan; with hindsight, ‘No’. What many soldiers did to the East Pakistanis was also very wrong. But once started, it was the duty of Army to continue the fight until the last man. Result many not have been different and Indians would still have won. However, assuming that 4 Pak soldiers killed just one Indian, 90,000 soldiers would have inflicted 22,000 dead and twice as many wounded. Instead, the Indian Army suffered only 1,500 dead and 4,000 wounded on the Eastern Front. Had Indian Army suffered 60,000 casualties from an army fighting 1,500 kilometres away from home, can you imagine what would be the expected losses inflicted by half a million men fighting for their home!

Indian Army brass would have to rethink ten times before starting future hostilities. However that did not happen. Gen Niazi's cowardly surrender has encouraged India to come up with offensive doctrines such as the ‘Cold Start’ and Modi to brazenly threaten us with stopping our water.

1971 is a very emotional issue for me but I do not apologise for it.

The fall of Dhaka had happened when Pakistan establishment didn't bought the ACC which Quaid-e-Azam wanted to buy for PN, later on India bought it and used it against Pakistan and played pivotal role war.

Let me ask very humbly, if the fall of Dacca really meant anything for us, then why was it dwarfed by only APS mourning? Everyone was talking about APS but none about what happened on the day in 1971. We don't want to learn from our history, dump the failures and move on.

Fall of East Pakistan should have been mourned to make sure future generations don't do same mistake.