India & Pakistan will forever claim and counter claim on the outcome of the war, but
this is what the International observers and media saw and reported on the 1965 war. !!!!
During 1965 War, India’s General Chaudhry ordered his troops to march on Sialkot and Lahore – jauntily inviting his officers to join him for drinks that evening in Lahore Gymkhana. He did not reckon on the Pakistani troops.
“The first Indian regiment that found itself face to face with Pakistanis didn’t get clobbered,” said a report in Washington DC, America. “They just turned and ran, leaving all of their equipment, artillery supplies and even extra clothing and supplies behind”.
I have been a journalist now for twenty years, ‘reported American Broadcasting Corporation’s Roy Maloni, “and want to go on record that I have never seen a more confident and victorious group of soldiers than those fighting for Pakistan, right now.
“India is claiming all-out victory. I have not been able to find any trace of it. All I can see are troops, tanks and other war material rolling in a steady towards the front … These Muslims of Pakistan are natural fighters and they ask for no quarter and they give none. In any war, such as the one going on between India and Pakistan right now, the propaganda claims on either side are likely to be startling. But if I have to take bet today, my money would be on the Pakistan side. “
The London Daily Mirror reported, “There is a smell of death in the burning Pakistan sun. For it was here that India’s attacking forces came to a dead stop. “During the night they threw in every reinforcement they could find. But wave after wave of attacks were repulsed by the Pakistani troops.”
“India”, said the London Daily Times “is being soundly beaten by a nation which is outnumbered by four and a half to one in population and three to one in size of armed forces.” In Times reporter Louis Karrer wrote, “Who can defeat a nation which knows how to play hide and seek with death“.
“… I will never forget the smile full of nerve the conducting army officers gave me. This smile told me how fearless and brave are the Pakistani young men. “Playing with fire to these men — from the “jawan” to the General Officer Commanding — was like children playing with marbles in the streets.
“I asked the GOC how it was that despite a small number Pakistanis were overpowering the Indians? He looked at me, smiled and said: “if courage, bravery and patriotism were purchasable commodities, then India would have got them with American aid.”
“Pakistan has been able to gain complete command of the air by literally knocking the Indian planes out of the skies, if they had not already run away.”
Sunday Times London, Sep 19, 1965: “Indian pilots are inferior to Pakistani pilots and Indian officers’ leadership has been generally deplorable. India is being soundly beaten by a nation which is outnumbered by four and a half to one in population and three to one three to one in size of armed forces.”
“Pakistan’s success in the air means that she has been able to redeploy her relatively small army — professionally among the best in Asia — with impunity, plugging gaps in the long front in the face of each Indian thrust”.
Patrick Seale, “The Observer, London”, Sep 12, 1965: “By all accounts the courage displayed by the Pakistan Air Force pilots is reminiscent of the bravery of the few young and dedicated pilots who saved this country from Nazi invaders in the critical Battle of Britain during the last war”.
Roy Meloni, American Broadcasting Corporation, Sep 15, 1965: “India is claiming all out victory. I have not been able to find any trace of it. All I can see are troops, tanks and other war material rolling in a steady stream towards the front.”
“If the Indian Air Force is so victorious, why has it not tried to halt this flow? The answer is that it has been knocked from the skies by Pakistani planes. “
“Pakistan claims to have destroyed something like 1/3rd the Indian Air Force, and foreign observers, who are in a position to know say that Pakistani pilots have claimed even higher kills than this; but the Pakistani Air Force has been scrupulously honest in evaluating these claims. Pakistan Air Force is claiming credit for only those killings that can be checked from other sources.”
Peter Preston, “The Guardian, London” – Sep 24, 1965: “One thing I am convinced of is that Pakistan morally and even physically won the air battle against immense odds. “
“Although the Air Force gladly gives most credit to the Army, this is perhaps over-generous. India with roughly five times greater air-power expected an easy air-superiority. Her total failure to attain it may be seen retrospectively as a vital, possibly the most vital, of the whole conflict.”
“Nur Khan is an alert, incisive man of 41, who seems even less. For six years he was on secondment and responsible for running Pakistan’s civil air-line, which, in a country where ‘now’ means sometime and ‘sometime’ means never, is a model of efficiency. He talks without the jargon of a press relations officer. He does not quibble about figures. Immediately one has confidence in what he says.”
“His estimates proffered diffidently but with as much photographic evidence as possible speak for themselves. Indian and Pakistani losses, he thinks, are in something like a ratio of ten to one.”
“Yet, the quality of equipment, Nur insists, is less important than flying ability and determination. The Indians have no sense of purpose. The Pakistanis were defending their own country and willingly taking greater risks. ‘The average bomber crew flew 15 to 20 sorties. My difficulty was restraining them, not pushing them on.‘ “
“This is more than nationalistic pride. Talk to the pilots and you get the same intense story.”
Everett G. Martin, General Editor, Newsweek, Sep 20, 1965: “One point particularly noted by military observers is that the Indians in their first advances, the Indians did not use air power effectively to support their troops. In contrast, the Pakistanis, with sophisticated timing, swooped in on Ambala airfield and destroyed some 25 Indian planes just after they had landed and were sitting on the ground out of fuel and powerless to escape (NOTE: PAF has not claimed any IAF aircraft during its attacks on Ambala due to non-availability of concrete evidence of damage in night bombing.)
“By the end of the week, in fact, it was clear that the Pakistanis were more than holding their own. “
Indonesian Herald, Sep 11, 1965: “India’s barbarity is mounting in fury as the Indian army and Air Force, severely mauled, are showing signs of demoralisation. The huge losses suffered by the Indian Armed Forces during the last 12 days of fighting could not be kept from the Indian public and in retaliation, the Indian armed forces are indulging in the most barbaric methods.”
“The Chief of Indian Air Force could no longer ensure the safety of Indian air space. A well known Indian journalist, Mr Frank Moraes, in a talk from All-India radio, also admitted that IAF had suffered severe losses and it was no use hiding the fact and India should be prepared for more losses“.
AFP Correspondent, Reporting on Sep 9, 1965: “Pakistani forces thrusting six miles deep into Indian territory the south-east of Lahore have checked the Indian offensive launched on Sep 6 against the capital of West Pakistan.
Pakistani infantry supported by armour and guns were today entrenched six miles east of the Indian border, and well beyond Indian town of Khem Karan, the capture of which last week forced Indian tanks and men to make a hasty retreat.
From Khem Karan, an evergreen village now deserted by its 15,000 people, a 40-mile road leads directly to Amritsar, holy capital of India’s restive Sikhs. And a Pakistani offensive along that road could threaten the rear of Indian forces still facing Lahore from East Punjab.
As I visited Khem Karan today with the first party of newsmen shown into India by Pakistani officers, evidence of the Indians’ hasty withdrawal lay everywhere in the flat dust blown fields. Intact mortars and American made ammunition, much of which was still crated, for 81 and 120 mm mortars, shells for 90 mm tank guns, rifle cartridges in hundred, stacks of fuel in barrel, had been left behind.
India had sent against Lahore one armoured brigade and two infantry divisions. The initial thrust on Sep 6 carried the Indians two and a half miles deep into Pakistan from Khem Karan and the Pakistanis say they were outnumbered six to one.
The Pakistanis pushed the Indians back at the cost of bitter fighting. One Pakistani armoured unit ran into an Indian armoured regiment, the Ninth Royal Deccan Horse… and no shots were spared. I saw two Indian Sherman tanks on the road to Khem Karan blown clean through, one in the rear and one in the front, each by a single Pakistani shell with the dead crew still inside. Indian dead lay unburied in the fields. An Indian border post was riddled with bullets and shells. This is real war, even though Pakistani infantry are now resting at forward posts, with Indians on the defensive and the main action in the air.
Indian British made Canberra’s, Soviet made MiG-21s and French made Mystere and Ouragons constantly swoop, strafe and bomb from a safe altitude, for Pakistani anti-aircraft units are very much on the alert. On the road from Lahore charred trucks lay twisted wrecks, one of them still aflame. It is war run by cool professionals, with every gun and tank well protected by camouflage nets, every trench where it should be, perfect discipline and very high morale.
Almost every Pakistani officer says, “We are not interested in territorial gains, but we are very keen to give the Indians a hard lesson and we won’t stop short of that”.
BBC Commentary by Charles Douglas Home, Sep 10, 1965: “Man for man, unit for unit, Pakistan’s smaller Army is at a higher standard of training than the Indian Army. The present Indian intention was to scatter Pakistan’s smaller Army by making several other thrusts apart from the main fighting area in the Lahore sector. The intense air activity had prevented the mass movement of Indian troops by air”.
Christian Science Monitor, Sep 10, 1965: “The Pakistan-India conflict, in the Pentagon’s early assessment, pits tighter discipline, a higher morale, better training, and some superior equipment among the Pakistanis against considerably larger Indian Land, Air and Sea Forces.
Washington sources see Pakistan aiming to humiliate India in a short conflict. They judge India as depending on its juggernaut to crush Pakistanis under sheer military weight. Armoured strength between the two forces is about equal but the Pakistani tanks are more modern.”
The ‘New York Times’, Sep 10, 1965: “Pakistan has a somewhat more homogeneous army with less ethnic and religious frictions. Its soldiers have a high reputation for will to fight; and in Mohammad Ayub Khan, the head of state and Sandhurst-trained professional soldier, the army has always had a sympathetic supporter.
Joe McGowan Jr., Washington Post, Sep 10, 1965: “We fought for you last time,” several Pakistanis told me, referring to their wartime service under British command. “But this time it is our war and we shall fight it to the finish”.
‘Top of the News’, Washington, Sep 6-10, 1965: “Nehru was not worried much about aggression when India took Goa. But Shastri has plenty to worry about now, because he is facing penal and disciplinary action by one of the toughest and best trained armies in the world, excellently led, highly organized and totally dedicated. For him he has a motley, disorganized and low-morale force of four times as many men as Pakistan, but they cannot or will not fight. They only beg.
The Pakistan military hardware, including tanks, planes, and ground-warfare equipment of every kind is far superior to that of Indians, and one long time expert of the Indian-Pakistan picture told me this afternoon that in his military opinion, there is little doubt but that the Pakistanis will lick the Indians in the long run, despite the fact that the Indian army outnumbers the Pakistan army four to one.
This expert said, however, that there is great disparity between the qualities of the two armies, not to mention the disparity in equipment. The Indian soldier is soft while the Pakistan soldier is tough and determined. The Indian leadership is vacillating and uncertain, while the Pakistan leadership is well trained, highly talented, and decisive.
The Indian Air Force is somewhat larger than the Pakistan Air Force in numbers of planes, but there is no organizational pattern to the way they have been acquired or to what is on hand. It is a weird conglomeration of all sorts and conditions of aircraft from a variety of countries, even including France and the maintenance problem is staggering, even if adequate maintenance personnel were available. It means a vast stocking of replacement parts (different for virtually every type of plane they have). On the contrary the Pakistan Air Force has been intelligent enough to standardise to a very high degree, thus reducing their maintenance problem to a minimum. And this is vitally important as any war proceeds beyond the very first stages.
Furthermore, it began to develop today that the Indian claims of having shot down large numbers of Pakistan Air Force planes in the first days of conflict were highly exaggerated, and that the Pakistan losses have been virtually nil in this line.
The Indian claims, frankly, were highly suspicious from the beginning because they are notably poor aviators and their equipment is antiquated and not at all a match for the modern jet equipment of the Pakistan Air Force. It just didn’t hold water to anyone who knew the details of the Indian air inventory as against that of Pakistan, that any such victories could have been achieved by the Indians”.
USA – Aviation Week & Space Technology – Dec 1968 issue: “For the PAF, the 1965 War was as climatic as the Israeli victory over the Arabs in 1967. A further similarity was that Indian air power had an approximately 5:1 numerical superiority at the start of the conflict. Unlike the Middle East conflict, the Pakistani air victory was achieved to a large degree by air-to-air combat rather than on ground. But it was as absolute as that attained by Israel”.
Encyclopaedia of Aircraft printed in several countries by Orbis Publications – Volume 5: “Pakistan’s Air Force gained a remarkable victory over India in this brief 22 day war, exploiting its opponent’s weaknesses in an exemplary style – Deeply shaken by reverse, India began an extensive modernisation and training program, meanwhile covering its defeat with effective propaganda smoke screen”.
Here ends the story.
