Chuck Yeager and the Pakistan Air Force
An Excerpt from Yeager,
the Autobiography of General (Retd.) Chuck E. Yeager (USAF)
When we arrived in Pakistan in 1971, the political situation between the
Pakistanis and Indians was really tense over Bangladesh, or East Pakistan,
as it was known in those days, and Russia was backing India with
tremendous amounts of new airplanes and tanks. The U.S. and China were
backing the Pakistanis. My job was military advisor to the Pakistani air
force, headed by Air Marshal Rahim Khan, who had been trained in Britain
by the Royal Air Force, and was the first Pakistani pilot to exceed the
speed of sound. He took me around to their different fighter groups and I
met their pilots, who knew me and were really pleased that I was there.
They had about five hundred airplanes, more than half of them Sabres and
104 Starfighters, a few B-57 bombers, and about a hundred Chinese MiG-19s.
They were really good, aggressive dogfighters and proficient in gunnery
and air combat tactics. I was damned impressed. Those guys just lived and
breathed flying.
One of my first jobs there was to help them put U.S. Sidewinders on their
Chinese MiGs, which were 1.6 Mach twin-engine airplanes that carried three
thirty-millimeter canons. Our government furnished them with the rails for
Sidewinders. They bought the missiles and all the checkout equipment that
went with them, and it was one helluva interesting experience watching
their electricians wiring up American missiles on a Chinese MiG. I worked
with their squadrons and helped them develop combat tactics. The Chinese
MiG was one hundred percent Chinese-built and was made for only one
hundred hours of flying before it had to be scrapped - a disposable
fighter good for one hundred strikes. In fairness, it was an older
airplane in their inventory, and I guess they were just getting rid of
them. They delivered spare parts, but it was a tough airplane to work on;
the Pakistanis kept it flying for about 130 hours.
War broke out only a couple of months after we had arrived, in late
November 1971, when India attacked East Pakistan. The battle lasted only
three days before East Pakistan fell. India's intention was to annex East
Pakistan and claim it for themselves. But the Pakistanis counter-attacked.
Air Marshal Rahim Khan laid a strike on the four closest Indian air fields
in the western part of India, and wiped out a lot of equipment. At that
point, Indira Gandhi began moving her forces toward West Pakistan.
China moved in a lot of equipment, while Russia backed the Indians all the
way. So, it really became a kind of surrogate war - the Pakistanis, with
U.S. training and equipment, versus the Indians, mostly Russian-trained,
flying Soviet airplanes.
The Pakistanis whipped their [Indians'] ***** in the sky.
The air war lasted two weeks and the
Pakistanis scored a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made
Indian jets and losing thirty-four airplanes of their own. I'm certain
about the figures because I went out several times a day in a chopper and
counted the wrecks below. I counted wrecks on Pakistani soil, documented
them by serial number, identified the components such as engines, rocket
pods, and new equipment on newer planes like the Soviet SU-7
fighter-bomber and the MiG-21 J, their latest supersonic fighter. The
Pakistani army would cart off these items for me, and when the war ended,
it took two big American Air Force cargo lifters to carry all those parts
back to the States for analysis by our intelligence division.
I didn't get involved in the actual combat because that would've been too
touchy, but I did fly around and pick up shot-down Indian pilots and take
them back to prisoner-of-war camps for questioning. I interviewed them
about the equipment they had been flying and the tactics their Soviet
advisers taught them to use. I wore a uniform or flying suit all the time,
and it was amusing when those Indians saw my name tag and asked, "Are you
the Yeager who broke the sound barrier?" They couldn't believe I was in
Pakistan or understand what I was doing there. I told them, "I'm the
American Defense Rep here. That's what I'm doing."
India flew numerous raids against the Pakistani air fields with brand new
SU-7 bombers being escorted in with MiG 21s. On one of those raids, they
clobbered my small Beech Queen Air that had U.S. Army markings and a big
American flag painted on the tail. I had it parked at the Islamabad
airport, and I remember sitting on my front porch on the second day of the
war, thinking that maybe I ought to move that airplane down to the Iranian
border, out of range of the Indian bombers, when the damned air-raid siren
went off, and a couple of Indian jets came streaking in overhead. A moment
later, I saw a column of black smoke rising from the air field. My Beech
Queen was totaled. It was the Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger.
I stayed on in Pakistan for almost a year after the war ended, and it was
one of the most enjoyable times of my life. From 1972 until we came home
in March 1973, I spent most of my time flying in an F-86 Sabre with the
Pakistani fighter outfits. I dearly loved the Sabre, almost as much as I
enjoyed the P-51 Mustang from World War II days. It was a terrific
airplane to fly and I took one to see K-2, the great mountain of Pakistan
and the second highest mountain in the world, about an hour's flight away
[from Islamabad] at over 28,000 feet.
It's a fabulous peak, as awesome and beautiful as any on earth, located in
the middle of a high range that runs the length of the Chinese-Pakistani
border. We actually crossed over into China to get there, and I've got
some pictures of me in my cockpit right smack up against the summit. I
made two or three trips up to K-2 - real highlights. I also did some
bighorn sheep hunting in the Himalayan foothills. Susie owned a little
Arabian mare. She took her horse when I went hunting and actually learned
some of the Urdu language of the mountain people.
Copyright © 1985 by Yeager Inc.
. I have had my share of war with 2 kills I can say that standing anywhere in the world that yes we did win the air war. And guys you took away East Pakistan wasn't that enough for you. so why don't we just cut the crap and except it our IAF has never shown us the correct figures when we had a claim they said no it landed now the Gnat I shot down there is no way in hell that the pilot could have land he had no canopy and my bullets hit the cockpit hitting the pilot as well. it fell in Indian Air Space and there was to much AAG fire I got a clean shot but the next day they said that the Gnat landed.
