How Indian Insiders Saw 1965 War?

[agamdilawari]

Some Pakistani members are trying to satisfy their ego with such threads and Indian members are falling in their trap. Relax guys...ignorance is best response to such BS.

When the aggressor comes down to defending its own land, it automatically reflects who stands what position. Happy Defense Day Pakistan...lol

 

[FaujHistorian]

Pakistan had sufficient geographical and technological advantage to defend against an India attack.

The General's suggested a retreat to Beas, hold up there, decimate the incoming Pakistani attack, then counter-attack against a crippled force.

Incorrect again. Pakistan's soft belly in Panjab and Sindh is difficult to defend against 7-10 times larger army.

So in 1965, if an Indian general was talking about retreating to Beas, things had clearly gone wrong, very wrong for the Indian army.

The credit for this goes to the superior Pak Air force, and high morale of the troops.


peace

 

[Joe Shearer]

This "BS" about "Retreat to Beas" has chapter 12 dedicated to it in RD Pradhan's book:

1965 War, the Inside Story: Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan's Diary of India ... - R. D. Pradhan, Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan - Google Books

Nobody objects to your celebrating Defense Day. Not even when there some mild banter about doing in the old enemy. At patriotic moments, some silliness is permissible.

Some silliness, on the other hand, is not.

It would be easy to quote from authentic Pakistani sources and laugh at the Gadag Gallop and other martial races cultural and social habits. However, an appropriate answer to an ungracious action is not another ungracious action.

Enjoy your celebrations.

 

[FaujHistorian]

Exactly, they didn't attack across the IB, nor were they planning to. So India scrapped the idea of a retreat to Amritsar.

I bow to you sir, you've vindicated my point.

Sorry to say that your points are based on emotional responses.

Pak army did cross IB once Indians initiated war across it. Indian generals brought in their troops and armor like mad elephants of Porus thinking that they can simply roll into Lahore and other key areas.

This is perhaps why they suffered humiliation at the hands of 7-10 times smaller but superior and better trained Pak military. Thanks to our modern airforce (of the time) Pak military turned out to be much more nimble and agile than what Indian planners were thinking.

So please read up a bit.

Thank you.


p.s. I look at wars from neutral POV. I'll call the mistakes of Pak generals, AND Indians.

 

[lkozhi]

1965 Analysed
The Fighter Gap - 1

 

[karan.1970]

The funny thing (I said it elsewhere but got deleted), is that Pakistan attacked India to LIBERATE Kashmir, and now Pakistanis take pride in the fact that they managed to defend their cities from Indian attack..

 

[third eye]

This one time it may be advisable for Indians to let the Pakistanis go. Each nation after all needs an occasion to smile at themselves. They would like to see some positives in 65 for 71 had none.

The 65 war that began in Sept had its origins in the Rann of Kutchh incidents earlier that year. Ayub , the self promoted Field Marshal felt he could pry J&K from India. What he then did was Op Gibraltar - insertion of SSG into J&K:

(1) Salahuddin Force” operating in Srinagar Valley

(2) “Ghaznavi Force “ in Mendhar-Rajauri area,

(3) “Tariq Force” in Dras-Kargil area,

(4) “Babar Force “in Nowshera-Sundarbani area,

(5) “Qasim Force” in Bandipura-Sonarwain area,

(6) “Khalid Force” in Qazinag-Naugam area,

(7) “Nusrat Force” in Tithwal-Tangdhar area,

(8) “Sikandar Force” in Gurais area

(9) “Khilji Force” in Kel-Minimarg area.

It began in Aug 65 and failed to meet its objectives.

Op Grand Slam was launched to capture Chamb and threaten Akhnur as it was feared that Muzaffarabad was threatened. Maj Gen Akhtar Malik was the GOC of 12 Infantry Division tasked for this. Half way through the war for some inexplicable reason he was replaced by Maj Gen Yahya Khan. This gave the Indians a well needed pause to consolidate themselves and stop the advancing Pak forces.

It was against this back drop that the IA then launched an offensive to threaten Lahore - a high value objective whose loss would be unacceptable to the enemy. It had the desired results and compelled Pak to recoil & shift troops south from Chamb - Akhnur area to defend Lahore.

The war on the Pakistani side was thus conducted disinterestedly because the higher leadership was simply irresolute and was not prepared or interested in fighting the war which came as a rude shock to them once the Indians attacked Lahore.

Post No 1 talks of various incidents that happened on the Indian side. It may be remembered that both IA & PA then were like huge lumbering armies equipped mostly with WWII equipment mostly inexperienced in sustained operations in the plains. India exploited its advantage of depth, numbers and exercised its option of opening up fronts away from the area of choosing where the enemy would like to fight.

Nothing surprising therefore that small battles dictated the war . Overall both nations would like to feel that they achieved their war aims.

One can only question what the war aims of Pak were ? For India it was to defend its own territory & take the war into enemy land, make him recoil .

Ayub was militarily naive enough to think that India would not start an all out war if Pakistan went for what Ayub himself called “India’s jugular vein” i.e. Akhnur.

Grand Slam harmed the Pakistani military cause in two ways.

Firstly, it provoked India to launch an all out war which Ayub did not have the resolution to fight and which Musa did not have the military genius to conduct!

Secondly, as a result of this indecision Pakistan failed to capture Akhnur whose loss would have led to a serious operational imbalance in the Indian dispositions in Kashmir and would have weakened India’s resolve to attack Lahore and opposite Chawinda without first redressing the serious imbalance opposite Kashmir.

Thus Pakistani military/political leadership failed in both aims; ie to sever the jugular and to prevent an all out war; and primarily because of irresolution on part of their own higher leadership rather than enemy resistance. Thus Ayub and his team were not propelled by a burning desire to defeat the enemy by decisive conduct of operations but by an essentially defensive attitude.

This lack of ability to see / war game things through to their logical end keeping all options available to India in mind has been visible again & again. Longewala, Kargil are some examples which proves that fortune does not always favour the brave - it frowns at the stupid.

 

[RiazHaq]

Pradhan argues in chapter 12 of his book that during the 1965 war with Pakistan, Indian COAS General Chaudhuri felt that "a major battle the west of the Beas would end in the destruction of the Indian Army and thereafter allow the enemy (Pakistani) forces to push to the gates of Delhi without much resistance".

1965 War, the Inside Story: Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan's Diary of India ... - R. D. Pradhan, Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan - Google Books

 

[Black Widow]

My dear poster. Read some history please.

Prior to the September attack by India, Pakistan army did not cross "international border" from Punjab, or from Sindh.

Pakistan's only desire (and rather foolish one) was to gain in Kashmir the "disputed" territory. They wanted to continue low level insurgency going in Kashmir until the December at least, when many parts of Kashmir would be cut off from India due to heavy snow.


In all honesty, I blame Pakistani generals for ignoring international borders, and especially Lahore, thinking and perhaps assuming that Indians would not dare attack Pakistan's soft belly. This is even when Indians were openly threatening to expand the war beyond Kashmir.

To a neutral observer, Pak military's posture was clearly defensive (a weak defense dare I say) in Punjab, Sindh, and Bengal.

And Pakistan paid dearly for this bad planning. Lahore is practically at the border, and so many jawans and officers died defending and retaking the areas close to Lahore

Our saving grace was the collection of latest fighter bombers F-86, (and rumored spy planes) and superior training of pilots that stopped Indian army in its tracks.

So the bottom line:

Pakistanis never wanted to capture Indian areas across internationally recognized border. Read up a bit and you will find that there were no troop movements, no major deployments in Punjab, Sindh etc. beyond the basic and usual cantonments.

I urge both Paks and Indis to read a bit more on this. Mad jingoism won't help anyone.


peace

You said nothing we don't know. Operation jibraltor was not about crossing international borders. India suffered heavily in Indo-CHina war, Pakistan saw it as opportunity, they wanted to get Kashmir.


Your general thought that India will go defensive in Kashmir. Instead India went aggressive On International border, The fact is, Pakistan never thought India can go for all out war.

Pakistan didn't violated the international border, It was India. Pakistan was willing to be agressive in Kashmir, end up being defensive in Lahore.

Why Retreat: Pakistan back was brocken, Indian condition was also not good, 2 wars in 5 year. India was not in position to fight for longer time. Ceasefire was the only option for both country.


NOTE: War is won based on objective, not on death count of fighter plane count. Pakistan objective was to get Kashmir, Indian objective was to defend it. Now tell me who won the war...??

If pakistan would have lost 10 times more men but got kashmir , they would have called victorious...

 

[ajtr]

For me best episode of 1965 war the lathi wielding Punjab farmers hunting/rounding up famed SSG commandos hiding in cornfields......

 

[anilindia]

Ayub misled nation in �65 war: Nur Khan

8 September 2005 ISLAMABAD � The 1965 war was based on a lie in which Ayub Khan and his generals misled the nation that India rather than Pakistan had provoked the war and that �we were the victims of Indian aggression�, Air Marshal Nur Khan, a war hero who led the country�s air force at the time, has said.

He said a coterie of army generals including its chief Gen Musa decided to send 8,000 infiltrators from the Pakistan army into India-held Kashmir in an abortive bid to foment Kashmiri revolt with vain hope that India would not retaliate and attack Pakistan.

Both the air force and the navy as also most of army commanders were kept in the dark and when the invasion came on September 6, 1965 with Lahore being the first Indian target, all of them, including the Lahore commander were taken by surprise.

The �Operation Gibraltar�, code name for infiltration into Kashmir proved a disaster as the local population did not cooperate and even helped the Indian forces to capture or kill almost all of 8,000 Pakistan army troops sneaking into the occupied territory.

Sharing his memoirs with Dawn on the 1965 war, which is celebrated as a victory in Pakistan on September 6 every year, Air Marshal (retired) Nur Khan said President Field Marshal Ayub Khan was petrified when only on the second day after India chose to attack Lahore on September 6, 1965, his army chief informed him he has another two days� of ammunition left with him

 

[Kyusuibu Honbu]

If India was really in "a superior position", then why was India so eager to end it that it accepted the UN Ceasefire first, as Pradhan says on page 100 of his book?

1965 War, the Inside Story: Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan's Diary of India ... - R. D. Pradhan, Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan - Google Books

Because its logical for going towards status quo when a war is imposed on you. Military adventerism doesn't appeal to those with Civilian Govts

 

[anilindia]

“The performance of the Army did not match that of the PAF (Pakistani Air Force) mainly because the leadership was not as professional. They had planned the ‘Operation Gibralter’ (infiltration into J&K) for self glory rather than in the national interest. It was a wrong war. And they misled the nation with a big lie that India rather than Pakistan had provoked the war and that we were the victim of Indian aggression.”

Air Marshal (Retd) Nur Khan quoted in ‘Dawn’ – Karachi. 6 Sep, 2005


It took 40 years for Air Marshal (Retd) Nur Khan – Chief of the PAF during 1965 war to state the truth about the genesis of 1965 war.

“Since the 1965 adventure, Pakistan’s generals have maintained a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in public relations about military matters.” According to this virtual SOP, “The Pakistani military wins every war it fights and Pakistan’s generals make no mistakes. Any blame for failure lies either with civilians or the Americans”.

Hussain Haqqani-former Pakistani Ambassador in Sri Lanka-quoting Brig AR Siddiqui-former Head of Pakistan’s Military PR. The Indian Express – New Delhi 10 Jun, 2004

 

[Kyusuibu Honbu]

Chronological flow of events in 1965 war, CIA view

 

[Supply&Demand]

I am all for celebrating one's heroes and martyrs...it is true that many Pakistani soldiers fought bravely and defended their motherland...And Pakistani should celebrate Defence Day..
but lets not hide the truth under the shadow of jingoism..

The truth is Pakistan attacked India in hopes of liberating Kashmir...instead they had to run back home to defend Lahore from falling in Indian hands...

At the time when ceasefire was declared, India was the clear cut winner...

Reasons:

1) It nullified the primary objective of Pakistan - to liberate Kashmir. Not even an inch of Kashmir could be taken by Pakistani forces finally.

2) India captured more Pakistani land than Pakistan had India's.