THE GARUD STRIKES (18 page)

There was not much cover available. Himmeth and Nahar Singh, the radio operator accompanying him, took cover in a tiny depression, more like a fold in the ground. It was so tiny that the two men could not fit it fully.

Realizing that his Commandant’s hand was outside, in the open, Nahar Singh reached out and pulled it in. He had barely done so when an artillery shell landed nearby. One of the several flaming splinters that sprayed out tore away a part of Nahar Singh’s hand.

‘At that time, his hand was precisely where my hand had been just seconds ago,’ Himmeth’s recording to Pyarelal told me. It made me wonder what had gone through Himmeth’s mind when he saw that. I wondered what would have gone through mine, had it been me back there. ‘We bandaged his hand the best we could, but I could see the wound was major and he would need to be evacuated to a hospital else he would lose that hand.’

Nahar Singh refused to even consider being evacuated.

‘It’s a minor injury, sahib. Besides, I cannot go away. I have to man your radio set. And I want to be there with you when we enter Dacca,’ was Nahar Singh’s response.

Himmeth held his peace. Not that evacuation was even a possibility at that point. The enemy was still gunning for his party.

As light increased, so did the effectiveness of the Pakistani fire. Himmeth was pinned down with Bravo Company.

‘I was literally in tears when I came to know that Himmeth was trapped with Bravo Company,’ Glucose made no attempt to mask his feelings even now. ‘I was on the verge of panic, knowing that if Himmeth was taken out, the unit was in serious trouble. As it is, we were behind enemy lines and under tremendous pressure from all sides.’

Desperate to extricate the Commandant, Glucose shrugged off emotions and focused on the task. He ordered the Forward Air Controller (FAC) to direct an airstrike at the Pakistani position opposite Bravo Company. He also ordered Maneck to lay down a smoke screen in front of Bravo defences.

The minute Maneck came to know about the situation, he re-directed all the mortars and they laid down barrage after barrage of smoke between Bravo and the enemy. For Maneck, it was not just a professional task. Where Himmeth was concerned, Maneck felt a deep emotional attachment, too.

‘Despite being considered a trouble-maker, and against the advice of the top brass, Himmeth took me into the war with 4 Guards. He believed in me, trusted me… In fact, he often told me that I had not been handled well,’ Maneck’s admiration for the old man was abundantly visible. ‘I was an Acting Captain but had been reduced to my substantive rank when I was attached to 4 Guards. Himmeth even spoke to the powers that be and got my acting rank restored when we went to war.’

Fired with this zeal, Maneck ensured his mortars landed with telling effect; to provide Himmeth the required screen to extricate.

Meanwhile, the air strike also arrived. It was deadly accurate and forced the Pakistani machine gun to go silent. However, the enemy artillery was already locked on to Bravo Company location and they continued with their deadly tattoo, affected neither by the air strike, nor by Maneck’s mortars.

Willy-nilly, Himmeth managed to get back to the battalion HQ, bringing back the injured Nahar Singh with him.

One of the first things Himmeth did on reaching the battalion HQ was to have the doctor take a look at Nahar Singh’s hand. Doctor Sutra confirmed what Himmeth had feared; the injury was a major one. Despite Nahar Singh’s protests, Himmeth ensured Glucose put him on the first chopper out, back to the hospital.

Meanwhile the action all around 4 Guards was escalating rapidly.

At Kodda, Delta Company again attempted to capture the bigger bridge, which Alpha had tried on 2nd December.

‘We were already in the Forming Up Place (FUP) when we realized the bridge had been reinforced by the Pakistani tank troops that had withdrawn from Akhaura. Now there was no way we could take that post with the resources available to us,’ said Granthi grimly. ‘But by now we were hemmed in. The Pakistani artillery had ranged in and were really hammering at us. For a change, even our own artillery fire was a real pain since we were too close to the enemy, so friendly fire was hurting us as much as the enemy artillery.’

Just then, Lance Naik Dhuni Ram saw some Pakistani soldiers come running forward. They were trying to outflank his section. Knowing the section would be written off if that happened, Dhuni Ram stood up and boldly engaged them. He was wounded almost immediately, but kept firing and finally beat them up.

Not too far away from him, Lance Naik Chhotu Ram was also holding the Pakistanis at bay with his LMG. So effective was his fire that the enemy brought an RCL to bear on him. Chhotu was injured, yet he stuck to his guns and kept firing.

Despite the tremendous pressure they were under, Bravo continued to deny the enemy all movement along the riverbank and the Akhaura railway station. This proved to be of vital importance in enabling the capture of Akhaura by 18 Rajput on 05 December 1971. In addition, Bravo also inflicted a lot of losses on the Pakistanis during their withdrawal on 05 December. And they managed to capture intact the bridge across Titas river.

DAY FIVE

05 DECEMBER 1971

B
y now, the Forward Air Controller (FAC) Pilot Officer Daljit Singh Shaheed had reached Kodda.

Daljit, a youngster with barely one year’s service, had joined 4 Guards as the FAC a few days before the war. He arrived armed with a puny little pistol, a big radio set and a bigger attitude: the kind that wins wars.

‘Right from the first day, he hounded Himmeth to give him something to do,’ Glucose grinned; for a moment giving a glimpse of why he had been so nicknamed. ‘Something more active, I mean. Unable to resist his enthusiasm, Himmeth tasked him to look after the Prisoners of War (POWs) during the advance on Akhaura. Not content with that, Daljit insisted on being sent on patrols. The old man did send him out a couple of times, but refrained when he realized that he would be a hard man to replace in case of some unforeseen eventuality. And the chances of that were rather high because Daljit was one of those irreprehensible, boisterous characters. It was very hard to keep him in control. He was always up to something.’

Glucose thumped the arm of his chair. ‘Let me tell you what he’d done just the previous day. A Pakistani machine gun bunker at Akhaura was continuously harassing us. Located along the line of the bund of the railway line that runs from Akhaura to Brahmanbaria, the bunker was a really tough target to take on. Daljit decided to take matters in hand and call in an airstrike, but we had no sorties available. Totally unfazed, he happily requisitioned a sortie that had actually been allocated for 73 Brigade. The requisition may have been dubious, but the strike was masterful, to say the least. Directed by Daljit, the strike leader flew in barely thirty feet off the ground. He hit the bunker with every rocket he fired. So did the other aircraft following in his wake.’

A long silence followed, as we all tried to imagine a modern, high-speed aircraft zooming on to a target at that height; thirty feet is barely treetop level.

By now the attack mounted on Akhuara by 18 Rajput and 10 Bihar had attained critical mass. It proved to be the last straw for the Pakistanis. Their nerves had already been rattled when 4 Guards had cut them off from behind. Now literally under siege from all sides, they just got up and started to run away.

The bridge on the Akhaura-Brahmanbaria railway track, which first, Alpha and then Delta Company of 4 Guards had tried to capture, fell to the Rajputs almost immediately. It broke the back of the Akhaura defences totally. The Pakistanis fled helter-skelter. Within minutes, the tone of the battle had altered dramatically.

‘It became a duck shoot,’ Paunchy cut in. ‘They were running right across our front and our boys shot down many of them.’

The same scenario was also playing out in front of Bravo Company. The Pakistanis fleeing in panic fell to the guns of the waiting guardsmen.

‘Most of them were from 33 Baluch, as we discovered from the dead bodies,’ Glucose added. ‘It was a total rout.’

The five PT 76 tanks that had made life miserable for Alpha Company the previous day also fell into the hands of the guardsmen. It was only now that Paunchy found out the real reason why they had refrained from attacking him, or from using their main guns on him. Due to non-availability of spares, the main guns of all five tanks were no longer functional.

Operation ‘Nut Cracker’, the investment and capture of Akhaura had succeeded.

Akhaura was a vital block on the road to Dacca, and its capture did crack the Pakistanis. Now the Indian forces had broken past the hard outer shell and were inside the soft kernel; which proved to be much softer than what the Pakistanis had imagined it to be.

Himmeth got the message that Brigadier Mishra was on his way forward. They decided to meet at Bravo Company location. Himmeth was soon back in the same location from where he had barely escaped alive just hours ago. However, now, the mood of the boys was remarkably different. Their morale was sky high and the guardsmen were raring to pick up the chase and hunt down the withdrawing Pakistanis.

As evening fell, the two commanders bent their heads over the map, in the light of a lantern, and began to confer. Unaware that, a few metres away, shielded by the fading light, a wounded Midha was listening to every word.

‘Life seldom gives us such opportunities, sir,’ Midha heard Himmeth tell the Brigade Commander. ‘God knows when we will get the orders to advance… By then, it might be too late. I think we should just keep the pressure on and go after the enemy. This is a chance of a lifetime… We should not give them any time to stabilize.’

Both were obviously experienced commanders and unwilling to let this golden opportunity pass, since that is precisely what they did. Mishra told Himmeth to press on while the Pakistanis were still falling back in complete disarray.

The guns had barely fallen silent on Akhaura and the Pakistanis
were still pulling back helter-skelter when 4 Guards resumed
the chase.

‘I cannot tell you how I felt when I heard them talking,’
Midha was clearly emotional. ‘It made my morale soar. Suddenly,
all the death and destruction that we had lived through the past
four days seemed to become worthwhile.’

Though raring to be part of the chase, the injured Midha was
ordered to get the dead and wounded back to the ADS, which
had been established on the IB.

As night fell, the cold deepened. Surrounded by the dead and
wounded, Midha shivered through the freezing night. All around
him, he could hear the battalion getting ready to advance.

Unaware of all this, Alpha Company was busy collecting the bodies
of the seven men from Desraj's platoon, which they had been
unable to do earlier.

‘I don't know whether you know what happens to a body
when it has been lying out in the open for a couple of days,’ the
expression on Paunchy's face was hard to describe, an admixture
of pain and anger.

I didn't. Not sure of what to say, I just shook my head.

I didn't. Not sure of what to say, I just shook my head.
‘The bodies were in pathetic condition; covered with ants,
flies and blue-bottles … some even partially eaten by dogs.’ He
looked sick at the memory, as I did simply listening to him. ‘We
finally got them on stretchers and then Subedar Makhan delegated
twenty-eight of my boys to take them back to the Quartermaster,
a few kilometres to the rear.’

The stretcher party had been gone about half an hour when
Himmeth gave the orders for the unit to commence advance to
Arhand. Pursuant to the discussion between Mishra and Himmeth, the Brigade Commander had ordered him to resume advance and set-up a roadblock at Arhand. The plan was to dominate the Brahmanbaria-Chittagong highway, the main artery between the two Pakistani formations opposing them.

‘The taste of victory had yet to seep in when we got orders from Brigade HQ to move ahead and establish a roadblock at Arhand by first light,’ said Glucose. He quickly drew a rough sketch of it for me, as he realized that the civilian map was inadequate. ‘Though there was no time for reconnaissance to be carried out, and we were battered and exhausted after five days of non-stop action, our morale was high and the boys were raring to go.’

But Alpha Company was in no condition to resume advance. They had already lost half of Desraj’s platoon during the Pakistani counter-attack on the smaller bridge. Another twenty-eight men (almost a complete platoon) was ferrying the dead bodies back to the Quartermaster, Captain Pradhan, so that he could dispose them of properly. In fact, if the battalion had not received a large number of reservists just prior to commencement of operations, Alpha Company would no longer have had the manpower to exist as an independent entity.

By now Paunchy was getting worried; it had been quite a while since his men had been gone with the bodies and there was no sign of them. When he finally managed to get through to them on Pradhan’s radio set, he learnt that they were being sent back to Agartala with the bodies for proper disposal since Pradhan had no resources available with him to conduct their last rites.