How India brought down the US’ supersonic man

[SpArK]

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How India brought down the US’ supersonic man

January 17, 2012

Chuck Yeager is an American icon and will go down in history as the first man to break the sound barrier. But during the 1971 India-Pakistan War, when an Indian pilot shot his personal aircraft, the air ace lost cool, and demanded retaliatory against India. Mercifully, his antics were ignored by then US President Richard Nixon.

The 1971 India-Pakistan war didn’t turn out very well from the US' point of view. For one particular American it went particularly bad. Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot and the first man to break the sound barrier, was dispatched by the US government to train Pakistani air force pilots but ended up as target practice for the Indian Air Force, and in the process kicked up a diplomatic storm in a war situation.

Yeager’s presence in Pakistan was one of the surprises of the Cold War. In an article titled, "The Right Stuff in the Wrong Place,” by Edward C. Ingraham, a former US diplomat in Pakistan, recalls how Yeager was called to Islamabad in 1971 to head the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) – a rather fanciful name for a bunch of thugs teaching other thugs how to fight.

It wasn’t a terribly exciting job: “All that the chief of the advisory group had to do was to teach Pakistanis how to use American military equipment without killing themselves in the process,” writes Ingraham.

Among the perks Yeager enjoyed was a twin-engine Beechcraft, an airplane supplied by the Pentagon. It was his pride and joy and he often used the aircraft for transporting the US ambassador on fishing expeditions in Pakistan’s northwest mountains.

Yeager: Loyal Pakistani!

Yeager may have been a celebrated American icon, but here’s what Ingraham says about his nonchalant attitude. “We at the embassy were increasingly preoccupied with the deepening crisis (the Pakistan Army murdered more than 3,000,000 civilians in then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). Meetings became more frequent and more tense. We were troubled by the complex questions that the conflict raised. No such doubts seemed to cross the mind of Chuck Yeager. I remember one occasion on which the ambassador asked Yeager for his assessment of how long the Pakistani forces in the East could withstand an all-out attack by India. "We could hold them off for maybe a month," he replied, "but beyond that we wouldn't have a chance without help from outside." It took the rest of us a moment to fathom what he was saying, not realising at first that "we" was West Pakistan, not the United States."

Clearly, Yeager appeared blithely indifferent to the Pakistani killing machine which was mowing down around 10,000 Bengalis daily from 1970 to 1971.

After the meeting, Ingraham requested Yeager to be be a little more even-handed in his comments. Yeager gave him a withering glance. "Goddamn it, we're assigned to Pakistan,” he said. "What's wrong with being loyal?!”

"The dictator of Pakistan at the time, the one who had ordered the crackdown in the East, was a dim-witted general named Yahya Khan. Way over his head in events he couldn't begin to understand, Yahya took increasingly to brooding and drinking,” writes Ingraham.

“In December of 1971, with Indian supplied guerrillas applying more pressure on his beleaguered forces, Yahya decided on a last, hopeless gesture of defiance. He ordered what was left of his armed forces to attack India directly from the West. His air force roared across the border on the afternoon of December 3 to bomb Indian air bases, while his army crashed into India’s defences on the Western frontier.”

Getting Personal

Yeager’s hatred for Indians was unconcealed. According to Ingraham, he spent the first hours of the war stalking the Indian embassy in Islamabad, spouting curses at Indians and assuring anyone who would listen that the Pakistani army would be in New Delhi within a week. It was the morning after the first Pakistani airstrike that Yeager began to take the war with India personally.

On the eve of their attack, the Pakistanis, realising the inevitability of a massive Indian retaliation, evacuated their planes from airfields close to the Indian border and moved them to airfields near the Iranian border.

Strangely, no one thought to warn General Yeager.

[SpArK]

Taking aim at Yeager

The thread of this story now passes on to Admiral Arun Prakash. An aircraft carrier pilot in 1971, he was an Indian Navy lieutenant on deputation with the Indian Air Force when the war broke out.

In an article he wrote for Vayu Aerospace Review in 2007, Prakash presents a vivid account of his unexpected encounter with Yeager. As briefings for the first wave of retaliatory strikes on Pakistan were being conducted, Prakash had drawn a two-aircraft mission against the PAF base of Chaklala, located south east of Islamabad.

Flying in low under the radar, they climbed to 2000 feet as they neared the target. As Chaklala airfield came into view they scanned the runways for Pakistani fighters but were disappointed to see only two small planes. Dodging antiaircraft fire, Prakash blasted both to smithereens with 30mm cannon fire. One was Yeager's Beechcraft and the other was a Twin Otter used by Canadian UN forces.

Fishing in troubled waters

When Yeager discovered his plane was smashed, he rushed to the US embassy in Islamabad and started yelling like a deranged maniac. His voice resounding through the embassy, he said the Indian pilot not only knew exactly what he was doing but had been specifically instructed by the Indian prime minister to blast Yeager's plane. In his autobiography, he later said that it was the “Indian way of giving Uncle Sam the finger”.

Yeager pressured the US embassy in Pakistan into sending a top priority cable to Washington that described the incident as a “deliberate affront to the American nation and recommended immediate countermeasures”. Basically, a desperate and distracted Yeager was calling for the American bombing of India, something that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were already mulling.

But, says Ingraham: “I don't think we ever got an answer.” With the Russians on India’s side in the conflict, the American defence establishment had its hands full. Nobody had time for Yeager's antics.

However, Ingraham says there are clues Yeager played an active role in the war. A Pakistani businessman, son of a senior general, told him “excitedly that Yeager had moved into the air force base at Peshawar and was personally directing the grateful Pakistanis in deploying their fighter squadrons against the Indians. Another swore he had seen Yeager emerge from a just-landed jet fighter at the Peshawar base.

Later, in his autobiography, Yeager, the subject of Tom Wolfe’s much-acclaimed book “The Right Stuff” and a Hollywood movie. wrote a lot of nasty things about Indians, including downright lies about the IAF’s performance. Among the things he wrote was the air war lasted two weeks and the Pakistanis “kicked the Indians’ ass”, scoring a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing 34 airplanes of their own.

Beyond the fog of war

The reality is that it took the IAF just over a week to achieve complete domination of the subcontinent’s skies. A measure of the IAF’s air supremacy was the million-man open air rallies held by the Indian prime minister in northern Indian cities, a week into the war. This couldn’t have been possible if Pakistani planes were still airborne.

Sure, the IAF did lose a slightly larger number of aircraft but this was mainly because the Indians were flying a broad range of missions. Take the six Sukhoi-7 squadrons that were inducted into the IAF just a few months before the war. From the morning of December 4 until the ceasefire on December 17, these hardy fighters were responsible for the bulk of attacks by day, flying nearly 1500 offensive sorties.

Pakistani propaganda, backed up by Yeager, had claimed 34 Sukhoi-7s destroyed, but in fact just 14 were lost. Perhaps the best rebuttal to Yeager’s lies is military historian Pushpindar Singh Chopra’s “A Whale of a Fighter". He says the plane’s losses were commensurate with the scale of effort, if not below it. “The Sukhoi-7 was said to have spawned a special breed of pilot, combat-hardened and confident of both his and his aircraft's prowess,” says Chopra.

Sorties were being launched at an unprecedented rate of six per pilot per day. Yeager himself admits “India flew numerous raids against Pakistani airfields with brand new Sukhoi-7 bombers being escorted in with MiG-21s”.

While Pakistani pilots were obsessed with aerial combat, IAF tactics were highly sophisticated in nature, involving bomber escorts, tactical recce, ground attack and dummy runs to divert Pakistani interceptors from the main targets. Plus, the IAF had to reckon with the dozens of brand new aircraft being supplied to Pakistan by Muslim countries like Jordan, Turkey and the UAE.

Most missions flown by Indian pilots were conducted by day and at low level, with the pilots making repeated attacks on well defended targets. Indian aircraft flew into Pakistani skies thick with flak, virtually non-stop during the 14-day war. Many Bengali guerrillas later told the victorious Indian Army that it was the epic sight of battles fought over their skies by Indian air aces and the sight of Indian aircraft diving in on Pakistani positions that inspired them to fight.

Indeed, Indian historians like Chopra have painstakingly chronicled the details of virtually every sortie undertaken by the IAF and PAF and have tabulated the losses and kills on both sides to nail the outrageous lies that were peddled by the PAF and later gleefully published by Western writers.

In this backdrop, the Pakistani claim (backed by Yeager) that they won the air war is as hollow as a Chaklala swamp reed. In the Battle of Britain during World War II, the Germans lost 2000 fewer aircraft than the allies and yet the Luftwaffe lost that air war. Similarly, the IAF lost more aircraft than the PAF, but the IAF came out on top. Not even Yeager’s biased testimony can take that away from Indians.


How India brought down the US

[Averageamerican]

According to the way Yeager saw it.


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, and President Nixon sent an ultimatum: An invasion of West Pakistan would bring the U.S. into the conflict. Meanwhile, all the Moslem countries rallied around Pakistanis and began pouring in supplies and manpower. 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'] asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. 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.



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Chuck Yeager's posting to Pakistan as the US Defense Representative from 1971 to 1973 provided the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) with a great opportunity to learn from someone who was at that time the most experienced and perhaps the best fighter pilot in the world. The PAF and its fighter pilots learnt as much as they could in that short period. During the war, he was constantly at hand to advise and organize the PAF's defences. After the war ended, Chuck Yeager, who had experienced it first had, briefed at length the PAF on what it had done right and on what it had done wrong. Many of Chuck Yeager's training and combat advice to the PAF was incorporated into PAF training and combat tactics manuals. Chuck Yeager's affiliation with the PAF was an honour to it. The PAF remains the only foreign air force in the world to have received Chuck Yeager's admiration - a recommendation which the PAF is proud of.

At the height of the cold war India was seen as an allie of the USSR which had stated intentions to destroy the USA. Yeager was just doing his job.

[Guynextdoor]

Lollzzz!!! I've always liked yeager and loved the way he got into the bomber, closed the hatch of the X1 with a broom and was shot out like a rocket. In fact I always took his censure of the IAF in 1971 very seriously and thought that we weren't getting the full picture. Didn't know he had a looney side to him!!

[Averageamerican]

Lollzzz!!! I've always liked yeager and loved the way he got into the bomber, closed the hatch of the X1 with a broom and was shot out like a rocket. In fact I always took his censure of the IAF in 1971 very seriously and thought that we weren't getting the full picture. Didn't know he had a looney side to him!!

Original Post By Guynextdoor

What do you make of this quote:

"The Pakistanis whipped their [Indians'] asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. 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."

[Guynextdoor]

What do you make of this quote:

"The Pakistanis whipped their [Indians'] asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. 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."

Original Post By Averageamerican

I wouldn't go against the logic that we lost more planes because we flew more/ riskier missions. Especially if, as the rport says, the pakistanis moved their planes back to iran, then a lot of their planes probably didn't participate at all-- we didn't fight that deep into their terrirotory. At the same time, I'd give some credibility to the ambassador's claims that Yeager was a bit biased coz he really has no reasons to put an american hero in any sort of negative light at all so was probably making a neutral observation that yeager was a bit kooky about pakistanis...


Sure, the IAF did lose a slightly larger number of aircraft but this was mainly because the Indians were flying a broad range of missions. Take the six Sukhoi-7 squadrons that were inducted into the IAF just a few months before the war. From the morning of December 4 until the ceasefire on December 17, these hardy fighters were responsible for the bulk of attacks by day, flying nearly 1500 offensive sorties.

Pakistani propaganda, backed up by Yeager, had claimed 34 Sukhoi-7s destroyed, but in fact just 14 were lost. Perhaps the best rebuttal to Yeager’s lies is military historian Pushpindar Singh Chopra’s “A Whale of a Fighter". He says the plane’s losses were commensurate with the scale of effort, if not below it. “The Sukhoi-7 was said to have spawned a special breed of pilot, combat-hardened and confident of both his and his aircraft's prowess,” says Chopra.

[Manmohan Yadav]

What do you make of this quote:

"The Pakistanis whipped their [Indians'] asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. 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."

Original Post By Averageamerican

hey we broke Pakistan in 2 pieces,
isn't that a big enough loss compared to a few planes haha.

[illuminatidinesh]

What do you make of this quote:

"The Pakistanis whipped their [Indians'] asses in the sky, but it was the other way around in the ground war. 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."

So he counted the wreckage on Pakistan soil but forgot that of in Indian soil? Despite the whipping of asses the PAF dint come to their ground troops help? Why? Just a doubt!

[vstol jockey]

From the second day of war in 1971, PAF was deployed in defensive role. They never came out to support their army in CAS missions while IAF did it in great numbers. A large number of ac were lost by ground fire in CAS Missions. In A2A missions our MIG-21s shot down Starfighters and that scared the shit out of PAF. They did not carry out any cross border raid after 7th of Dec 71. They only defended their cities. Karachi was already set ablaze by Navy and they had very small stock of fuel left with them. In the last few days we caught their tanks which were fully servicable and had been abondoned as they had no fuel left in them.

Like any fighter pilot I too liked Chuck. But after reading this crap written by him, I think he was an idiot.

[Marqueur]

read this ... this man was on Picnic in Pakistan ...

Despite Pakistan's surrender to India in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, Yeager stayed in Pakistan until March 1973, and recalled his stay in Pakistan as one of the most enjoyable times of his life. During his stay he spent most of his time flying in a F-86 Sabre with the Pakistan Air Force and making several expeditions to the K2 mountain, vacationing in Swat, trekking and hunting in the Northern Areas, and learning the Urdu language.

Chuck Yeager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[DragonKnight]

Wow... ..No Pakistani here to comment and Speculate on this topic?????
Chuck Yeager... From a Supersonic Man to the Supersonic Moron.

[vstol jockey]

Chuck Yeager... From a Supersonic Man to the Supersonic Moron.[/QUOTE]

May be the correct phrase should be,"From supersonic Man to Super Idiot Moron".

[Averageamerican]

Well I dont know for sure, but if India is counting shooting up civilian planes on the ground as downing planes in a war I am kind of leaning toward Yeagers version of things.

[neil_diablos]

Well I dont know for sure, but if India is counting shooting up civilian planes on the ground as downing planes in a war I am kind of leaning toward Yeagers version of things.

Original Post By Averageamerican

Why am I not surprised.

1. Isn't it kind of obvious that Yeager would support the Pakistanis considering the fact that they were being aided by the US? Yeager was training the PAF pilots on authorization of the US government and given the fact that the Pakistanis lost the war in totality, Yeager had to do something to show himself and the US administration in a good light. Anything otherwise and the whole world would have laughed at Uncle Sam.

2. Did he also come into India to count up the Pakistani Wrecks? Don't think so.

3. The IAF totalled the Karachi port and the Indian Navy gained complete control of the Arabian waters. What was the great PAF doing? Sleeping?

4. Does'nt it even strike you as remotely funny that though the PAF did excellent (according to Yeager), how come they were unable to provide adequate support to their ground troops which suffered overwhelming defeat in both theaters (East and West)? Being such a "competent" Air Force, the PAF should have played a decisive factor in turning the tide of the battle. What stopped them?

[vstol jockey]

The situation in West pakistan in 1971 war was so bad that they could not even operate their trains as IAF knocked out whatever moved on rails and as a result the Pak Army units had no ammo, no fuel and food to fight. Had it not been for USA, There would have been no Pakistan Today. Chuck would have also been a POW with us. Even though a US citizen, any one who fights along with enemy gets treated like one.