Читать книгу Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War - Raghu Karnad - Страница 15

Miranshah, November 1941

It was all very well for Manek, up there. But did he know what they did to a Tommy on the ground, if they caught him alive? Tortured to death, and that’s just the start of it. If he was carrying his kit, they knew to look for the mess tin with its folding handle, and they used that pretty handle to gouge his eyes out. Then he’s scalped, and they have his brains out, and fill the cavity with dust and stones and straw. They cut his privates off and stitch ’em into his mouth, and put burning cigarette ends up his nose.

Mind you, that’s just his head …

The sergeant trailed Manek through the circuit of the aircraft, making final checks. He was on his second tour in the North-West Frontier, he said; the last time had been with the Army, so close to the ground he could smell the fakir’s sulphur smoking off the hills. He thought it only right, and some small pleasure, as a man who had felt flint-chips dance down his shirt when bullets struck his sangar walls, that he should inform the young Indian pilot-officer of the true nature of the foe. Air force men never saw much of them. But no one’s initiation to Miranshah was complete without him getting a picture of how he would look after a Pashtun beauty treatment.

An hour later, Manek was cocooned in the cockpit of his Hawker Audax, 2,500 feet above the mineral sea of Waziristan. The slopes below him graded from the rule of brown to disobedient shades of purple, ferrous orange and powder blue, and the outcrops cast flat black sails of shadow, pointing east, east and east in the afternoon light. Here and there, notched into the hills, was a small white ‘Y’: the Frontier pickets signalling ‘We have nothing for you. All is well.’ Manek was now at the outermost point of British-Indian power, beyond the last garrison, wheeling through the furthest, coldest orbit of what was called India. The hills beyond them had been ceded to the control of the Afghan king. As if they were anyone’s to cede, or to control. Manek thought of the recruitment ad in the newspaper: Monarch of all you survey. Kings ruled the air here, but not the land.

From this elevation, the Tochi river was a twist of green silk scarf, tied to conceal the beige blisters rising from the ground beside it. Those were the villages of Waziri Pashtuns, who grew rice and apricot trees on the riverbanks. Higher up the hills, they grazed sheep in the shade of the juniper and pine. In between, they lay among the stones, invisible, nibbling at sugary balls of channa-gud from their pockets, and waiting for the Empire’s men to enter rifle range.

Once a week, on road-opening day, supply trains of armoured trucks ventured out to the Scouts’ post at Datta Khel, the camp nearest the Afghan border. Up in the folded hills, the Army manned pickets to watch the valley road, while down at the river, stockades secured the larger villages at Boya and Kharmakar. At the base of the valley was Miranshah, knuckle of the Empire, home to several battalions of the Indian Army and the headquarters of the Tochi Scouts, tribesmen paid to control tribesmen in the most hostile sector of the Frontier. Yet control, bought at whatever price, never lasted long. When they grew restive, the Pashtuns were stone-sprung terrors. At the end of road-opening day, when the pickets were called in to join the rearguard, seasoned soldiers came running like children from the dark. This was why the Army shared its base in Miranshah with the Indian Air Force and the RAF.

Other forts in the Frontier were crowded by hilltops, from which the Pashtuns sometimes took potshots into the kitchen lines and hockey fields. Miranshah, however, sat some distance from the nearest hills, a clay battleship in a flat, stony bay. At night, all life retreated into its thirty-foot hull. With its crenels and watchtowers silhouetted by the stars, the fort could belong in any century. But at dawn the gates opened and a modern air force was wheeled out onto the plain. Bomb racks and fuel tankers scrawled on the dust, and the Audaxes of No. 2 Squadron rolled into the haze, ready for the fight.

It was sixty years almost since the Forward Policy had advanced British control, not just to the base of the mountains beyond Punjab, but into their heights. Those passes had been the gates for the invasion of India since Alexander, and for as long as Britain had ruled the Punjab it had maintained a grizzled guard against threats from the west. Mud forts were built and garrisoned in monastic isolation, exposed to the elements and to trigger-happy tribesmen, and service in ‘the Grim’ became a rite of passage for young officers and regiments. By the turn of the century, once the wounds of the Mutiny had closed, the imperial imagination filled instead with exploits on the Frontier.1

The implacable Pashtun was inscribed in tradition, with a tsarist agent and a ‘Mad Mullah’ whispering in either ear. This grudge was not released even in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Britain’s sullen, opportunistic nemesis was transformed into its valiant ally. The foreign shadow over the Hindu Kush did not disappear – it simply became a fascist one.

The figure of the Mad Mullah, too, was still intact in 1941. The mullah of the present was the Fakir of Ipi, Mirza Ali Khan, who in 1936 had stoked the Waziri and Mahsud khels into full armed rebellion. It took three years and half the strength of the Indian Army,2 supported by the RAF, to suppress them, but the fakir remained at large. Using guile, or sorcery, he escaped every British grasp: whenever Gurkha units captured a cave being used as an insurgent hideout – killing, say, thirteen men – they invariably found fourteen beds inside. One person had simply been spirited away.

The Italians had been the first of the Axis powers to make contact with the fakir, using agents sent out of Kabul disguised as Pashtun tribesmen. They had made gifts of arms and equipment, including machine guns and a wireless set, and sought the financial terms on which the fakir would agree to create trouble.

Soon, German agents, with larger funds to dispense, tried to take over the negotiations with the Fakir of Ipi, the figure they codenamed ‘Feuerfresser’, ‘Fire-Eater’. Spies, some posing as scientists collecting specimens of butterflies, attempted to reach the fakir and foment a full-scale uprising in September. The Axis aim was to break the Soviet line at Stalingrad and the British at the Nile, and blitz across Central Asia. Through these passes, India could be invaded again, by a force of traitors and terrors: Nazis, Indian mutineers, and Pashtuns berserk under the spell of the Mad Mullah.

So it was that dragon’s teeth grew in the ancient gums of the Khyber Pass – concrete pyramids to snag and slow the German Panzers. And so it was that in 1941, in the middle of a world war, Flying Officer Manek Dadabhoy patrolled the Frontier on duties a century old.

Manek was now at the tip of the lance of British-Indian power, raised against threats from the west. As he flew on, his mind travelled back along the taper of the lance: to Miranshah, the forward operating base, then Bannu, the supply station, and Kohat, where the No. 2 Squadron had its headquarters. Further back was Peshawar, the last real city of India, filled with commerce and political clamour. Beyond Peshawar the land descended to the busy fields of Punjab; to Lahore and Ambala, where he had learned to fly, and then Delhi, capital of the Raj and general headquarters of its army, the shoulder that raised the lance and set him here in the sky. Finally, at the end of an endless country stippled with shrines and laddered with railway track, where at last the land became water: Madras, where his family and his sweet wife awaited him.

Manek’s family had never been as scrupulous as the Mugaseths, but like any Parsi home, theirs was printed at regular intervals with the icon of the winged-disc Farohar. The figure was sewn in cross-stitch and hung by the kitchen door; it was embossed onto the front of brass pen stands and printed on the warped paper stickers that someone once applied to the corner of each bedroom’s mirror. The general effect was as if Farohar spent all day fluttering around the house, alighting on any old thing, spreading consecration like bees spread pollen.

The first impression Manek ever had of his faith was that it centred on a man riding a winged device. His tribe had spent 4,000 years admiring an angel who set an example impossible to follow – until now. Not to say that Manek felt divinely enjoined to be a pilot, but he did sense that in flight he might approach a lofty state that he never achieved on the ground. When he won his wings, the silver badge of a pilot officer, he thought of them as the pug mark of Farohar on his khaki breast.

After his appointment as an officer-cadet, Manek had taken a long train ride from Madras to Lahore for preliminary training at Walton airfield. His months there were an already misted memory of drill, physical education, riflery and lectures; theory of flight, theory of weapons, assembly and disassembly. Half of his fellow cadets were cocky young men from Bombay and Karachi, members since their teens of the flying clubs there, and with more flying hours than some instructors. The other half were Khalsa schoolboys who had never set eyes on an aeroplane, let alone flown one. They struggled with every sentence spoken by the sergeants in their regional brogues. ‘Brother, what are “goons”?’ one whispered, at the end of a demonstration. ‘He keeps saying “goons”.’

‘Guns,’ Manek replied.

The Cranwell accents of the RAF officers could be equally elusive. ‘Fahpah, what is fahpah?’

‘Firepower,’ Manek hissed.

He made the first selection and went on to Jodhpur, for flying instruction on the fine airfield of Maharaja Randhir Singh. They were billeted in tents, but they messed like rough-necked royalty in the Maharaja’s guest house. They learned the luxury of living with bearers – magical chaps who could despatch you from your tent with gleaming shoes and your training schedule, and be waiting at the mess when you arrived there, setting out your bacon and eggs.

Manek learned to fly at last, in the Tiger Moth, a plane forgiving of beginners’ errors. The Moth took care of him. To put it into a spin, you pulled the nose up until the plane stalled, and let it begin to drop, with one rudder held down. The plane corkscrewed towards the ground. He neutralised the rudder, and the Moth recovered on its own. It made the cadets cocky: they placed bets on who could pull off the longest spins. Manek’s body stopped fearing the sensations of flight in the fabric vessel: the restless bob of the fuselage over the wheels as the props began to turn, its brief careening sway as it moved down the tarmac, and the effortless, almost absent, moment when flight began and the horizon dipped away. Back on the ground, he could feel a throb of racial rivalry among his fellows. But for him there was only one superior race: the flyers – all those who summitted their alp of air, and did effortlessly what their fathers in their youths would never have thought possible.

At Ambala he learned to attack the ground, dropping dummy bombs and strafing on the range. He learned to fly at night, high above the cancelled earth, flashing code down into the darkness and fighting panic until the ‘glim’ lamps were uncovered along the airstrip, one by one, a faerie road to bed. At last, in the summer of 1941, Manek returned to Madras carrying a scroll of rich parchment – his letter of commission. It began in lettering so thick with tendrils and curlicues that the words themselves seemed borne on a bank of clouds:

George VI by the Grace of God, of Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India &c …

And then, in a tighter calligraphy:

To our Trusty and well-beloved Manek Hormusji Dadabhoy Greetings; We reposing, especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage, and good Conduct, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer in our Indian Air Force …

The letter was signed by His Excellency’s Command, the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow. It was a splendid thing. It rustled with honour and authority.

Newly winged, Manek left for Peshawar to join the No. 2 Squadron. ‘The Winged Arrows’ had been raised on 1 April, but had spent months waiting for its aircraft, the dregs of the RAF fleet. The Westland Wapiti, popularly called the ‘What-A-Pity’, was a biplane that had actually been out of production since 1932. To start its propellers, a team of airmen threw a length of rope around a blade and yanked it into motion, as if hand-cranking a car. Still, the Wapiti was endemic to the skies above Waziristan: brown, spindly and locust-like, with bright RAF roundels for eyespots and tappets beating as visibly as an insect’s heart.

Far more exciting than the planes Manek could expect to fly were the men who flew them – and the most exciting of them all was his squadron leader, Aspy Engineer. Manek had been too young to remember when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, but the Parsis had their own flying ace, and Aspy was it. He and his three brothers, all in the air force, were an Indian sensation.

Aspy was from Karachi, and grew up with the whine of biplanes rising from the great RAF depot at Drigh Road. While he was still a boy, his father used the family savings to buy a Tiger Moth so that his sons would learn to fly. By the time Aspy was seventeen, and the Aga Khan offered a prize to the first Indian to fly solo between Britain and India, Aspy was able to take his Moth and, without a radio or much else by way of instruments, win it. Two years later he was at the RAF College in Cranwell, one of the first dozen cadets selected for the Indian Air Force. At Cranwell he won the Grove Prize for best cadet of the year; jumped from a burning plane and survived – and made it back to India just in time to take a commission with ‘A’ Flight, the very first squadron of the Indian Air Force.

At the start of the war Aspy and ‘A’ Flight were on duty in Karachi, watching for enemy bombers in the sky and U-boat shadows in the water. By 1941, however, they had returned to the Frontier, where the Waziris were being roused by the Faqir of Ipi once again. In March, Aspy led a nocturnal rescue mission to Boya Fort, flying out in the black of night and returning mid-morning on wings tattooed with eighteen bullet holes. That operation would win him the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In June, only days before Manek reached there, Aspy had arrived in Peshawar to take command of No. 2 Squadron. He was only thirty, and not at all the grinning daredevil Manek had imagined and prepared to impress. At their first meeting, the new CO was reserved and oddly focused on protocol. He left Manek with a single, modest piece of advice that would become his own credo. ‘Remember,’ Aspy said, ‘good flying means doing the right thing at the right time.’

Where Aspy was concerned, this meant leaving immediately to fly the duty wing out to Miranshah to get his new squadron blooded. The Waziris now threatened the post at Datta Khel, and four army battalions were sent to meet them, with a train of a thousand mules, trucks and guns. On 7 July, the Winged Arrows dispersed a gang of over two hundred hostiles who blocked the column’s march.

It was from Miranshah that the RAF had led its first entirely independent campaign, in 1925, when GHQ India invited air staff to test their own solution to endless Mahsud raids. Three squadrons of Bristol and de Havilland biplanes rose from Miranshah to make continuous day-and-night attacks on the Mahsud villages; in less than two months, at the cost of only two British lives, the rebels surrendered.

The creation of India’s own air force, in 1932, had made a bold statement: that an imperial armed service could be staffed by Indians alone. Unlike the Army or navy, the IAF was a service of the twentieth century, and in its miniature but modern establishment it reflected new expectations of the country itself. It did not prefer martial races for recruitment, and it scorned the segregation of faiths and castes, the cornerstone of order in the Army. The motto of its first squadron mixed Urdu and Hindi to pointed effect: Ittehad mein shakti hain – ‘In unity there is strength’. But the proud, precocious start of the IAF belied the ancient duty it was made to perform: aiding the RAF in suppressing the Pashtuns. As it grew from a token force during the war, it still upheld the first principle of aerial bombing: that it was used to pay out to Black people the wages of opposition to White rule.

In October of 1941, a hundred badmashes attacked a picket at Asad Khel and were holding back a relief force across a rivulet called the Khaisora. The duty wing was scrambled to the fight, now flying Hawker Audaxes, better than Wapitis, though still canvas biplanes, towed out of their hangars like oxen.3 They were above Asad Khel in twenty minutes. The pilots and observers peered down as bright white runes formed against the barren ground. Below them, signallers rolled out strips of cloth that spelled ‘X–V–T’ followed by cloth discs indicating the distance to the enemy positions. The pilots lined up and dived, squeezing their triggers and tearing up the ground in front of them, while the observers swung their Lewis guns, firing into the blur. The Waziri fighters fired back from wedges in the rock. The formation arced back into the sky, and came back through again and again, giving the infantry a chance to rush forward each time.

After the third pass, one Audax of the IAF climbed out but then sank in a nauseating drop. It recovered, lurched again for height, and buzzed down heavily into the gap between the Army and Pashtun positions. What happened was described by the pilot, Flying Officer Arjan Singh, while he was having his nose stitched up back at the base. His Audax landed hard on the bed of the Khaisora, smashing his face against the instrument panel. His gunner, Ghulam Ali, was so thoroughly disoriented by the shock that he got to his feet and fled – but in the wrong direction. He leapt out of the gully and ran right at the tribesmen, whose bullets popped at the ground by his feet. Arjan Singh, hand over nose, sprinted out in pursuit and finally caught him, fifty yards further up, and turned him around. Both men lay low in a deep cut of the stream bed, listening to the bullets blow past overhead, until they were rescued by the jawans.4

Manek was then still stuck in Peshawar, living out an endless yawn. In the mess, much of the conversation turned on the question of why they policed the Pashtuns at all. Some of the Indian pilots, the more political sort, believed that the Frontier was kept deliberately tense, and that the tribal khels were clay pigeons periodically set off to give them target practice. To Manek this seemed idle talk, the froth of idle hours.

Their cantonment was as mannered as every cantonment in India, and the walled city was out of bounds. In Peshawar the bloody chivalry of the Pathans overlapped with the mass politics of Gandhi’s Congress, giving rise to something the Congress could barely control any more than the government.5

Manek was delirious with impatience before his turn came to join the duty wing. But he was there, in November, on a day that the telephone rang in the office of the Miranshah station commander, and a captain took the handset, listened for a moment and set it back in its cradle. Then he lifted it again to dial a number.

Aspy appeared in the door. ‘XX?’ he asked.

That was the code for an emergency flight. The captain shook his head. ‘Just proscription.’

Years of regular imperial air control had culminated in the proscription bombing policy, with warnings delivered ahead of time, to minimise civilian casualties. One plane would go out and drop pamphlets over the target area, ordering the evacuation of women and children from certain villages; the next day, anything or anyone that remained – people, livestock, buildings – became a sanctioned target.6

Manek and the other pilots had until late morning to gather for the briefing, around a table covered with indexed maps and catalogued photographs. Soon they would go over their grid references, approaches, ordnance and the colours of the day with Aspy, but first they were addressed by the political agent, a quiet man Manek had seen flitting in and out of Miranshah wearing a captain’s pips and speaking mainly to his driver in fluent Pashto. He began by describing the high pastoral villages and cave dwellings of the target area. Four days of bombing would be sufficient to bring their leaders to the jirga, where he would negotiate their compliance, confiscate arms and ‘make sure they understand the good intentions of the government’. He didn’t say with what the tribesmen were being asked to comply. In the stick-and-carrot strategy of India’s government, they were the stick; their concern was only where to strike and how hard.

Manek wrote to Kosh of his excitement, and told her he’d be carrying her photo in his pocket. It was folded up with his blood chit, which the pilots called a ‘goolie chit’ because it promised in three languages a reward to anyone who helped an injured pilot return to base with all his bits intact. Kosh wasn’t to worry, though: the Pashtun weapons were mostly old Lee-Enfields and Italian Martinis, and rifles built on British patterns in their own workshops. The pilots were never in range. He’d be in no danger.

He hadn’t promised not to freeze to death, though, Manek thought as he pulled the Audax into the air. It was a slow plane but its cockpits were open. It was winter now: the snow caps had grown on the further peaks of the Hindu Kush, and the Audax swam through their icy breath. Manek and his observer wore hooded, fur-lined jackets, inverted-leather boots and gloves, with fur on the inner lining. He felt like a yak flipped inside out.

All about him the aircraft’s Kestrel IIB engines throbbed and the atmosphere hummed tunes in the plane’s wires. They were navigating by the line of a valley, centred on a pink vein of soft river bed. Before the days of the air force, this mission would have required at least a battalion on the march, a long, exposed train of followers, mules, field ambulance and remount staff trudging up the valley. The sergeant had told Manek how such missions went. How there came an echoing report from high above and disorder spread in the column, noses slamming into the packs in front of them. A man falls, or two, with panting screams. Machine guns are pulled off the mules and sections form up, some covering the hilltops as others climb, hot acid in their legs. A hundred yards from the top, they fix bayonets, pump their calf muscles with their hands, and charge. On top of the hill they find nothing but sky. In the next valley the rifles sing out again, more men fall; again the hill is bare. So, again and again, until the regiment reaches some settlement of goats and grandmothers, and smashes it until their rage and the village are levelled.

That was the punitive strategy of the previous century, referred to as ‘Butcher and Bolt’. Now the Audax served the same end in a matter of hours, and they called it ‘Watch and Ward’.

Manek straightened in his pilot’s seat and raised his face into the slipstream. The formation slowed in the air and climbed down to pinpoint their target. He signalled bombardier mode to the cockpit behind him, and his navigator sank onto his knees, to stretch out prone beneath Manek’s seat and access a hatch and a bombsight in the floor. The flight passed over and banked. Manek was the last to go, and he watched as one by one the other planes dropped low, and he saw the rips of light open and close, doing invisible damage among the dirt houses. Tiny figures scattered out beyond the village wall.

His mind passed over Arjan Singh’s crash. It passed over his parachute harness. It passed over the photograph in his pocket. He pushed down the stick, read the ground and target as if they were part of his instrument deck, and felt his engine sigh at the load’s release. Behind him, the shaggy head of the explosions rose from the ground. Above, the other aircraft dallied, innocent as doves. He rejoined them and turned back to Miranshah, at a loss for feeling.

His fight had begun at last. Against whom, he wasn’t certain.