A history of a relatively neglected arm of the Indian armed forces

Nair shouldn't have used the WWII sub-title to define and limit his narrative

As youngsters, before the whiff of World War II had quite disappeared, many of us were seriously thinking of joining the armed forces and chasing glory. The question was, which arm? The Army was the popular choice, of course, but as we learnt more, it began to appear to us that there was more to the Allied victories than ground-level heroics. The navy had its devotees, but for a few it was the air force that beckoned. There was a singularity in its victories that appealed, and of the loneliness up there at 20,000 feet with the entire sky as the battle zone. Most importantly, the air force pilots were the combatants who connected that sky to the ground below in conflict. Unhappily, what was written about the air force either wasn’t enough or wasn’t serious history. For instance, the majority of books on the Battle of Britain, arguably the greatest come-from-behind victory of WW II, were mainly personal recollections penned by those who had carved out that victory; Goering’s splendid Luftwaffe hasn’t, I believe, a definitive chronicle to its name; and I’m not at all sure if books on Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s precision planning of the lethal strike force of Mitsubishi Zeros on Pearl Harbour read more like adventure stories than critical analyses, and so on.  In short, compared to the army, the air force hasn’t excited chroniclers all that much.

The disparity is especially acute in the sub-continent. Although there’s a bank of competently researched, annotated and presented books concerning the pre-and post-independence Indian Army, there’s a major lack of equivalent work relating to the birth and growth of the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy. K S Nair’s learned history of the Indian Air Force (IAF), right from its unsteady beginnings as an unnoticed splinter of the Royal Air Force (RAF) to finding its feet as India’s (and indeed Pakistan’s) exclusive force within a decade, tackles this inadequacy with conviction and undeniable passion. Crucially, Nair has every reason to feel affronted by the cavalier treatment meted out to the handful of Indian pilots who were our first trainees at Cranwell, the famed college for the RAF, and later to the fledgling Indian formation which was doled out only chowkidari duties at frontier posts on our north western borders and factory installations elsewhere on the sub-continent. Nair, however, is a level headed chronicler who doesn’t let jingoism get the better of him though he does allude to British disdain and arrogance that made our young pilot’s tasks that much more difficult.

The Forgotten Few: The Indian Air Force in WW II; Author: K S Nair; Publisher: Harper Collins; Price: Rs 699; Pages: 400

Nair writes about these men who were given scant recognition for their proven skills on basic fabric and wood-paneled Westland Wapitis and later, in the war years, unwieldy Lysanders, and it took plentiful hours of flying before they were admitted to the elite Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons. He recounts with obvious amusement how an intrepid young Ranjan Dutt, barely out of flight training and who finally retired as Air Vice Marshal of the IAF, challenged his conceited instructor to a classic, potentially risky flying trick which he first performed himself; the said senior is known to have chickened out. In those formative years before the IAF got its wings, so to speak, men like Srirama Setty who also helped design aircraft for his employers, Avro, Hardit Singh Malik, later to head the embassies in Canada and France, the aristocratic Errol Sen, Jumbo Majumdar, the hero of IAF’s Burma campaign, Aspi Engineer, who later became chief of our IAF, as did Subroto Mukherjee, P C Lal and Arjan Singh, scripted an enviable Roll of Honour. These were brilliant flyers who reached their full stature only in an independent India with its self-determining air force.  This was the leitmotif of the IAF story for years to come and one does get the feeling, as Nair does, that in any case such was par for the course in most matters concerning the Colonies.

The IAF formally came into being on October 8, 1932, flying out of its Drigh Road, Karachi station. WW II was still some way off, which gave the newly minted force enough time to cement its base though as a part of the bigger RAF operation. After war broke out and with their scant exposure in the Western sectors when the action enveloped the Eastern theatres, the first real encounters of the IAF as a combined and accredited fighting force rather than individual pilots with their separable presence, took place in what was decorously called the Battle for Burma after an earlier, bigger battle. Nair notes how once more, the RAF chose to downplay the IAF, this time its No: 1 Squadron’s combat record, fronted by its forceful CO Karun Kumar “Jumbo” Majumdar, amidst the tatters of the Allied ops in Burma and later in Singapore. They were intent on forcing the IAF into a “cauldron of disaster” with its insecure Westland Wapitis and awkward Lysanders, slap dash bombers without proper bomb bays. According to Nair, the Japanese were moved to question why Britain was sending the IAF into such theatres as “cannon fodder” while keeping the RAF away. To their credit, the IAF pilots kept raising the bar, so much so that Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, Nationalist China’s supremo, gave “Jumbo” Majumdar a brief interview and congratulated him on the performance of the IAF, a rare honour, indeed.

This was the primary story of the IAF throughout WW II, and Nair traverses their history with remarkable keenness, reading copiously and collecting memories from the few who lived through those times, and their families and colleagues. At the end of his search, two things stand out for Nair: the remarkable courage and skill of the IAF men and that as the world marvelled, their “elder brothers” not only turned their faces away but kept pushing the envelope towards dangerous edges.

The Forgotten Few is crammed with reportage and analyses and to cite even a lesser part of it would mean creating almost another book! It’s for the reader, lay or conversant, to navigate this potent material at will and be amply rewarded for it. Finally. as far as I’m concerned, I have two issues with Nair and both relate to the title of his book. First of all, the way his book pans out, the formative part of his IAF story is superlative and he therefore shouldn’t have used the WW II sub-title to define and limit his narrative. Secondly, he shouldn’t have named it the Forgotten Few; a more fitting title would have been The Glorious Few.