As the tribal raider poured into Kashmir in 1947, the Indian army put into service Douglas DC-3 Dakotas which flew round the clock to keep the supplies going on the war front.

Wing Commander (Rtd) Arijit Ghosh in his book ‘Air Warriors: True Stories of Valour and Courage from the Indian Air Force’, gives a full picture of how the Indian Air Force (IAF) felt in those desperate days felt an urgent need to bomb the tribals relentlessly to cut off their supplies.
Ghosh writes to achieve such a mission the IAF had no heavy bombers and that B-24 Liberators were inducted into the service providing much-needed relief to the air forces. These B-24 Liberators also played a great role during the 1965 war with Pakistan.
The second chapter of the book titled ‘The Bomber That Flew in from an Aircraft Graveyard’ is the backbone of the manuscript which details the description of how these B-24 Liberators were inducted.
Ghosh writes that of a generation that had seen two World Wars and an Air Force that had flown under a foreign flag, they gave their fledgling nation a sorely needed heavy bomber when it could not afford one from the world markets. They rummaged through an aircraft graveyard and came up with the remains of an iconic World War II aircraft that the world had junked and forgotten.
“And in the stuff of fairy tales, IAF built two operational squadrons from those ghost aircraft and flew them successfully for the next twenty years,” the author points out.
As the author writes, soon after World War II ended, the British were eager to go back home and to take back the heavy B-24 Liberator was not an easy task as it was not financially viable to fly these aircraft back to their home countries and so nearly 100 B-24 Liberators were abandoned as junk at the Chakeri airfield at Kanpur Air Base.
The British Royal Force took up the onerous task of disabling the iconic aircraft so that they could never be flown again. However, in their anxiety and haste to go home after a long, wearying war, they just may have cut a few corners here and there, and not all aircraft were completely written off.
“And so, they lay, in that forgotten aircraft graveyard at Chakeri, broken, forlorn and abandoned; vegetation growing over a once-proud aircraft that had struck terror in the hearts of the enemy in its heyday. But they reckoned without the resourcefulness, need, and sheer determination of Indians,” writes Ghosh in ‘Air Warriors’ which is published by Penguin House.
Says the author that as the Kanpur Air Force Base had no facilities to service these aircraft and the only way to carry out the massive overhauls necessary to get them flying again, was to somehow move them back to the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) workshops in faraway Bangalore.
Ghosh writes that since the railways did not have the wherewithal to transport these mammoths, 67 ft long, 110 ft wide, 29,000 kg ‘heavies’ to Bangalore, the only option available was to patch them up as best as possible, and somehow enable an initial, near-suicidal flight to Bangalore, literally on a ‘Wing and a Prayer’.
“Chances were that only around 10 per cent of them would make it there safely, the rest perishing midway, killing the pilots who dared to undertake those ill-advised flights,” writes the author.
The IAF even contacted the qualified American B-24 pilots but the fees that they quoted for each hazardous journey, were unaffordable for the new nation.
“This brought HAL, then a large aircraft servicing organisation into the picture. Hindustan Aircraft had been set up in December 1940 to provide maintenance support to the Royal Air Force during World War II and had worked extensively on maintaining and overhauling Allied aircraft and assembling fighters and bombers of US origin,” writes the author.
As the saying goes desperate times call for desperate measures and it is here where the then Chief Test Pilot (CTP) of HAL, Capt. Jamshed (Jimmy) Kaikobad Munshi and a team of engineers under the leadership of Yellappa, stepped up and took charge of the operation.
Ghosh says that they undertook the initial on-site repairs to the abandoned aircraft, necessary to make them flyable for the hazardous journey to Bangalore.
“Broken cockpit windows and windshields were patched. Things were so uncertain that an equally intrepid Mrs Munshi refused to let her husband fly those missions alone and insisted on accompanying him in the cockpit, in the co-pilot’s seat. She wore a fur coat to cope with the cold, draughty, unpressurised, unheated cockpits of the Liberators,” Ghosh writes.
Says the author that on a typical day, Jimmy would start up his engines early, with battery support from the ground crew, open power on the four engines, and if everything functioned normally, taxi around the tarmac to check that the engines were delivering full power, and the brakes were serviceable.
“With minimum fuss, he would then turn into the wind and take off from Chakeri, en route to Bangalore, 1500 km away, flying with wheels down, throughout the journey. He did this because the hydraulic system that operated the wheels was unreliable and there was no guarantee that they would come down again, once retracted after take-off,” writes Ghosh.
The book provides graphic details, writing that such day-to-day acts of fantastic courage, repeated many times over, risking his life each time he got airborne, Jimmy Munshi flew out an incredible forty-two Liberators from Kanpur to Bangalore, where a team of HAL technicians waited to undertake a complete overhaul of the iconic aircraft.
The author writes that when HAL offered to pay Jimmy ‘a handsome amount’ per flight for the risk he was taking, Jimmy refused, saying he was simply doing a job for which HAL was already paying him.
‘Air Warriors: True Stories of Valour and Courage from the Indian Air Force’ also includes the stories of the legendary Indra Lal Roy, the first Indian pilot in the British Royal Force, and his nephew Subroto Mukherjee, who went on to become the first IAF chief.
The book also debunks the largely believed myth that the Indian Air Force was not used in the 1962 war and fully explains the role of the Air Force during the war in carrying out the logistic supplies.
The book also thoroughly describes in the book what went wrong during the 1962 war. One of the examples quoted in the book is about Squadron Leader Jaggi Nath’s photographers of Chinese military assets across the LAC. However, his intelligence was never used in the war.
Arijit Ghosh also writes about how the Indian army left Tawang on the eve of the war without fighting when the Air Force had adequately supplied the forward posts.

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