In his book, ‘The Sabre Slayers: The Air Battles of the 1965 War with Pakistan’, co-authored with writer Kunal Verma, Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar (Retd) says the Sabre posed a major danger to Indian pilots at the time, having earned its reputation against Soviet jets during the Korean War.
The Indian Air Force has a long, storied history dating back to World War 2. But some of its finest moments came in 1965, when its pilots faced Pakistan’s cutting-edge American jet, the feared F-86 Sabre. This war in the sky is the subject of Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar (Retd)’s latest book, The Sabre Slayers: The Air Battles of the 1965 War with Pakistan, co-authored with writer Kunal Verma. An air combat veteran and test pilot with a career going back to 1962, Air Marshal Rajkumar’s various writings include The Tejas Story: The Light-Combat Aircraft Project, to name but one.
Being a city full of writers and readers, it is perhaps appropriate that the Air Marshal hails from Bengaluru . He said, “I am a born-and-bred Bangalorean. When I was six months old. my parents shifted to Bengaluru (from Davangere), and I pretty much spent most of my life in the city. Of my 40 years in the Indian Air Force, 20 were spent in Bengaluru because I was a test pilot and I was working with the Air Force test center and then the Tejas program….You could say that Bengaluru’s cosmopolitan culture had instilled in me a fondness for English literature.”
Air Marshal Rajkumar himself was first commissioned in 1962, starting his training at the then Air Force Flying College at Jodhpur on the HAL HT-2. He was selected for the fighter stream of pilots – with the first operational jet he flew being the ‘Toofani’ – the Indian name of the French fighter-bomber, ‘Dassault Ouragan’. He was then posted to the airbase in Adampur, and remained there up to the outbreak of the war against Pakistan in 1965. At the time, he was flying the Mystere, a French jet that the IAF used mainly for attacks against ground targets.
Air Marshal Rajkumar recalled, “The Mysteres were all ground attack aircraft. During the 65 war, our main job was to support the army…. most of our work was in the Lahore sector. War broke out on the 1st of September when Pakistan attacked in the Chamb sector in Jammu. And the Indian Air Force was pressed into action because we were very hard-pressed at that time. For six days, the action was limited to the Air Force units in Pathankot. And then, when the pressure became intolerable, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri ordered the Indian Army to attack across the international border on the 6th of September.”
After several bases, including the one at Adampur, were raided by the Pakistan Air Force, a retaliatory attack was launched by the IAF against the airfields in Sargodha. This would be Rajkumar’s first combat operation.
Recalling the day, he said, “As Field Marshal Manekshaw so famously said, ‘If a man says he is not afraid to die, he is either a liar or a Gurkha. So, since I am neither a liar nor a Gurkha, I was scared. Of course, there is a lot of tension when you are going into operation. But the funny thing is, once you get into the cockpit. you get too involved in doing the mission, flying the aircraft, and so on – you put your fear away and concentrate on the mission.”
The Sabre posed a major danger to Indian pilots at the time, having earned its reputation against Soviet jets during the Korean War, with a good turning rate and six machine guns. To make matters worse, around 20 of the approximately 100 Pakistani Sabres were armed with the newly invented Sidewinder guided missiles. A few Pakistani Starfighter jets also had these missiles. Explaining how this complicated the war, the Marshal said, “We had just received a small number of MiG-21s, which was about six or eight aircraft, and those were equipped with the first-generation K-13 Russian missile, which was actually a Russian copy of the Sidewinder. It was a very small number….the problem is when you encounter a Sabre in the sky you don’t know whether it is carrying a missile or not….So you have to assume that every Sabre you see has the missile and therefore you have to plan your tactics accordingly.”
An unlikely protagonist emerged against the Sabre from the Indian side – the locally licence-made Folland Gnat, which became nicknamed the ‘Sabre Slayer’. According to the Air Marshal, the small, maneuverable jet had a high thrust-to-weight ratio, very good turning performance, and a very high rate of climb, making it a match for the Sabre in dogfights. Ironically, Air Marshal Rajkumar never got to fly the Gnat during the 1965 war, but only in later years as a test pilot. By this time, he had already gotten to fly the Mig 21 (at that time one of the top jets in the world) and thus was not as impressed as his colleagues who got to fly the Gnat in the pre-MiG years.
Going forward, Air Marshal Rajkumar is contemplating writing a book on how Bengaluru, often thought of as a sleepy “pensioner’s paradise”, became India’s aerospace capital.
source/content: indianexpress.com (headline edited)