Spitfire Singh

by Mike Edwards

  The first two to speak were Banerjee and Sanyal from Bengal: outspoken, fiery, but also cultured. This was Harjinder’s first introduction to Bengalis. A popular saying in Bengal in those days was: ‘What Bengal thinks today, India will think tomorrow.’ In this room, with these people, that certainly seemed true.

  On his return to Lahore, a number of students tauntingly started calling him a Hawai Havaldar (Sergeant). The irony was, despite his engineering degree, it would take him ten years to become one!

  Considering the importance it held for Harjinder, he refers very little to the moment he was accepted by the RAF. In his diaries just a cursory: ‘We were selected in November 1930 but were asked to join in January 1931, at Karachi.’

  During this period of waiting, things nearly took a different turn when an offer for the post of Superintendent of the Gujranwala Power House arrived. A job which was very lucrative according to the standards of those days, carrying a starting salary of two hundred twenty-five rupees per month compared to the thirty rupees on offer from the Air Force. It is unclear whether Harjinder would have taken this post, but the decision was, quite literally, taken out of his hands when he lost the tips of three fingers of his left hand in a motorcycle accident. It seems the injury had no bearing on the Air Force because, after 3 months of no news from Air HQ in Delhi, in January 1931, he was summoned to join the Indian Air Force as the lowest possible rank, a Hawai Sepoy. The class structure was still very rigid, as a graduate engineer Harjinder would have sat high in the pecking order, with servants and a great degree of luxury. He was about to discover that as a Sepoy you were not just at the bottom of the scale; you looked up at the bottom of the scale with wonder.

  A lifelong career had begun; so had the troubles.

  Two

  Training to be a Sepoy

  Squadron Leader White:

  ‘I have not met an Indian who had the moral courage even to admit the charges made against him.’

  UK Parliament 1930: The Secretary for India:

  ‘It takes more than pilots to form an Air Force. The Indian engineers and mechanics are casual and untrustworthy.’

  Harjinder and his band of brothers were to become those ‘casual and untrustworthy’ engineers. It would take years of constantly proving themselves, time and time again, and the small issue of a world war, for anyone in power to admit their misjudgement.

  The Secretary of State for India seemed willing to remember the exploits of the few Indians who had served as pilots with great distinction in the World War I, the most successful being Lieutenant Indra Lal Roy. Roy took his open-cockpit SE5a biplane into combat over France, scoring 9 victories in only fourteen days, proving that Indians had all the courage needed to be fighter pilots. This makes Roy the highest scoring Indian pilot to this day. His ferocious method of attack, by throwing himself at the enemy, could not last. He was shot down and killed after those fourteen days earning the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), having not yet turned twenty.

  Then there was Lieutenant Hardit Singh Malik, the most distinguished Sikh of his time. He was a sportsman, civil servant and diplomat. Only eighteen years old when World War I broke out, he volunteered to be a French Army ambulance driver, as the RFC would not accept Indians as officers. It took a forceful plea from his tutor at Oxford, to his friend, General Henderson, for him to be accepted as an officer pilot in the Royal Flying Corps; the first sporting a turban and beard to become a fighter pilot, who scored two victories! His long hair and beard caused him to be called ‘My Indian Prince’ by his flight commander, the legendary Major Billy Barker, VC. During one of his dogfights in his flimsy biplane, his cockpit was riddled with hundreds of bullets, of which two pierced his legs. He crash-landed back in France. After convalescing for many months in England, he was back in the battlefield. The Secretary might remember these people and their proven flying skills, but he wasn’t for having Indians doing anything technical or mechanical with the aircraft.

  For a man whose ambition was now firmly fixed on joining the Air Force, Harjinder kept his successful application very, very quiet. He told no one in his family except his cousin, the district Magistrate in Sargodha. His Christmas holidays were spent constantly having to listen to his cousin trying to dissuade him to join. The cousin finally gave up his efforts, resorting to offering, the now well-known advice of, ‘If God had wanted you to fly, He would have given you wings!’ However, with his cousin’s grudging assistance, the successful application was kept a secret. Harjinder believed that if his uncle had found out, there would have been great uproar, and the entire family would have arrived at his door to beat this ridiculous idea out of him. Would the IAF have survived the first few months of independence if that had happened? Would there have been an Indian Air Force to expand throughout World War II?

  Harjinder also received a reply from his letter to Amarjit Singh and Bhupindar Singh, whilst on holiday. Before these men had joined the RAF College at Cranwell to earn their pilot’s wings, Harjinder had met with them. Amarjit endorsed Harjinder’s plans to join the Air Force ‘in any capacity’. Encouraged by those who were well on their way to be on the ‘inside’, he felt vindicated in his decision.

  On 21st January 1931, the bearded, turbaned, Harjinder Singh Bains arrived in Karachi to start his career in the Air Force. He was almost a local, as his military life started at the Drigh Road RAF base outside the city. There was great excitement among the new arrivals, even if the base was no heavenly vision. The aerodrome lay between the main railway and a dry, four-mile wide valley of sand-ridges, overrun with dust-coloured tamarisk, and faintly tinted green with colocynth runners. Cattle and camels wandered the site, between buildings that were erected without any apparent thought to planning. The aircraft hangars were functional boxes with low-pitched roofs, peeking out from behind slab-like doors. The newly built Officers’ and Sergeants Messes reflected the splendour that has become synonymous with so many buildings of the subcontinents’ colonial era – with rows of dark arches on two stories, and a flat roof of Marseilles tiles, it inspired comparison to a Roman aqueduct.

  Outside the wire was no better, just a dry hole, on the edge of the Sind desert. When the winds blew through the camp, they came heavily laden with dust. They would soon learn to eat dust, and breathe dust, and think dust, and hate dust. Air craftsman T.E. Shaw was not taken in by what he saw, even though he ultimately enjoyed the relative solitude it offered. He wrote of Drigh Road: ‘the Depot is dreary, to a degree, and its background makes me shiver… North of the railway is a mass of building, married quarters, officers’ houses, mess, and hospital. Unattractive, since it has no plan, no raison d’être or focus, like a grown village… The camel-bells sound just like a water tap dripping, drop, drop, drop, into a deep cistern.’

  It would only take a few days for the new recruits’ excitement of a long-awaited dream to capsize. The contract they’d signed only gave them status as members of the Indian Followers Corps of the RAF in India, not as Engineers or Technicians. Not only was there no proper accommodation for them, they were treated like intruders. They were shown four tents, dumped on an open piece of ground. They slept 8 men to a tent, putting up with the rigours of sun and rain as well as the winter ‘Quetta Breeze’, that felt like it could cut a man in half if he didn’t bend double in the face of its unremitting drive across the open ground. Once, when heavy rains collapsed the tents, they were given temporary refuge in an empty barrack block. However, the taste of ‘luxury’ soon ended, once the tents were back up. They were back under canvas even while the dry, wind-proof, barrack block remained empty.

  The latrine blocks had no lighting with the excuse that lights would attract mosquitoes, which would attract insects, which would attract lizards which would then attract dangerous snakes. The long nurtured vision of stepping out in a smart uniform were dashed, for there were no Indian Air Force personnel uniforms of any kind, or any plan for there to be one. So for twelve months all wore their own mufti (civilian dress) to
work, denied the look of a collective, military unit.

  There were no cooking utensils, not even a cup to drink tea from! Coming from an environment where a cook was deemed almost as essential as the food itself, the lack of an allocated cook came as a shock. The first thing Harjinder and his colleagues did was to engage a cook, a man named Abdullah, who became almost family to them.

  This group of new entrants represented almost all the technical colleges that then existed in India. In the present multicultural society, and ease of movement around the world, it is easy to forget that the norm then was for people to stay within their region of birth, and the regions of India are a massive diversity in food, culture and language. This was the first time for Bengalis and Madrasis to learn how to eat the chapattis of the North, and the Punjabis to eat rice from the South. Despite the disappointing start and abysmally low standards, Harjinder wrote ‘We enjoyed every minute of our new life.’

  The start to military service differs very little around the world – your introduction to the military life is marching lessons under the guidance of some fearsome, vocal veteran. Their first drill instructor was a fearsome Havildar-Major (Sergeant Major), an infantryman who took a dim view to this new part of ‘his’ military. Harjinder reports him as being only ‘semi-literate’, however, I think all new recruits have similar opinions of their first drill instructor, apart from also doubting their parentage! Apparently, he bore a grudge against the educated classes, or would that just be a grudge against the world? All drill sergeants offer a constant stream of discouragement and put-downs, but this particular one seemed to actually believe his own ranting and wanting to grind them into the dust. Daily, he would address his men saying: ‘You biscuit-eaters will never be able to make it. I’ll make you jump ditches, dig trenches and keep at the double all day. I bet I’ll see you out of Karachi within a month.’ Fortunately for the new recruits, he was replaced by an RAF sergeant. Their fear that a British instructor would take offence at Indians being allowed into ‘his’ Air Force proved unfounded. He was a fairer, more open-minded character than had been their own countryman. Harjinder had his firstmajor surprise.

  The replacement, Flight Sergeant Tilbury, turned out to be ‘an excellent man’. He was a picture of physical fitness, known to be one of the best physical training instructors in the RAF. He taught physical fitness with relish but in these early days he despaired when it came to teaching drill. According to him, it would take the ten trainees six months to learn marching, he claimed to have taught complete parade ground drill to a thousand British Airmen in the same period of time. His main grouse against them was they lacked rhythm. His reasoning for this missing rhythm was because they had never had the opportunity to listen to good wholesome marching music! When you now see the elaborate dance sequence of any Bollywood movie, this reasoning seems hard to believe.

  The ingrained politeness of these educated Indians did not sit well with their new military role. During early training, each trainee took it in turns to take charge of the remaining nine for the day. They couldn’t click their brain out of civilian mode and frequently would say: ‘Please fall in; would you please come here; if you don’t mind…’ On parade, these blissfully happy men would smile and laugh with each other. You can visualise the Flight Sergeants, with veins bulging out of their necks, spit flying from the twisting lips as they bellowed at the men, trying to form them into some form of military unit. Twelve push-ups was soon the punishment for every ‘please’ uttered.

  In what seems like twisting the knife in the wound, the new recruits were taken around the RAF Airmen’s barracks, which were infinitely better than the Indian tented town. If it was a deliberate attempt to dishearten the Indian recruits, it didn’t produce the expected resentment their masters expected. What did surprise Harjinder and team was the RAF’s eating arrangement. He remembers, ‘It was quite an eye-opener for us to see how the RAF men were treated. They queued up and each airman had an enamel plate, spoon, fork and a mug in his hand. As each airman reached the counter his meals were ladled out in a lump on his plate. At the end of his lunch or dinner he had to wash his own plate. We went to our tents and held a hurried meeting. After a long discussion it was decided to part with the new crockery purchased only a week earlier and we all joined in breaking the flowered crockery ceremoniously. We decided to become full-fledged “combatants”, as our instructor put it. We bought enamel mugs and plates and felt very righteous about it.’

  There were the usual demonstrations and expectations of military life, including how to make the beds in the morning, sweep the floor and polish shoes. This was novel to all the recruits, since they were college graduates from good families, many of them had staff to carry out such tasks. Kit was laid out every day where it was regularly and critically inspected by the Orderly Apprentice. This set the standards for Harjinder’s military life and even as a senior officer he would polish his own shoes or Brasso the buckles on his uniform. Another shocking difference from college life was that every morning, they were called upon to carry out physical training for an hour, ending with a 400-yard sprint. After breakfast, an hour’s drill was compulsory. One year of this training developed them into first-class, physically fit, Airmen. Harjinder’s drive to succeed always took him one step further, so much so that his P.T. Instructor wanted him to compete in the quarter-mile event at an all-India meet. His personal best was a challenge to that of Teja Singh, the record holder, meaning that he had a real chance to take the title. On the advice from the technical instructors, the idea was dropped, with the staff thinking that it would have taken up too much of Harjinder’s course time.

  We know of the men who influenced Harjinder’s early days, but now we must introduce Warrant Officer H.E. Newing, an engineer, and his appointed technical instructor. Newing was to take this man, who had a fairly basic idea of military life, a better-than-average knowledge of theoretical engineering, but little practical skill, and shape the engineer within Harjinder. Fortunately for Newing, his student was a man who had complete dedication, determination and drive to make the Indian Air Force experiment work, and to be the best he could within it. Newing had never been to an engineering college, but after years of service, he knew his trade inside out. It was he who was responsible for giving the IAF an excellent technical start in its formative years. He was not only a conscientious instructor, but also took great pride in his Indian apprentices, something few of his countrymen would do. Although he was supposed to teach them only technical trades, he gave them all sorts of advice, and was the main force to turn them into fully-fledged servicemen. When Harjinder looks back to these first few steps, he writes that no amount of praise would be too much for this man. Needless to say, Newing was not the norm within the staff at Karachi.

  Initially, Harjinder’s gang threw themselves into their new military existence, without fuss, and they didn’t question the widely-held view of those above that they were incapable of little more than eating and breathing. However, this enthusiasm could not take the continuous abuse daily showered upon them, and it soon began to fade. The honeymoon period had inexorably come to an end. Someone suggested that a letter of resignation, signed by all, should be sent Delhi, letting them know that the RAF authorities were not willing to play the game, not taking them seriously as engineers. When the letter reached Newing, it was Harjinder he called aside immediately and said: ‘I know you are the ringleader. I also know that you led a strike of students in Lahore. So you must be a natural leader. You can lead these men to mutiny, or you can lead them along the right path. Staying the course here will be your chance to prove that Indians can face it, and learn to defend their own country; if you fail now, there will never be an Indian Squadron.’

  There is no doubt that Harjinder held Newing in very high esteem, because he sincerely took his words in, and the truth they conveyed. He vowed there and then that he would suffer all frustration and indignity, but never quit the Air Force. He was tested time and time again, but he wo
uld keep this vow throughout his career, even as some of those around him would eventually allow themselves to be ground down in the dirt.

  It was Harjinder’s influence on the rest of the recruits that led them all to follow his determination at this stage, not to give up yet, to suffer for the sake of building up an Indian Air Force. The mood of the country outside the boundary of wire surrounding their camp was totally different, with the Non-Cooperation Movement at its height. Only a year before, Gandhi had walked 241 miles with his followers, newsmen following this strange caravan, to the Arabian sea at Dandi. His simple act of scooping a piece of caked salt from the beach, crumpling it and handing it out in defiance of the British salt tax, spurred the people on into non-cooperation. When arrested with thousands of others, he managed to send a last message: ‘The honour of India has been symbolised by a fistful of salt in the hand of a man of non-violence. The fist which held the salt may be broken, but it will not yield up its salt.’

  Released from jail, Gandhi was now requested to attend talks with the heads of the British Raj, much to Churchill’s disgust. He was a staunch opponent to any Dominion Status that he felt would lead to the unthinkable Independence for India. In a speech to the West Essex Conservative Association in 1931 he said: ‘It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace.’