by Mike Edwards
Meanwhile Harjinder and his fellow Hawai Sepoys were to have their own small eating facilities. Bouchier was concerned about the overcrowding of British Airmen in their canteen area and therefore considered separate facilities for his Indians to be the best option. What followed was an ongoing battle to provide them with their basic needs, and overcome the prejudice ingrained in the less-enlightened senior officers. Bouchier went back to the Base Commander, Wing Commander Whitelock, to ask for some basic tables and trestles for their mess. His reply speaks volumes of the man. ‘Bouchier, what on earth do you want trestle tables and benches for? Indians are used to squatting on the ground to eat their meals.’
‘Sir. They are not coolies. They come from good families. Almost all of them are University educated; they speak English, and all their lives they have been used to sitting at a table to take their meals as we do.’
He got the small hut for their use but no tables or benches. His trusty Warrant Officer and Flight Sergeant were given the task to rectify this and from somewhere (always best not to ask the professional scroungers where from!) things appeared in place until a spotless, fully-equipped mess was in use within 4 days.
That was not the end of the matter. When the Air Commander-in-Chief India, Sir John Steel, visited and glanced into this small, inoffensive facility, he ordered Wing Commander Whitelock to ‘Have these tables and benches taken out of here at once. These people from time immemorial have squatted on the sand to take their meals. They don’t need these things.’
Whitelock had a smug smile, but Bouchier was shocked. During his time in Delhi he and his wife had socialised with Sir John and Lady Steel. It was then that Bouchier realised that neither Sir John nor Wing Commander Whitelock wanted his small Indian Air Force to succeed. The furniture was removed in full sight of Sir John, but Flight Sergeant Hill was on the case. By the end of the night all the furniture reappeared.
A few months later Sir John dropped in again, this time unannounced. ‘Whitelock, I thought I told you to get those tables and benches out of here.’ The chess game continued with, Flight Sergeant Hill supervising the removal, and, within a few hours, the replacement of the offensive furniture! It was a dangerous game Bouchier was playing, disobeying the Commander-in-Chief’s orders. To justify this in his military mind, he reasoned that the order had never been given directly to him. Whitelock was ordering the removal, whilst Bouchier was replacing the furniture, shocked at the discovery that somebody was moving it from its correct location! There is no mention of this event in Harjinder’s extensive diaries, so I think we can assume the Indian Sepoys were not even aware of this game of furniture chess.
The Indian Air Force had only just been formed, but there was just not time enough to rest on laurels. New personnel were joining to expand the Flight. The reality was, as a flight of four aircraft, they were just an insignificant speck within the RAF, and so expansion was vital. In 1933, that expansion included Pilot Officer Aspy Engineer, a pilot who had made a name for himself by being the first Indian to fly solo from England to India, thereby winning the Aga Khan Prize in 1930, all at the age of 17. He was the closest thing to an Indian aviation celebrity.
All the Indian pilots going through Cranwell had received honours in all forms of sport including captaining the tennis and hockey teams. Aspy added another trophy to the ‘Indian cabinet’. He was awarded the caterpillar pin, given to those who have been saved by ‘hitting the silk’. As a student pilot doing aerobatics his aircraft has caught fire and over the side went Aspy Engineer using his parachute to save his life and gain the caterpillar pin. On leaving Cranwell he beat all the RAF cadets to win the Grove prize for best pilot in his term. He was a truly gifted pilot and his celebrity status was a gift for the IAF.
In Harjinder’s opinion Aspy was a steady, thorough and conscientious officer. He followed the King’s Regulations to the letter, but had ideas of his own for the future. The first day he was on duty as the Orderly Officer, he went and saw the Commanding Officer with the suggestion that Sepoys should be allowed to employ servants in the barracks, as the British Airmen did, to clean up and lay out their daily kit on the beds. Harjinder was in-charge of the barracks and surprised Engineer when he vehemently opposed this new suggestion. Although British Airmen were allowed this facility Harjinder felt that because the Sepoys were not used to Service life as yet, they had to learn everything from the bottom up. The British men had been through three years’ training at Halton as teenagers, and they had senior Airmen in the barracks to teach them the military way. The Indians were college boys who were in their twenties, less amenable to the rigorous discipline of a military life. Harjinder wanted them to be taught to do things for themselves, and Bouchier agreed with him. Pilot Officer Aspy Engineer, naturally, was very upset at his idea falling on stony ground especially as it was derailed by the very people he was trying to help. In a stunning misjudgement of character, Harjinder told Bouchier that this new officer was very methodical and perhaps idealistic but, wait six months and he will come down with a bump! Harjinder was spectacularly wrong, because Pilot Officer Aspy Engineer’s career went up and up, and later, these two men would regularly spar verbally; Aspy Engineer as the Chief of the Indian Air Force, and Harjinder, one rank below him as his Head of Maintenance in an independent India. That would happen in the 1950s. Back in the 1930’s, the IAF had to learn beyond just flying their Wapiti aircraft. The reality of the job was they had to learn how to use them as tools for warfare.
Four
Death Comes to Visit,
Death Comes to Stay
‘I wish I had also died…’
Thus it was that ‘A’ Flight IAF existed, but now they had to prove they could do the job as well as, if not better than, the RAF could. The only way to achieve this was through training, training, and more training.
That training had a high price.
It was to cost the lives of 16 people…
During the spring of 1933, exercises were carried out with Sindh Independent Brigade near Hyderabad. They operated in active service conditions from open dusty strips over the browns and greens of the surrounding countryside. They flew over the pock-marked firing ranges, blasted by years of explosions on the dusty brown earth. From their back seats, Harjinder and his colleagues watch the arcing shells, fired by the distant artillery, reach the peak of their flight, seeming to hover with in touching distance, before plummeting back to earth with a shower of dirt spraying upwards from the explosion. They would scribble down the coordinates of the hits as the pilots took their Wapitis down to zoom over the heads of the artillerymen. The rear gunner placed his message in a bag, with a colourful streamer attached, and dropped it at the feet of the gun crews. With this information, the artillerymen could adjust their aim on the fictitious enemy and the IAF Wapitis would be back in place to report on the results. True, they had radios in the Wapiti, but they saw the primitive wireless sets in their aeroplanes as useless extra weight to balance the aircraft rather than as an instrument to help the pilot. They were not unique in their mistrust of this new technology. Even at the start of World War II, the senior Spanish Civil War veterans of the Luftwaffe, in their ultra-modern Messerschmitt 109 fighters, thumbed their noses at radios and at the young bucks who suggested their use. The RAF fighters had an edge during the Battle of Britain in 1940, as they were guided onto their foe by ground controllers, whereas the German pilots wandered the skies trying to pick out the tiny specks of would-be targets. Aviation can be cutting-edge in technological terms, but often, it is the minds behind the operation which can be the resistive to any change.
When their week-long exercise was at an end and the dust-streaked Wapitis of the Indian Air Force took off for home, the Indian pilots brought their aircraft in close formation with their boss. The big biplanes bounced around in the warm thermal currents bubbling up from the ground, but the whole Flight held a tight formation. Flight Lieutenant Bouchier looked left and right at these bobbing machines and suddenly felt t
he upsurge of pride burst forth for his little command. He now knew they were matching anything which the RAF could do.
In September of that year, Flight Lieutenant Bouchier, Flying Officers Sircar, Mukerjee, and Awan, together with Sepoy Ram Singh and Harjinder, were posted to Quetta in order to gain experience on the North-West Frontier. The base was situated in high mountainous country, 6,000 feet above sea level, in a small saucer-shaped airstrip near the Afghan border, the gateway to the North-West Frontier proper. Command, back in Delhi, felt that it was necessary to have two complete squadrons based there to patrol over the local tribes. Whilst flying into their new airfield, they had to climb to 12,000 feet and over the Bolan Pass, the drop in temperature at that height a blessed relief. Summer temperatures in Quetta were high, but not unpleasant, due to the lack of humidity. In winter, however, the flight through the Pass would be an exercise in survival, with temperatures on the ground plunging well below freezing. Quetta was very much a military town, with the Army Staff College dominating, and the aerodrome only 3 miles from the town centre. One RAF technician described the town as having only 2 sleazy cinemas, but an official brothel in Chip Street. The airman in question seemed to view the brothel as more acceptable than the cinemas! The golf course was open to Airmen and officers, but the climate was not conducive for a good course. The fairways were sand and the greens were rolled mud, cow dung and straw: best described as ‘browns’. However, golf was not on minds of the new arrivals.
Attached to No. 31 Squadron RAF, the Indians saw the Royal Air Force in its true operational colours for the first time. Harjinder thought there was a casual air about them. For example, it was quite normal to see a British pilot crash an aircraft and walk away with a grin on his face, as if he had just fallen off a bicycle. The IAF didn’t have the luxury to throw aircraft away. Harjinder knew, as the rest did too, that plenty of people further up the chain of command were looking for an excuse to squash them flat.
One day during their stay at Quetta, Flying Officer Mukerjee landed with Harjinder after a routine flight. Harjinder jumped down from his rear cockpit, a place where he now felt completely at home. He organised the men to start refuelling the Wapitis. This was a lengthy process – the fuel was poured slowly from heavy tins, through chamois leather-topped funnels to keep the dust, grit, water, sweat and insects out. As he sweated away, he saw an old Muslim approaching them sheepishly. When the old gent had the courage to complete his final few steps up to the working men, he asked whether the two persons who had come out of the silver machine were in fact Indians as they had the faces of Indians. When he was assured that they were, he spread out his prayer mat on the tarmac, dropped to his knees and began praying. Later, he came up to Harjinder and said; ‘I am an old man. I have always seen white men fly. Today I feel very proud and happy because I have seen two of my own countrymen fly. So I prayed to Allah for your long life and may He be with you wherever you ride in this Wheel of Satan.’
Harjinder was gaining quite a reputation as a mechanic and technician to keep these ‘Wheels of Satan’ flying. This was mainly due to the fact that he saw it as more than just his duty to examine every nut and bolt of his aircraft in detail; he saw it as the whole purpose of his life. One day he was carrying out a check on an aircraft with Ram Singh, each checking and re-checking each other’s work. Head first, Harjinder disappeared deep into the cavernous bowels of the aircraft under the pilot’s seat, examining all the linkages in its belly. The sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes, but a visual check was the only sure way to stay safe. What he saw chilled the sweat on him. The main link from the bottom of the pilot’s control column to the rear elevator tail control surfaces was cracked. The crack had passed through the whole of the eye fitting of the bell crank. Surely, the slightest bump on the next flight would finish the job, leaving the pilot with an interesting headache, as he pulled and pushed a control column that was no longer connected! When this was brought to the notice of Bouchier, Harjinder was rightfully praised for his thoroughness and the incident duly noted in his personal folder. However, the glow from this story so nearly turned sour shortly after. It was only saved by Divine Intervention, or was it his subconscious that was now fully tuned into aeronautical engineering?
A couple of nights later, Harjinder dreamt that a split-pin was missing in the control column universal joint bolt in a particular aircraft. For Harjinder, this was more a nightmare than a dream, and he woke up in a cold sweat. He did as we all do with nightmares, and pushed it aside, telling himself not to be so stupid; but sleep would not come…
The visions of the missing pin were lodged firmly in his mind, gnawing away, no matter what other thoughts he tried to replace them with. Finally, he could take no more, and so gave up; he slipped out of bed before anyone else stirred, and gently padded into the hangar.
A hangar at night takes on a nightmarish quality, as shadows dance, and the quietest of footfalls echo off the corrugated iron walls. He climbed up the side of the fuselage and once again wriggled in, head first, to get a look under the control column in the pilot’s cockpit. In the light of his torch there was the joint with the empty hole where the pin should be, staring at him.
‘I broke out in a sweat thinking of the accident that could have resulted from such negligence, and I thanked my lucky stars that some power from above had drawn my attention to it. Perhaps there was no clairvoyance involved; the explanation could be simple. For the first time in my service career I had been given a chance to look after an aeroplane; no Indian had ever had this opportunity before. Added to this was our love and affection for our Indian pilots, who were fighting against odds to establish one fact; that Indians could fly. To accomplish this, they had developed great initiative and character. They had become good pilots and first-rate officers. It was a matter of pride and pleasure for us to be with them on the ground and to fly with pilots like Mukerjee and Awan. We felt it our sacred duty to concentrate fully on our part of the job, i.e. maintenance. What must have happened in this case was that when I had changed the bushes in the universal joint I must have inadvertently forgotten to replace the split-pin. It was a complicated joint and very awkward to work upon. But after leaving the work, my subconscious mind must have been still working on me in my sleep and thus it pointed out the mistake.’
This single unit of four Wapitis, with their own Indian Engineers, was still viewed as a bit of an oddity by the RAF and one that could be ignored; after all it was bound to fail. The Indians had to win over the RAF, one person at a time.
One day, Flight Sergeant Wilson from the RAF happened to see Harjinder’s two tool boxes; one, a standard Metal Rigger’s tool box, and the other, full of all manner of gadgets fashioned by Harjinder himself. The Flight Sergeant was so intrigued that he called his own Flight Commander who, in turn, called Flight Lieutenant Bouchier to have a look. In front of these officers and men of the RAF, the Flight Commander complimented Harjinder, then added to Bouchier; ‘If I had him in my Flight, I would have promoted him to a Corporal on the spot.’
Flight Lieutenant Bouchier, eyeing Harjinder with approval, smiled and said: ‘I am not lowering the standard of NCOs in the IAF.’
Unknown to Harjinder, Bouchier was already pushing for the stripes of a Corporal to be awarded to Harjinder, but as everyone knew in HQ, Indians just weren’t good enough, were they?! The reality was that Newing’s adverse report on Harjinder had turned from a theoretical college engineer into a practical engineer, who stood out from among the crowd. He was now attracting the attention of the RAF’s own hardened engineers; men not known for giving easy praise to anyone.
The IAF pilots were also sweeping aside prejudices as they came into contact with the RAF personnel. Those more broadminded among the RAF personnel were beginning to mutter in respectful terms regarding the standard of flying of the Indian pilots. They were quiet mutterings, but they were audible enough to create a glow for the Indian Sepoys who regarded their own pilots as heroes. The Sepoys were mortifie
d when their pilots were ordered to scrub and clean the aircraft during one ‘Servicing Day’ in October 1933. You would think it normal for the Airmen to see this as giving assistance to them, but the Sepoys saw it as their pilots being made to do an airman’s work, which was neither proper nor correct. They had earned a good reputation with both Indian and British Airmen, and they gave the Indian men a feeling of delight and pride in all their professionalism to the Service. They all felt that to build an Air Force was the greatest service they could perform for their country. They had jelled as a team, albeit very small, but one where respect ran up and down the power gradient.
This was the embodiment of the Squadron motto, ‘Ittehad Men Shakti Hai’, or ‘In Unity lies Strength’.
The time at Quetta with the RAF was soon over. It was with heavy heart that they left the excitement of this operation station, but, whilst they were waiting to pack up, Pilot Officer Mukerjee solemnly approached the group. Harjinder instinctively knew this was not regrets at leaving – something was wrong.
Mukerjee was the harbinger of news about Pilot Officers Amarjit and Bhupinder Singh.
The early days in aviation were a fraught with risk. Personnel numbers always fluctuated in the Flight with people like the young star Aspy Engineer posted in.
This, however, was their introduction to the brutal reality of how their numbers would reduce.