Danny is on his way from 110 Sqn. in Khumbirgram to 8 Sqn. IAF (but where might that be?)
I had to abandon my DIY bed, but of course stripped off the webbing and put it in my bedroll, so that I could easily rebuild it at the other end. All our previous trips to and fro the "sharp end" had been self-flown, so this one was a bit of an eye-opener.
A bumpy truck ride took us to the railhead at Silchar (the end of the line into our corner of Assam). Then it was a train to some God-forsaken hole in the middle of the Sunderbans (the name "Narayanganj" seems familiar). There we embarked in a stern-wheel paddle steamer (quite a comfortable cabin for the night). This threaded its way through innumerable islands and waterways (I could see where the "dug-out canoe" yarn, told us at Worli, might have come from). Disembarked somewhere in the morning, back on a train to Calcutta - Howrah station again!
This time we did
not bed down there for the night! A good dinner, bed and breakfast in the "Grand", and back on the train for Chaara (I have absolutely no idea where that was), except that it was somewhere in Orissa. On a standard strip-cum-basha camp (indistinguishable from fifty others in the district) was the brand new No. 8 Squadron of the Indian (for a brief period the Royal Indian) Air Force. Or at least the outline of a Squadron.
I think it was a political thing. Independence was in the air, and we wanted to hand over a "going concern", with all three Services up and running after the war. There had been a Royal Indian Navy for years, and an Indian Army from the days of the Mutiny. We had an Indian C.O. (Sqn.Ldr. N. Prasad). He struck me as a very reserved, scholarly, intellectual type, far better suited as a Staff officer than in the rough-and-tumble of Squadron life (he did, IIRC, reach air rank in the postwar IAF).
He was replaced some time in February '44 by Sqn.Ldr. Ira K. Sutherland, a tough New Zealander with a hard reputation as a martinet. The Indian "A" Flight Commander, Flt.Lt. "Pop" Chopra, was the exact opposite of S/Ldr Prasad. A mustachioed, cheerful extrovert, he was the life and soul of the party and very popular with everyone. The British "B" Flight Commander was Flt.Lt. "Bill" Boyd Berry (no hyphen), an excellent Flight leader and well liked. His crews were a mixture of British and all the Dominions, all of them from one or other of the four original ex-Blenheim squadrons.
I can only recall two of the Indian pilots, (F/Os Dhillon and Chakravarthy), and there were two or three Sikhs. They were all good chaps, but most had come straight from the OTU in Peshawar. How much bombing practice they had had there, I don't know, but it can have been nothing like the four months' intensive work we'd been able to put in on the Damodar range early in the year. The Indian ground crews were very inexperienced, and needed close supervision by RAF NCOs and airmen trawled, like us, from the squadrons.
This Indian nucleus had had their aircraft for some weeks before we arrived, but they had done little with them. Certainly they had done no bombing (
AFAIK, there wasn't even a range). Much more to the point, they hadn't swung any compasses, or belted-up a single round of ammunition for their guns.
(Since first writing this, I find that you can Google: "
Officers and Flight Crew List - 8 Squadron IAF (1939-47)" and go straight to a most useful Nominal Roll in
BHARAT RAKSHAK. It seems that on 26 Nov '43, 20 RAF aircrew joined 8 Sqdn - many names familiar to me, my own included!, and a further 39 before hostilities ended. (But they converted from VVs to Spit XIVs later in '44, so many of the later pilots would have been on the Spits.......D.).
Even so, the plain fact was that ten VV crews were "transfused" into 8 Sqdn, which is almost a whole squadron, so what we had was pretty well a RAF Squadron with an Indian component. For this two of the RAF units were now three trained crews short, the others two short each.
Our location at the time we arrived is stated as "Phaphamau" . I thought I knew India, but had to go to Google for this. It's near Allahabad, half way to Delhi, at least 400 miles away! But 8 Sqn had spent some time there before we came on the scene; we did not meet them until later in Chaara; it seems that for some reason we were "put on the books" of the earlier place.
Now is as good a time as any to broach the subject which has been the Elephant in the Room so far: How did we and our new Indian squadron colleagues get on together ? Now I must think hard, and choose my words carefully, so as (on the one hand) not to give offence and (on the other) to tell as honest an account as my memory allows.
First: were our relations cordial? Answer: No.............Were they hostile? Answer: No........ I would say that we were in a state of mutual voluntary apartheit, eyeing each other warily, like two strange dogs meeting. There was no suggestion that IAF squadrons in general were in any way less efficient than their RAF counterparts. There were excellent IAF Hurricane squadrons; one close nearby, commanded by the redoubtable S/Ldr Arjan Singh, who would go on to become the CinC of the IAF after Independence. (There was, I am sorry to say, an unjustified and unpardonable slur heard from time to time: "The Indian Air
Farce ", from people who did not know what they were talking about).
It should be remembered that the first Indian officer in the (British) Indian Army was commissioned in only relatively recent times, and in the R.I.N. even more recently. In both cases the introduction was small-scale and progressive. (A number of Indian officers served with distinction in the wartime RAF, and in the other Services in Europe, of course). But from the outset the Indian Air Force seems to have been conceived as an independent, wholly Indian manned body. It is quite understandable that there would be resentment when the RAF "took over" a Unit, an impression confirmed when S/Ldr Prasad was so soon replaced by S/Ldr Sutherland.
Even on an RAF squadron, there is a slight gulf between the two Flights; this was obviously intensified in a "mixed" squadron. There were the obvious cultural differences: separate Messes to accomdate the different diets, and although I think the anterooms of both Officers' and Sergeants' Messes were shared, there wasn't much cross-socialisation in them. In fact, I do not know of any other such squadron, and it is difficult to see what was the purpose of creating this one. On their part the Indian attitude to us, quite understandbly, can best be summed up in a phrase culled from another Thread (in an entirely different context): "They needed us - but they didn't really want us". The day of the Sahib was nearly over.
Do not get too hot under the collar about this if you hold strong views - I have good support from the other side - as will next appear. Wait a bit.
Goodnight all,
Danny42C
Goodness gracious me !