Playground turned battlefield

Lt Gen Baljit Singh (Retd)

On the bright and sunny December 3, 1971, all 16 of us from 12 Field Regiment converged at our battle location, west of the Manawar Tawi rivulet, at 12.30 pm sharp. The occasion was the farewell lunch of one of our Battery Commanders, Tara Gill, as also to welcome into our fold, TN Konnar. The Officers’ Field Mess was tucked inside a dense cluster of sarkanda reeds, barely 1,500 m from Chhamb village.

Another field regiment was similarly deployed in the sarkanda shrubbery, in the space between Chhamb and our battle location. And one battery of 120 mm heavy mortars was in dug-down pits about 2 km ahead of us. As there was just no warning of the war yet, it was natural that we would invite their officers to join us for lunch.

In the ensuing bonhomie, they decided to field a volleyball team each in the vicinity of Chhamb. Once the game picked up the tempo, some 50 residents also joined the cheering spectators. Who could have imagined that the area around the volleyball ground would be the flashpoint of a fierce battle an hour later; or for that matter, whether among the “spectators” were agents from across the border? 

On termination, as the officers sat sipping cups of steaming hot tea, there were muffled sounds of loud explosions from the hinterland. The very next moment, the adjutant announced that the Pakistan Air Force had signalled the war with pre-emptive strikes on our air bases.

The news about the moment of reckoning spread among troops fast. Mahinder Dua, second-in-command of 12 Field, made haste to reach his guns. His spirits soared as he noticed the regimental panditji reading out a shloka and the gunners of the Dogra Battery responding aloud in unison: “Jwala Mata Di Jai”. Concomitantly, the Sikh Battery gunners responded to the granthiji’s call, “Bolay So Nihal,” with a spirited “Sat Siri Akal!” 

Having got back to my affiliated brigade headquarters, I ‘broke radio silence’ and called the regimental command post, “Hello, Romeo Tango Charlie, report my signal, over.” Prompt came an unconventional response from Havildar Swaran Singh, which had me laugh aloud, “Charhdiaan kalaan, saab ji. Out!” Unmindful of the hyper lethal contact battle zone, Swaroop Singh led his detachment from the front and was “mentioned-in-dispatches” for resolute leadership.

That is how the 1971 India-Pakistan War played out at all levels, to a glorious closure even though we were mauled severely in the Chhamb sector for the first 48 hours. Mahinder had barely rechecked the gun-fire data computations when the battle was joined in earnest and our guns responded volley for volley to Pakistan’s sustained fire assaults. On a pitch dark night, such heavy volume of shell-bursts throws up clusters of orange-red flames creating a surreal fireworks display, albeit not too benign.