Four Miles to Freedom

by Faith Johnston

  His reputation for luck had been reinforced during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. Although fully operational on the Hunter only a week before that war started, Dilip had been in Delhi when his squadron commander answered a call for replacements from another squadron that had experienced heavy losses. Dilip and another pilot grabbed their helmets and took off immediately. Forty minutes later they reached Halwara, a base near the front.

  Although Dilip was hit in his first sortie from Halwara, through a combination of good luck and competent flying, he had managed to save both his plane and his life. The target that day was a column of tanks. When they reached the target, the Hunters were greeted by ack-ack from anti-aircraft guns mounted on the tanks. Dilip, flying fourth, got the worst of it. The first plane can count on the element of surprise, but by the time the fourth makes its attack the gunners have had the time to correct and coordinate their fire.

  Just into the dive, Dilip’s Hunter was hit. Suddenly the cockpit filled with mist and ambient noise as cooler air and the sound of guns penetrated the cockpit. A half-inch bullet had pierced the floor of the cockpit and hit his right shoulder before exiting through the Plexiglas canopy.

  He was lucky. If he hadn’t been leaning forward to peer through the gun sight his head would have been in the path of the bullet.

  As Dilip pulled out of the attack he felt a sharp pain in his arm and realized his G-suit was already soaked with blood. He decided not to report it. He was afraid the attack might be aborted if he mentioned he had been wounded. Once the four planes had exited the target area, he radioed that he had been hit in the right arm and was bleeding profusely. His flight commander suggested he eject as soon as they reached Indian territory. ‘You might be able to fly with one arm,’ he said, ‘but you’ll never be able to land.’

  But Dilip hadn’t heeded that advice. He’d been determined to try a landing. He was successful on his second attempt.

  An inspection of Parulkar’s Hunter revealed that he had made the right decision. After piercing his shoulder the bullet had gone through the headrest and the top of the ejection seat. In the process, it had severely frayed the static line that connects the drogue parachute with the main parachute. Had he ejected, the main chute would not have deployed.

  Now, six years later, Dilip was flying his single-engine Russian fighter one hundred metres above the Punjab plains. He was travelling at a speed of a thousand kilometres an hour. Below him the wheat and cane were a blur of green. There was no time to think of luck or fate or invincibility. That was what he loved about flying. When you fly fighters there is no time to think of anything but the present task. It requires all your concentration.

  Capture

  Their target that morning was only 125 kilometres from Adampur and they reached it in less than ten minutes, flying low all the way. One by one the SU7s rose and dove, firing their rockets and dropping bombs. As usual Dilip was in fourth position. He remembers seeing his colleagues hit the target.

  That was his last clear memory for several days. The memories he does have are brief, like photo flashes with nothing to connect them.

  He vaguely remembers the plane being hit and going out of control. ‘I was lucky the plane pitched upwards, not downwards. I remember ejecting. It was almost a reflex. There was no choice. It was very different in 1965—I had a choice then.’

  ‘Ejecting is like shooting a bullet,’ he explains, ‘and you are the bullet.’

  His next memory is of a mob of people surrounding him and beating him with sticks, fists, feet. When he tells this story, his listeners often respond with, ‘Oh, how terrible!’ but Dilip has never seen it that way. ‘We were attacking these people. Their homes were being destroyed. I didn’t expect them to run up and kiss me!’

  He remembers riding in the back of a truck, blindfolded. It is a long ride and very cold. His head and knees are bandaged but it isn’t his bruises and scrapes that are bothering him. One of his feet is freezing. He realizes he is missing his boot and that his foot is completely bare. ‘Where is my boot?’ he keeps asking.

  Then he is in a cold, damp, dimly lit cell, God knows where. The cell is about seven feet by eight and has no window. The only furniture is a charpoy. The single light bulb in the ceiling, controlled by a switch outside, is never turned off. For days he wears the shirt and pants he had put on the morning of 10 December. The mob had ripped off his G-suit and taken everything else, including the revolver, the Pakistani currency and his watch. But the G-suit, or flying overall, is what he misses most because of the cold. He has two blankets. He puts one under him and one over but it’s still impossible to warm up, even in the middle of the day. Meals are delivered to the cell and when he needs the toilet he reaches through the bars of an inner door to an outer door made of wood and knocks. A guard comes eventually with handcuffs and a blindfold and leads him to the toilet.

  Several times he is handcuffed and blindfolded and taken to a larger room for interrogation. He actually looks forward to interrogation because it is very cold and the interrogator always begins with the question, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ and then sends for two cups of tea, one for himself, and one for Dilip. And it is much better tea than that delivered to the cells twice a day. Sometimes there is even a second cup.

  The interrogators threaten death, but they never touch him. He finds the whole thing ridiculous. It is the typical good cop, bad cop routine. When you get the good cop he tries to be chummy. ‘What did you do in Delhi for fun?’ the good cop asks him once.

  The bad cop is equally predictable. He threatens Dilip, calls him an infidel dog, and curses India. It is all so clearly an act that Dilip doesn’t take it seriously. ‘But I didn’t take anything very seriously then,’ he remembers. ‘Everything was a lark.’

  After several days he still has no idea where he is. The interrogators seek information—mainly technical questions about the Sukhoi 7 and airfield defence—but they are willing to give no information themselves, and the guards are the same.

  Then one day he has a stroke of luck. The hole in the wooden door is covered by a cardboard flap on the outside. Whenever the guards want to observe the prisoner, day or night, they lift the flap and look in. Dilip discovers that if he reaches through the bars and pushes the flap out just a little he can see the path in front of his cell. He already knows from his trips back and forth to the toilet that his cell faces a courtyard, with the toilet located on the other side. One day he pushes out the flap at just the right moment to glimpse a guard’s trousers and belt buckle; on the buckle is engraved ‘Rawalpindi Police’.

  The interrogations continue. One day, the bad cop asks him to draw a map of the Adampur airfield. He can picture the airfield clearly, both from the air and from the ground—all the rows of blast pens sheltering the fighters, the anti-aircraft guns, the troops patrolling the perimeter. But he decides to give them a sketch map of the Santa Cruz airport in Bombay instead. All pilots in India knew that airport well.

  ‘“Where are the guns?” asks the bad cop. “Where are the anti-aircraft missiles?” So I drew them at random.’

  ‘The man left the room with the sketch and came back livid. “You’ve been fooling with us,” he said. “Do you want to go home alive or not?” He knew I didn’t take him seriously. He was so furious that he had me face the corner and didn’t let me sit down. He told the guard in Urdu, “If he tries anything, shoot him.”’ Dilip got the message.

  ‘Not being fed didn’t bother me but I did get tired of standing. Once I started to squat, but then I heard the guard loading his rifle so I changed my mind and stood up again. A little later the guard said, “Sahib, your legs must be paining. You sit down. If someone comes, I will cough and you stand up.”’

  The kindness of that guard warms his heart even forty years later. And so does the full story of his rescue, which he learned about later. One day a civilian policeman appeared at the camp, dressed in uniform, and asked to see him. He was a chap of about forty, with a twinkle in his
eye, obviously very pleased with himself. He told Dilip that he had been on duty the day Dilip’s plane was downed and he had been surrounded by an angry mob. ‘I called a halt to the beating,’ the policeman said. ‘I told them “this guy is worth more to us alive than dead,” and they stopped.’ The policeman had taken Dilip to the airbase where he was given first aid. But his interest hadn’t stopped there. He had travelled all the way from Lahore to Pindi to find out how he was faring.

  One day an American interrogates Dilip. A tall man of about fifty, with blue eyes, he is wearing the one-star insignia of a brigadier general in the US Air Force. He sports an impressive row of medals, and is both friendly and physically imposing, as Americans tend to be. When he introduces himself he is disappointed that Dilip does not recognize his name immediately. The man’s main interest is gathering technical information about the Sukhoi 7.

  Later, when the downed pilots meet and compare notes, they are surprised and impressed but also outraged to learn that they had been interrogated by Chuck Yeager—an important guy, no doubt about that. In 1947 he had been the first pilot to break the sound barrier and later, in the 1960s, he’d trained astronauts for the American space programme. But what was he doing in Pakistan?

  Dilip and his mates all agree that the Pakistani Air Force has the right to question them. And they have the right to give only name, rank and serial number, and any innocuous information they can cough up in order save their necks. But what right has this American? They plan, when they get back home, to report this incident. ‘How about sending a mission to North Vietnam?’ they will say. ‘I think we need to interrogate some downed American pilots there.’

  Later still, they learn that right at the end of his career (1971−73), Chuck Yeager served as an advisor to the Pakistan Air Force. During the 1971 War, Yeager’s own twin-engine Beechcraft had been destroyed in an Indian Air Force raid on the Chaklala air base near Rawalpindi. They will also learn that in the hope of pressuring the American government to supply Pakistan with more planes, Yeager had predicted India could win a war against Pakistan in two weeks. He had certainly been right about that.

  On 16 December, six days after Dilip’s capture, Pakistan’s army in the east surrenders, and the following day the war is over. India has won an amazing victory, due largely to careful preparation, air superiority, and the swift advance of the Indian Army into Bangladesh. At the outset of the war the Pakistani Air Force had only one squadron in the east, stationed in Dacca. On 6 December, only two days into the war, IAF Mig-21s bombed the Dacca airfield with such force and accuracy that the lone PAF squadron there was grounded for the duration. From that day on Pakistani ground troops had no protection from the air, so Indian paratroopers and helicopters could leap ahead of their own ground forces with little opposition.

  As a result of India’s support Bangladesh now has its independence. Pakistan holds approximately 600 POWs, including twelve airmen, while India and Bangladesh hold a whopping 93,000 POWs.

  The news of the extent of the victory takes weeks to reach the IAF POWs in Pakistan. They are pretty sure the war has ended; they no longer hear the whine of air raid sirens, the rumble of heavy planes taking off or landing at the air base nearby. But who has won? Are they winners or losers? Dilip would like to know. He would like to chat up the guards on his trips back and forth to the toilet, but they seem to be a surly lot. Either they are obeying orders, or actively hostile, he isn’t sure which.

  If the war is really over he knows that the next step will be a prisoner exchange. After the 1965 War, Pakistan held seven IAF pilots prisoner for four months. From what he’s heard, they had a rough experience, though the medical care was all right. One of those prisoners was the son of the Army Chief of Staff, General Cariappa. He was offered preferential treatment but refused it, and so did his father, on his behalf. He’s also heard that the PAF POWs held in India were treated very well. The IAF had considerable sympathy for the PAF pilots whose chances of survival were poor because their Sabres lacked good low-level ejection seats. In Delhi the three surviving pilots were lodged in a posh area, not far from the prime minister’s residence, and they were guarded by IAF officers. According to rumour, they were even taken to Connaught Place for a movie.

  Dilip wonders what kind of treatment he can expect now that the war has ended, and how long it will take to negotiate a prisoner exchange this time. But that isn’t his main concern. He knew several of the pilots captured in 1965. When they returned to India, his first question to them was, ‘Did you try to escape?’ and their answer was ‘no’.

  The question of capture is something all fighter pilots have to take seriously. Ending up a POW is an occupational hazard. If your plane goes down, it usually happens in enemy territory. After 1965 Dilip had decided that if he were captured, he would make every effort to escape. His vow was not a secret. In 1969, over dinner in Delhi with his commanding officer Wing Commander M.S. Bawa and his wife, he mentioned his intention.

  ‘No,’ said Bawa, ‘it would be far too dangerous. Don’t be a fool.’

  ‘It would be my duty,’ Dilip told Bawa. ‘Isn’t it the duty of every POW to escape if at all possible?’

  But for Dilip escape wasn’t just a matter of duty. Planning and executing an escape, using his wits to counter all obstacles, this was the ultimate adventure. He’d watched Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Of course the story was jazzed up for the movies but most of it was true; over seventy airmen had tunnelled their way out of a German POW camp during World War II. They had mustered all their determination and ingenuity to design and dig a series of tunnels. They had forged documents and scrounged clothing that would pass as civvies. Then they had taken their chances.

  And he’d read Papillon, too, the story of Henri Charrière’s escape from Devil’s Island in French Guyana. How clever Charrière had been, watching the waves, observing that every seventh wave was the most powerful, that flotsam thrown on that wave never came back. He’d made himself a raft of coconuts and floated out to sea. For Dilip, it was a lesson in confidence and determination and, above all, in perseverance. And now his turn had come. Why not an Indian escape story for a change?

  It isn’t long after the 1971 War ends that little by little the routine at the prison in Rawalpindi begins to ease. Occasionally the wooden door on Dilip’s cell is left open, and one day he sees another prisoner being led, blindfolded, to the toilet. He’s a very tall, slim fellow. Even without seeing his face Dilip thinks he recognizes the man. ‘Vikram!’ he calls out. ‘Is that you?’ Dilip and Flight Lieutenant Aditya Vikram Pethia had been flying instructors together.

  The next time he sees Pethia being led past, he begins to joke with him and another voice joins in, from the cell on his left. ‘Is that you, Dilip?’ the voice says. ‘I’m Kamy.’ He had met Squadron Leader Kamat only once in the Adampur mess, just before the war. Kamy had ejected late and his parachute had not fully opened by the time he hit the ground. He had suffered multiple fractures in both legs and was in plaster from his ankles to his groin.

  Soon after this, interrogations end and the guards dispense with the handcuffs and blindfolds on the trips to the toilet. Dilip can see that the camp is a walled compound with several clusters of cells and offices set around an open yard. In typical military fashion there is a guardhouse at the gate. In the same block as the guardhouse are four solitary cells. The place wasn’t built to house more than four prisoners at a time. All the other cells, including Dilip’s, have been improvised from offices or storage rooms.

  After taking stock of the lay of the land, Dilip devises his first plan of escape. He observes that at any one time there are four or five armed guards on patrol. One of them, the one in charge, is always a PAF corporal. At night the corporal sits in the guardhouse, making rounds occasionally. The others, posted around the compound, are young jawans from the army. They work in shifts around the clock, and those on the night shift are inevitably weary.

  His plan is to ask to be taken to t
he toilet in the middle of the night. On the way there or back he will grab the guard’s gun from his holster and take him hostage. Then he will demand a plane for Delhi. It isn’t an original idea—he’s heard of an Italian fellow using a hostage to hijack a plane in the USA and divert it to Italy. It is a plan that just might work. And it is the only one he can think of at the moment.

  Rawalpindi

  (13 August 1972)

  After they had walked about a hundred yards down Mall Road, all the street lights went out. They kept walking happily along despite the dark and the rain and, following Chati’s instructions, turned left onto another broad road. After walking for close to an hour along deserted streets, they came to a junction that was hopping with life despite the hour and the power failure. Here, at last, was the interstate bus station and right beside them was a bus with its engine idling.

  ‘Peshawar, jana hai bhai?’ shouted the driver. ‘Peshawar, Peshawar!’ The three men hopped on immediately and took seats towards the back of the bus, near the rear exit.

  ‘We climbed in hoping the bus would start off quickly,’ remembers Sinhji. ‘However, it held on till it was packed to capacity and that took about an hour. What was uncomfortable is that the conductor asked us in broken English for the fare. Normally it is only Urdu, not pure Urdu but something similar to our Hindustani that is spoken all over. Even PAF officers greet each other with ‘salaam alekum’, not good morning. So this attempt at English by the smiling conductor made us rather self-conscious but all we could do was sit tight and hope for the best.’