When Pakistan airdropped para-commandos on IAF's Adampur, Pathankot, Halwara airbases in 1965

The Print

14-05-2025

This was on the night between 6 and 7 September. On the 6th, PAF carried out rather successful raids on the same bases, causing almost a pulverising destruction at Pathankot. Combined with an early setback over Chhamb, the loss of four Vampires, this was supposed to have left IAF in disarray. And nightly commando drops were to fully take advantage of that.
It was the audacious para-commando attack by Pakistan with the intention of crippling three of IAF's most crucial and largest airbases in Punjab: Pathankot, Halwara (near Ludhiana) and Adampur (near Jalandhar).
Continuing my series of notes on some of the more interesting aspects of the 1965 War in its 50th anniversary year, let me take you back to one of the most remarkable, but short-lived and relatively less talked about events of that war.
These were no small bands of paratroopers. Large C-130 Hercules were used, taking advantage of the fact that India had no night-capable fighters in that war, and three groups of 60 each were dropped in the vicinity of each airbase. Each group was led by one or two officers and a JCO.
The Pathankot group was the first to be discovered. It had an unintercepted yet far-from-perfect drop at 2:30 am and was first noticed by a villager who raised an alarm. The Halwara group was spotted immediately thereafter. The Adampur group, in fact, partly landed inside the airbase perimeter and could have posed an immediate threat to an airbase bustling with frontline fighters and personnel, but only lightly protected by a Punjab Armed Police contingent as nobody had anticipated such tactical aggression and risk-taking by the Pakistanis.
On paper, the plan was brilliant. If it had even partly succeeded, it would have caused a serious blow to IAF strength and India's morale hours after the initial reverses in the air and on the ground, mainly at Pathankot.
But true to Pakistan's track record, from Chhamb to Pathankot to para-commando raids, or from Kutch to Khem Karan to Kargil, great tactical dash is invariably followed by thoughtlessly incompetent execution, leading to disaster.
We have several accounts of the fate of these very well-trained paratroopers. But the amazing thing is how this is one chapter in that 50-year-old war where chroniclers of both sides agree. Both say the operation was a complete rout. Of the 180 para-commandos dropped, 138, including all officers but one, were captured and safely taken to POW camps. Twenty-two were killed, or rather lynched by joint combing teams of villagers armed with sticks, police and even bands of muleteers released by the Army, from the animal transport battalion of the nearby Corps headquarters.
Only 20 were unaccounted for and most escaped back to Pakistan in the fog of war. Most of these were from the Pathankot group, dropped less than 10 km from the border and with plenty of ravines, riverine tracks to navigate back along. The one notable, commando-style escape was of Major Hazur Hasnain, the Halwara group commander who, along with his buddy, hijacked an IAF jeep and somehow managed to return safe. I take the figures from Lt General Harbaksh's book, but Pakistani accounts fully confirm these.
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The Pakistani accounts, latest of which comes now from several participants in the wake of the 1965@50 commemorations, acknowledged the para-commando disaster but blamed it on poor briefing, planning and callous arrogance of the commanders. Some of these former Pakistani soldiers even write about having met some of these paratroopers and exchanged notes with them on how badly planned the operation was. I am attaching the account of Col S.G. Mehdi, himself a commando officer then.
The raid had immediately spread some panic on the Indian side. A hurried defence was organised with the police leading the search parties along with large bands of enthusiastic villagers, NCC cadets and, of course, the muleteers whom the Army released to fight one of the most ironical battles ever: muleteer versus para-commando. For airfield defence, at once, a couple of wheeled Armoured Personnel Carriers allocated to the local college NCC wings were spared. By the time the sun shone in the morning, however, even the mopping up was over.
Pakistani accounts, however, claim that the raid caused confusion in Indian HQ and resulted in its 14 Infantry Division, being moved from Lahore to the Sialkot sector to beef up the 1 Corps assault there, was diverted to deal with the paratrooper menace and was therefore delayed. Some fanciful accounts now even claim that in the confusion 14 Division convoys were jammed on the highway and PAF attacked these in daytime.
There is no confirmation from Indian accounts and Harbaksh puts the total numbers of vehicles destroyed by PAF quite low in that war. It's an aside but this incident matches with Anna Hazare's own spiced-up account of having been the lone survivor when PAF hit a troop-truck he was driving on a Punjab highway in that war.
Haste, arrogance and tactical foolhardiness had caused Pakistan the loss of the cream of its special forces then. Mule-drivers, other animal-handlers, NCC cadets, Punjab Police and ordinary villagers had earned their battle honours. The picture of this successful manhunt that I append here has been picked from vayu-sena.tripod.com. It is hazy and old but leaves no doubt what is going on as a motley band of lightly armed Indians, policemen and civilians, hunt for elite Pakistani troops.
This was originally published as a Facebook post by ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on 17 September, 2015.
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