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Shimmering Dust. The major theater of war is the broad Punjab plain, which stretches flat from horizon to horizon. It is lushly green, dotted with clumps of trees, laced by canals. The days are swelteringly hot, and dust clouds shimmer in the glaring sun. It is Rudyard Kipling country, immortalized in such books as Kim and Indian Tales. And the soldiers on both sides are very like the men Kipling so deeply revered. The officers are British-trained, and many are graduates of Sandhurst. They have the British manner, right down to clipped accents, mustaches and swagger sticks. The enlisted men are also right out of Kipling's pages—sturdy Jats and turbaned Sikhs, rawboned Pathans and sinewy Sindhis, volunteers all, whose regimental flags are inscribed with battle names ranging from Ypres and Gallipoli to El Alamein and Monte Cassino and Rangoon.
Since its army is much the larger (867,000 men to 253,000), India went on the attack in five widely separated sectors of the Punjab front—three columns aimed at encircling Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city, one thrust at Sialkot, and the last struck at Karachi via the town of Gadra. The Indians hoped to force the dispersion of the smaller but better-trained and -armed Pakistani forces and then chop them up piecemeal.
The strategy worked, at least partially. A Pakistani armored force that had driven 30 miles into Kashmir with the object of seizing Jammu city, and thus cutting off more than 100,000 Indian troops in Kashmir, slowed down before reaching its goal and detached tanks to defend Sialkot.
In the air, it was much the same story—Indian quantity and Pakistan quality. Indian pilots are flying a variety of fighters, from French Mystères and British Vampires to Russian MIG-21s and Indian-built Gnats. The Pakistanis have U.S. supersonic jets, which seem to have made a spectacular number of kills—Pakistani Air Vice Marshal Nur Khan claims that 108 Indian planes have been shot down. If true, that amounts to a fifth of the Indian air force.
At week's end, both armies were digging in along the Punjab plain, their battalions stretching 800 miles, from the Kashmir border to the Rann of Kutch on the Arabian Sea. New Delhi reported "very fierce fighting" around Lahore and Sialkot and said its tank forces had killed two Pakistani generals, but neither side was claiming major advances and the battle line appeared to be temporarily stable. No ground fighting at all was reported from East Pakistan, 1,000 miles from the Punjab front, although Shastri warned that Indian troops might move at any time. On the Indian side, there were innumerable reports of nightly drops by Pakistani paratroopers, but police and army patrols found no evidence that the reports were true.
Quavering Voice. When the British left India in 1947, it was commonly said that Pakistan got the military, and India the civil servants. The leaders of the two countries reflect the aphorism. Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan is a strapping six-footer who was educated at Sandhurst, fought valiantly in Burma in World War II. Before seizing control of his chaotic country in a bloodless military coup in 1958, Ayub Khan was commander in chief of Pakistan's army.