1186 Gen Vaidya was in the thick of the bloodiest battles of the 1971 war in the western sector. Tribune Archives: Photo by Yog Joy
Sujan Dutta
On a cold winter night when his men in the tanks were still waiting to weave a way through fields that could explode under their tracks, the Brigadier hustled from one machine to another. Stopping at the head of a column where a trawl tank was in the lead, he spoke a few words with another officer, a Sapper, on what the least risky path would be.
There was no guarantee that the least risky meant it would also be safe. This would be the third minefield in a row. The semi-official history of the war would later record it as 1,460 yards wide.
411
Lt Col Dilbag Singh Dabas (Retd)
THIRTEEN days before the declaration of war in 1971, Pakistan army launched its biggest attack on the eastern front. The action took place near Garibpur village, some 7 km inside south-western East Pakistan, wherein one battalion of the Indian Army, with support from the artillery, armour and engineers, successfully took on the might of the enemy’s two infantry battalions supported by matching artillery, armour and recce and support combat elements.
In the early hours of November 21, under cover of dense fog, Pakistan’s 107 Infantry Brigade’s 6th and 21st Punjab battalions, supported by 49th and 55th Field Regiments (artillery) and 3 Independent Armoured Squadron (Chaffees), attacked Indian Army’s 14th Punjab Battalion (Nabha Akal) while it was in the process of organising its defences between Garibpur and Jagannathpur villages in Jessore sector.
Advertisement
The harsh realities of World War One for soldiers around the world have been brought into sharp focus in a series of vivid colourised photographs.
Images show British soldiers at a captured trench pointing at a sign that says old hun line , Indian cavalry after their charge at the Somme in 1916, and an Irish soldier in a trench in Mesopotamia.
Other striking pictures show Canadian soldiers in the Battle of Amiens in 1918, the second wave of Russian troops waiting to go over the top in Ukraine in 1917 and the Lancashire Fusiliers on a boat at Gallipoli in 1915.
The original black and white photographs were painstakingly colourised by Welsh electrician Royston Leonard, 56, from Cardiff.