In August 1965, Pakistan initiated a daring plan to annex Kashmir by infiltrating thousands of trained fighters and agent provocateurs into the Srinagar Valley.
Codenamed Operation Gibraltar, the attempt failed as Indian forces repulsed the infiltrators and the expected popular Kashmiri uprising never materialised. What happened instead was total war between India and Pakistan, as India had long warned Pakistan that any attack on Kashmir would be construed as an attack on India.
By the time, the war ended on 23 September, neither side had managed to make any significant territorial gains but all of Pakistan’s strategic aims were defeated. The book, The India-Pakistan War of 1965, is all about what happened in those tumultuous days. It is not just another account of the war but an updated official history published for the first time.
The book explains what prompted the war and recounts how it escalated into a multi-front conflict. After having failed in the Kashmir Valley, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Ayub Khan had launched a massive offensive in Chhamb, northwest of Jammu. This operation was codenamed “Grand Slam” and the ultimate aim was to capture Jammu town and cut off communications between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of India. The battle raged for days but the Pakistani forces could not make a breakthrough as desperate Indian defenders clung on to the positions they had been pushed back to.
Five days later, on 6 September, India and Pakistan were officially at war and the Indian Army divisions had opened up several fronts. The Punjab-based XI Corps began its assault across the border with the aim of threatening Lahore. Two days later, India’s hastily put together offensive formation, the 1 Corps, began its thrust into Pakistan in the Sialkot-Chawinda area. Later that day, Indian troops in the Barmer sector of Rajasthan crossed the desert to occupy Gadra city inside Pakistan. Pakistan was soon facing an all-out Indian offensive and was forced to pull troops away from Chhamb to defend its heartland.
The official records of the war were de-classified by the Indian ministry of defence in 2005 and a year before that U.P. Thapliyal, former director of the ministry’s history division, was tasked to edit and update the official history of the war originally compiled by military historian S.N. Prasad in the 1980s. Mr Prasad along with a team of researchers had painstakingly put together this history in the form of a book from accounts culled from war diaries, Pakistani versions of the battles, journals and gazetteers.
The best thing about the book is that it is not another attempt at official propaganda. Rather, it seeks to present objective accounts of the main battles and assesses them with the advantage of hindsight. The result is a remarkable book that holds lessons for military strategists, researchers and historians.
The book is well organised with a chapter devoted to the developments in each sector starting from Kashmir in the north to Barmer in the south. The battles in the Chhamb sector, the series of clashes in the Punjab and the 1 Corps’ failed attempts in the Sialkot sector are dealt with in great detail. Orbats for each operation are provided as are aims, progress and assessments.
The book brings out, among other things, the lack of preparation of the Indian Army leadership and the political leadership’s limited understanding of military affairs. The Indian Navy, for instance, was not assigned any role whatsoever despite its fleet of operationally capable warships and a substantial air arm. The Indian Air Force too was not properly tasked and virtually operated on its own. The pre-emptive Pakistan Air Force (PAF) attacks on forward Indian airfields so unnerved the IAF that it deployed an inordinately large part of its force to guard the skies thus depriving the Indian Army of more ground support sorties. These are other shortcomings have been thoroughly discussed in the book.
Perhaps the best parts of the book are about the valour displayed by the Indian soldiers in situations of great adversity. The battle of Assal Uttar, where Indian troops halted the advance of Pakistan’s formidable 1st Armoured Division equipped with the state-of-the-art Patton tanks, is among those events that will forever be recounted in Indian military circles. The fields of Punjab where the battle took place became known as Patton Nagar because of the large numbers of destroyed Pakistani tanks.
While the book’s focus is not on individual heroism, it does detail some of the exceptional acts of courage, like that of Havildar Abdul Hamid of 4 Grenadiers. At the battle of Assal Uttar, Hamid was defending a vital position when Pakistani Patton tanks broke through the Indian defences; he took off on a jeep mounted with a recoilless gun and knocked out three Pattons before being mortally wounded. He was awarded the country’s highest military honour, the Param Vir Chakra, posthumously.
The book acknowledges scores of Indian soldiers and officers, who gave up their lives in acts of extra-ordinary bravery. These individual stories and many stirring battles retold in the impassive style of old gazetteers come together to provide a straight but powerful account of the war that shook India in 1965.

The author is an independent security and political risk consultant