CYRIL Almeida’s article ‘Gibraltar, Grand Slam and war’ lacks substance. Grand Slam was not launched to achieve victory but to release pressure on Muzzafarabad.

The loss of Hajipir Pass, the principal logistic base for the infiltrators, and Indian successes in the Neelam valley and opposite Uri on Aug 29-31, 1965, unnerved the Pakistani GHQ which assumed that Muzaffarabad was about to be attacked.

It was under these circumstances that GHQ ordered the execution of Grand Slam, with the aim of relieving Indian pressure against Muzaffarabad, Maj-Gen Shaukat Riza, the official historian of the 1965 war, admitted that by Aug 31 the Indians had ruptured 12 division’s defences and this was the main reason why GHQ decided to attack Chamb.

Shaukat Riza quoted Musa and Chief of General Staff Sher Bahadur as stating that the main reason for the Grand Slam was that “there was danger of Indians capturing Muzaffarabad”.

Musa did not mention Muzaffarabad but merely stated that the main object of launching Grand Slam was ‘reducing pressure in the north by capturing Chamb and threatening Akhnur’.

Mahmood’s book is not an official history at all, but Quetta command and staff college’s teaching handbook, plagiarised by Mahmud. The official history of the Pakistan Army is Maj-Gen Shaukat Riza’s book published in 1984.

Noted Indian analyst Ravi Rikhye stated that the Pakistani attack in Khem Karan could have been India’s Panipat. Gen Harbaksh Singh of India in his book ‘War dispatches’ similarly noted that the main Pakistani attack could have serious consequences for India and stated that he was actually told by the Indian Army chief to withdraw to the Beas River abandoning Amritsar -- an order that he refused.

The failure was not in Grand Slam but in the change of command that delayed the offensive for 48 hours and the main Pakistani attack at Khem Karan where Pakistan’s first armoured division failed to achieve a breakthrough despite a seven-to-one superiority in tanks.

Major (r) Agha Humayun Amin

Kabul

Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2015

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