At the start of the war Aspy and ‘A’ Flight were on duty in Karachi, watching for enemy bombers in the sky and U-boat shadows in the water. By 1941, however, they had returned to the Frontier, where the Waziris were being roused by the Faqir of Ipi once again. In March, Aspy led a nocturnal rescue mission to Boya Fort, flying out in the black of night and returning mid-morning on wings tattooed with eighteen bullet holes. That operation would win him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
In June, only days before Manek reached there, Aspy had arrived in Peshawar to take command of No. 2 Squadron. He was only thirty, and not at all the grinning daredevil Manek had imagined and prepared to impress. At their first meeting, the new CO was reserved and oddly focused on protocol. He left Manek with a single, modest piece of advice that would become his own credo. ‘Remember,’ Aspy said, ‘good flying means doing the right thing at the right time.’
Where Aspy was concerned, this meant leaving immediately to fly the duty wing out to Miranshah to get his new squadron blooded. The Waziris now threatened the post at Datta Khel, and four army battalions were sent to meet them, with a train of a thousand mules, trucks and guns. On 7 July, the Winged Arrows dispersed a gang of over two hundred hostiles who blocked the column’s march.
It was from Miranshah that the RAF had led its first entirely independent campaign, in 1925, when GHQ India invited air staff to test their own solution to endless Mahsud raids. Three squadrons of Bristol and de Havilland biplanes rose from Miranshah to make continuous day-and-night attacks on the Mahsud villages; in less than two months, at the cost of only two British lives, the rebels surrendered.
The creation of India’s own air force, in 1932, had made a bold statement: that an imperial armed service could be staffed by Indians alone. Unlike the Army or navy, the IAF was a service of the twentieth century, and in its miniature but modern establishment it reflected new expectations of the country itself. It did not prefer martial races for recruitment, and it scorned the segregation of faiths and castes, the cornerstone of order in the Army. The motto of its first squadron mixed Urdu and Hindi to pointed effect: Ittehad mein shakti hain – ‘In unity there is strength’. But the proud, precocious start of the IAF belied the ancient duty it was made to perform: aiding the RAF in suppressing the Pashtuns. As it grew from a token force during the war, it still upheld the first principle of aerial bombing: that it was used to pay out to Black people the wages of opposition to White rule.
In October of 1941, a hundred badmashes attacked a picket at Asad Khel and were holding back a relief force across a rivulet called the Khaisora. The duty wing was scrambled to the fight, now flying Hawker Audaxes, better than Wapitis, though still canvas biplanes, towed out of their hangars like oxen.3 They were above Asad Khel in twenty minutes. The pilots and observers peered down as bright white runes formed against the barren ground. Below them, signallers rolled out strips of cloth that spelled ‘X–V–T’ followed by cloth discs indicating the distance to the enemy positions. The pilots lined up and dived, squeezing their triggers and tearing up the ground in front of them, while the observers swung their Lewis guns, firing into the blur. The Waziri fighters fired back from wedges in the rock. The formation arced back into the sky, and came back through again and again, giving the infantry a chance to rush forward each time.
After the third pass, one Audax of the IAF climbed out but then sank in a nauseating drop. It recovered, lurched again for height, and buzzed down heavily into the gap between the Army and Pashtun positions. What happened was described by the pilot, Flying Officer Arjan Singh, while he was having his nose stitched up back at the base. His Audax landed hard on the bed of the Khaisora, smashing his face against the instrument panel. His gunner, Ghulam Ali, was so thoroughly disoriented by the shock that he got to his feet and fled – but in the wrong direction. He leapt out of the gully and ran right at the tribesmen, whose bullets popped at the ground by his feet. Arjan Singh, hand over nose, sprinted out in pursuit and finally caught him, fifty yards further up, and turned him around. Both men lay low in a deep cut of the stream bed, listening to the bullets blow past overhead, until they were rescued by the jawans.4
Manek was then still stuck in Peshawar, living out an endless yawn. In the mess, much of the conversation turned on the question of why they policed the Pashtuns at all. Some of the Indian pilots, the more political sort, believed that the Frontier was kept deliberately tense, and that the tribal khels were clay pigeons periodically set off to give them target practice. To Manek this seemed idle talk, the froth of idle hours.
Their cantonment was as mannered as every cantonment in India, and the walled city was out of bounds. In Peshawar the bloody chivalry of the Pathans overlapped with the mass politics of Gandhi’s Congress, giving rise to something the Congress could barely control any more than the government.5
Manek was delirious with impatience before his turn came to join the duty wing. But he was there, in November, on a day that the telephone rang in the office of the Miranshah station commander, and a captain took the handset, listened for a moment and set it back in its cradle. Then he lifted it again to dial a number.
Aspy appeared in the door. ‘XX?’ he asked.
That was the code for an emergency flight. The captain shook his head. ‘Just proscription.’
Years of regular imperial air control had culminated in the proscription bombing policy, with warnings delivered ahead of time, to minimise civilian casualties. One plane would go out and drop pamphlets over the target area, ordering the evacuation of women and children from certain villages; the next day, anything or anyone that remained – people, livestock, buildings – became a sanctioned target.6
Manek and the other pilots had until late morning to gather for the briefing, around a table covered with indexed maps and catalogued photographs. Soon they would go over their grid references, approaches, ordnance and the colours of the day with Aspy, but first they were addressed by the political agent, a quiet man Manek had seen flitting in and out of Miranshah wearing a captain’s pips and speaking mainly to his driver in fluent Pashto. He began by describing the high pastoral villages and cave dwellings of the target area. Four days of bombing would be sufficient to bring their leaders to the jirga, where he would negotiate their compliance, confiscate arms and ‘make sure they understand the good intentions of the government’. He didn’t say with what the tribesmen were being asked to comply. In the stick-and-carrot strategy of India’s government, they were the stick; their concern was only where to strike and how hard.
Manek wrote to Kosh of his excitement, and told her he’d be carrying her photo in his pocket. It was folded up with his blood chit, which the pilots called a ‘goolie chit’ because it promised in three languages a reward to anyone who helped an injured pilot return to base with all his bits intact. Kosh wasn’t to worry, though: the Pashtun weapons were mostly old Lee-Enfields and Italian Martinis, and rifles built on British patterns in their own workshops. The pilots were never in range. He’d be in no danger.
He hadn’t promised not to freeze to death, though, Manek thought as he pulled the Audax into the air. It was a slow plane but its cockpits were open. It was winter now: the snow caps had grown on the further peaks of the Hindu Kush, and the Audax swam through their icy breath. Manek and his observer wore hooded, fur-lined jackets, inverted-leather boots and gloves, with fur on the inner lining. He felt like a yak flipped inside out.
All about him the aircraft’s Kestrel IIB engines throbbed and the atmosphere hummed tunes in the plane’s wires. They were navigating by the line of a valley, centred on a pink vein of soft river bed. Before the days of the air