Behind the Scene: Analysis of India's Military Operations, 1947-1971 - Hardcover

What does a high practitioner of the military art and sciences, a successful commander and trainer of men, and an outstanding general staff officer find in his thirty-two years of service and two wars? First, that political guidance and military strategic thinking are virtually absent in our affairs of the state. Higher direction of war is well below the poverty line. Singh autopsies the 1965 war as the main example of this poverty. Startlingly, he shows that when the war was joined, a fair proportion of field commanders who failed had already been found wanting in the eastern theatre in 1962. Higher direction was tentative and ad hoc at the Army HQ level. At the theatre level, forward command was being exercised by the theatre commander at battalion levels, who was unable and unwilling to read the big picture and act on wide open operational possibilities being presented on a plate by the enemy. This book lays to rest many operational ghosts of 1965.

Major General Joginder Singh was commissioned into the Punjab Regiment in 1937. He attended the 1945 Army Staff Course in Quetta and thereafter went into a series of staff appointments in the transition phase to independence and setting the fortunes of a National Army at Army HQ. There he found that the First Secretary, Ministry of Defence, H.M. Patel, was not amenable to common sense but coercion. In 1950 he took over the 7th Battalion, the PUNJAB Regiment, then in the dumps. He whipped the unit back into a first-class outfit. Thereafter, he taught the senior command course in the Infantry School. On taking over command of the 80 Infantry Brigade in Naoshehra, he was astonished to observe that nobody had cared to defend his left flank—the plains of Chhamb. He also commanded the 5 Infantry Division, which along with the rest of the army, was severely undertrained. He retired from service after a distinguished military career.