He is buried in the municipal cemetery, every year the municipality pays him tribute by decorating with flowers its grave during the remembrance of the armistice of November 11th as well as to the other fighters buried in our village. It is our way of greeting the memory of everything those who died bravely to defend our freedom.

Very cordially, Estevelles, on January 15th, 2010 Alain Szabo

The Forgotten Army by Stephen Ward Fay – This book covers the events leading up to the formation of the Indian National Army. It’s actually written by an American, a professor at Cal Tech I think.

The Gurkhas by Byron Farwell – more anecdotal than anything, this book tells some amazing first-hand accounts about the legendary Gurkhas. One of my favs: As the British are closing in on the Gurkhas, one of the Gurkhas comments ‘you guys are very nearly equal to us.’

Let me know if you check out either of these books.

Cheers

Amardeep the webmasters of BR would welcome a critique even if it is not comprehensive; just serious. Better still, why not join a BR meet the next time it happens in your area and share your comments?

My dis on BR was pretty slight — just a throwaway comment, not a comprehensive critique. If you like, I can take out the offending clause (“not known for its objectivity on questions of Indian military valor”) — I really don’t care that much about this, and it doesn’t affect the point of my post.

Tell you what we don’t need, Amardeep. We don’t need a silly version of the skeptical argument. “How do you know that?” “Well, I read it here” “well, how do you know thats true?”. “Well, so-and-so cited XYZ”. “Well, how do you know XYZ is true?” And so on. You think you sound objective? No, you sound silly.

Incidentally, Shiva, the Indian Express carried a two-page spread on that book. It was written by Shiv Aroor, who is one of the better defense journalists in India.

That answer doesn’t do much to make the story seem more plausible. To me it just sounds like a little masala thrown in (perhaps in the original article in 1973) to make the guy sound more heroic. We don’t need it — he’s plenty heroic as it is.

However, on 06 Nov he crash landed whilst flying SE5 (Scout Experimental 5) B567. Lying unconscious, he was taken for dead and laid out with other dead in a morgue at Etaples, France. After coming to, he kept banging on the closed morgue door but the frightened attendant did not open the door until well after he had stopped shouting in his school boy French. After recuperating and a further stint of training in England he joined 40 sqn at Bryas in France under Major AW Keene MC.

I don’t see any indication of a citation on the site. What RFC source? What is the name of the person who witnessed or corroborated this story? One could, I suppose, email Polly Singh to request a confirmation of where he (she?) got that anecdote.

As a scholar, if I don’t see a footnote and I don’t find confirmation from any other source (in this post at least I cited a published book), my first inclination is to doubt. It it’s proved to be true I’ll happily acknowledge it.

Remember, this is a post admiring Indra Lal Roy.

Amardeep, learn something about the subject, before you dismiss hard research done by people, with an airy wave of your hand. You don’t know squat about military history, and so, calling out a website, which is internationally acknowledged as an authority on the subject, for a supposed lack of objectivity simply does one thing: it shows your lack of objectivity and most damagingly, your ignorance.

Check out this review of the IAF webmaster’s books:

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Books/AirWar65/Reader-Reviews.html

On the page linked, Sajad Haider is the PAF pilot who carried out the Pathankot raid in the 1965 war

Or this:

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/Books/AirWar65/Media-Reviews.html

Walter Boyne is one of the most respected aviation historians in the US.