The Last Liberator

To my military aviation enthusiast friends:

The photo is of a B 24 J Liberator bomber now in a museum in Britain. The plaque near the nose shows that it was donated by the Indian Air Force.

[Source]

Yes, the Indian Air Force operated B 24 Liberators, which it did not finally retire till as late as 1968. This is an especially interesting fact since not one of those Liberators was ever acquired officially.

Here’s how it happened. During WWII, a lot of B 24s were transferred to Britain by the US and many were based in India for use against the Japanese in South East Asia. Under the terms of the Lend Lease agreement, at the close of hostilities they had to be either returned or destroyed. The US didn’t want them back – after 1945 the B 29 and its successors were their main bombers and they were scrapping their own B 24s as fast as they could. So the British gathered the B 24s in a plane graveyard in Kanpur in North India and wrecked them by bulldozing them, pouring sand in the engines and so on. The technicians made a less than complete job of it though since they were anxious to go home after years of war. And they also thought the incompetent Indians could never make use of them anyway.

In 1947 India became independent and almost immediately began fighting a war with Pakistan over Kashmir. India had no bombers, so Pakistani forces were “bombed” by crewmen in DC 3 Dakota transports shoving explosives out through the doors. (Obviously, this was less than effective, and yet in December 1971 Indian aircrew did the exact same thing with Antonov transports over East Pakistan.) That and the prestige requirement for heavy bombers led to the demand for India to acquire some.

Britain, then India’s go-to country for weapons, offered the already obsolete Avro Lancaster. The IAF rejected that. There was no money to shop from elsewhere and the Indian government of the time was still chary of buying weapons from the USSR, a situation that would not be corrected till the late 1950s. So it seemed that India might have to do without the prestigious heavy bomber...

...until, in 1951, someone remembered those wrecked B 24s lying in the aircraft graveyard and decided to do something about it.

So the technicians from Hindustan Aeronauticals Limited, the state run aero-engineering company, went over and began constructing complete aircraft from the component parts of the wrecked ones. Not only had they been wrecked, they had been sitting in the weather for years totally without any kind of protection. The technicians had to work with what they could find, and as soon as an aeroplane was in a flyable condition they’d fly it over to the main HAL depot in Bangalore (about a thousand or so kilometres south) where proper repair work could be done. Each of the planes was constructed out of bits and pieces of several, most of which were in different paint schemes (and were different model B24s as well). So you might have a plane with a natural metal finish fuselage with desert pink wings and a jungle green tail section, flying with four engines taken from four different aircraft and only a few cockpit instruments. Amazingly, every one of the planes that could be salvaged managed to make it safely to Bangalore for proper repair. Ultimately, enough B24s were salvaged – about 44 of them – to equip three squadrons (Nos. 5, 6 and 16), not bad when one remembers that they were deemed unusable by the incompetent Indians.

There were two rather amusing sequelae. The first was when the Americans became aware that the IAF was flying squadrons of B 24s. They decided that India must have acquired the planes illegally from some source which had not wrecked Lend Lease aircraft as mandated. It took a lot of persuasion for them to accept the truth. The other one I’ll tell you about in a bit.

In the late 1950s, the British finally decided that India was capable of flying bombers and decided to supply the Canberra. (The USSR had offered the Il 28 – and the MiG 17 – but India was still at the time not “buying Russian”, a situation fortunately corrected since.)  Nos. 5 and 16 Squadrons then dumped their Liberators for Canberras, and No 6 Squadron – which no longer had the bombing role to perform – had theirs converted to the maritime reconnaissance role. The useless waist machine gun positions were removed and the ventral ball turret was replaced by a radar in a retractable housing. So, instead of looking like this:

The No 6 Squadron B 24s ended up looking like this:

When India invaded the Portuguese colony of Goa in December 1961, No 6 Squadron B 24s conducted leaflet raids on Portuguese positions. During the war with Pakistan in 1965, they flew maritime reconnaissance missions which had nothing much to do since the Indian Navy stayed hiding in harbour for fear of politically damaging sinkings. And they were finally retired in 1968 and consigned to another aircraft graveyard, in Pune near Bombay.

And there they might have remained, if only the West hadn’t suddenly woken up one day and found they had almost no B 24s left, let alone any in flying condition.

So it came about that some of the surviving B 24s were – once again – cleaned up, oiled, put back into running order, and flown over vast distances to their final resting places in museums. The final one – the one in the photo with which I started my article – didn’t reach its RAF museum till 1974.

Now here is where the second funny sequel I mentioned happened. As one of the planes was being flown to Britain, circa 1970, off the Pakistani coast, Pakistan scrambled jet fighters to intercept it. Because Pakistan hadn’t yet heard that it was no longer an active Indian type.

That the B 24s didn’t actually do much during their service with the IAF is obvious. They did almost achieve something extraordinary, though, something that might have changed India altogether. At one time in 1953 the IAF decided on a live bombing drill near Delhi at a test range. Through some combination of geological factors the bombs dropped by the B 24 formations – all in a straight line – caused earthquake-like tremors in Parliament House and caused the assembled politicians to run for their lives.

If the Parliament building had collapsed on their heads, or one of the bombs fallen a bit further on, we could have got rid of the political class in one fell swoop.

Further Reading:

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/IAF/History/Aircraft/Liberator.html

http://www.warbirdsofindia.com/ovb24/227-consolidated-b24-liberator.html

Burnt At The Stake

"Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack. Where men enforcèd do speak anything." 

- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 3

I still remember clearly the first time I saw the Abu Ghraib torture photos. That was also the first time I ever visited antiwar.com, where a lot of them were published. I don’t remember feeling sickened or horrified as much as a kind of cold, steely rage. But then, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, just about any action of the occupation in that country was guaranteed to be angering anyway.

As time went on and nobody could pretend any longer that Abu Ghraib was an “isolated incident”, I got faintly amused by the way the Empire’s media and officialdom kept wriggling around to avoid using the word “torture”. My personal favourite was “harsh treatment of prisoners”. You see, I have a book called The Knights of Bushido which enumerates, with diagrams, Japanese treatment of Allied prisoners of war during the period 1941-5. They had stress positions, beatings, simulated drowning, the lot – only nobody said they were “harsh treatment of prisoners”.

But then, as I say, being Exceptionalistan means never having to subscribe to the rules everyone else has to follow.

When, a few days ago, the much-celebrated Torture Report broke, I was of course not among those who was surprised. I was, frankly, quite cynical about it changing anything, and my cynicism has not been misplaced. In this case, the whole world knew the USA was torturing prisoners, illegally kidnapping people, paying its puppet dictators to torture them on its behalf, and so on. Only the particularly nauseating details of rectal “feedings” and the like were new. But I assumed that the average American, having the attention span of a mayfly with ADHD, would forget it in a week.

Going by internet commentary, even a week may have been too much to expect.

Insofar as the reactions I’ve seen have gone, barring a small minority of honest and principled people (Ted Rall and Cindy Sheehan come to mind), most American reactions (among those who deigned to react at all) fell into two categories, depending on their political stance:

“Torture doesn’t work. If it worked it would probably be fine, and anyway, it’s all over and done with, so nobody should make a fuss.” No surprises whom these people voted for.

“Torture is fine because 9/11”. No surprises whom those people voted for either.

Of course it doesn't work, but that's not the point. It doesn't have to work to fulfil its purpose, as I'll talk about in a moment. Also, of course it isn’t over, and everyone knows it, but as long as the money trail from the bribed dictators doesn’t lead back to the office occupied by a certain Nobel Peace Prize winning mass murderer and war criminal, nobody has a problem.

I was thinking of the kind of psychology, though, that would justify torturing anyone at all, if that is one isn’t a psychopath and isn’t personally doing the torturing. What would provoke this kind of support?

I can think of one – fear. Pure, unthinking, fear.

And that immediately put me in mind of another time when common citizens justified the torture and murder of harmless innocent people by the high and mighty – the witchcraft trials. They seemed to be identical in their essentials; a coalition of religious and secular rulers – in order to secure their own ends – spreads fear among quite ordinary, and abysmally ignorant, people about other people. Those others can then be quite openly deprived of property and liberty, tortured for confessions everyone knows to be fake, and then ceremonially murdered. 

History repeats itself, and not necessarily as farce.

So here is my comment on the torture “scandal”. I chose the anonymous masked face of the Abu Ghraib detainee as the symbol for all the victims of the neo-witchhunts. I chose, also, to frame him against a background that suggests both a mushroom cloud and a crucifix. The reasons should be obvious enough for me not to have to explain.

Unusually, I painted this in acrylic, not water colour. It was the whim of the moment, but was a highly interesting experience. Acrylic is much easier than water colour to layer and provide texture. It is, however, extremely difficult to blend into subtle shades – hence the bright appearance, which I don’t necessarily like. I still think it works, and I shall be using both water colour and acrylic in future as the needs of the painting suggest themselves.

Title: Burnt at the Stake

Material: Acrylic on Paper

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

Sacrifice

In these last moments of my life, I wish I could understand.

I know these are the last moments, well enough. With my head pressed flat against the stone, I can barely move, and there’s nothing I can do to get away.

Above me, the old man’s bearded face holds a curious expression. I can’t say what it means. He seems almost excited, and yet at the same time disappointed, as though he had wanted to do something else, something which meant a lot to him and killing me is second best.

Not that it matters – I’m dead either way – but in these last moments I do wish I could know at least why this is happening.

I have no illusions about my life, I do not pretend it is important in any way or to anyone. It didn’t last long and it didn’t make any mark on the world, and I don’t think anyone will even notice it go. But it’s still all I have, and I would like to know why it’s ending. I’d say I have a right to know.

I remember well how it all happened. I had lost a fight, not the first time I’d lost, but I didn’t know it would be the last either. If I’d known, perhaps I’d have fought harder, because then I wouldn’t have been trailing despondently round the side of the hill. I’d been hungry and tired and hurting all over, and I’d been looking for something to eat.

I’d seen the pair of them on the hilltop, and not taken much notice at first. You don’t see that many people out here, and they don’t really bother anyone if they do come. But there seemed something different about these two. And, because I was curious, I ventured a little closer to watch.

The bigger of the men was quite old, with flowing grey beard and hair. He had a hand on the shoulder of the younger – a boy, thin and frightened looking – and was pushing him up the slope, shouting. The wind whipped his words away, and, besides, I would not have understood him anyway.

He pushed the young boy to the top of the hill and knocked him to the ground, and that’s when I noticed that the kid’s hands were tied behind him. Still shouting something, the old man took a leather thong from around his waist and tied the boy’s legs together, too. He then left him on the ground and walked away, gathering dried branches and brush from the hillside. Soon he had a respectable pile beside the boy, who was lying still and – I could see it – trembling violently. I heard him say something in a small voice, and the man replied loudly and angrily. The boy didn’t speak again.

By now I was very curious. I was still hungry, of course, but I’d been able to get my mind off it a little, and I’d almost forgotten my pain and the humiliation of my defeat. Obviously, something was going to happen to the boy, and it was unlikely to be very good. I wished I could help him somehow.

Far above, in the sky, a hawk wheeled.

The old man had finished his pile of wood, and now he returned to the boy. Lifting him up bodily – he was a muscular old man and the boy was young and thin – he put him down on a large flat rock, holding him down with one hand. With the other hand he fumbled at his belt and lifted out something which glittered in the noonday sun. Shouting hoarsely, the old man lifted his hand, the thing flashing back the light. I crept a little closer, for a better look.

It was a knife, and the old man was poised to bring it down on the boy’s neck.

Now I know life is brutal and pitiless, and I’ve seen my share of bad things happen. But I’d never come across something like this before, something so pointlessly cruel. I shied back in fright, instinctively. Right next to me was a thorny bush. My horns got tangled up in it, and I could not pull myself free.

Oh, given a little time I could have freed myself, of course. But I was frightened and struggling, and I did not have the time.

Then the hawk swooped downwards.

I can’t say why it swooped. Perhaps it was after some hapless prey animal. Perhaps it wanted to peck away at the corpse of the boy after the old man had killed him. But it flew down low above the pair, and the old man abruptly stopped his ranting and looked up at it. He cocked his head, as if listening to it, but I could hear nothing. The hawk swooped down, looped and flew by again, and then it soared up into the air and away.

There was a long moment of silence. And then the old man turned his head, looking around the mountain slope.

The first thing he saw was me.

Now I’m lying, legs tied together, on the same rock on which the boy had been lying only a short while ago. The boy, whom I’d wished I could save, helped the old man tie me and lift me up here, and then set fire to the pile of wood. I can smell the smoke, which is rubbing my throat raw. I can feel the heat.

The old man looks down at me and raises the knife. It won’t be long now. I shall no longer feel the sweet grass in my mouth, feel the nuzzling of a ewe, hear the bleats of newborn lambs, my children. I don’t know what I did wrong to deserve this. Perhaps, if only I could have asked, the old man could have told me.

Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Again, I see the curious expression in his eyes, and I know now that he would much rather have killed the boy. I, I am second best, my death not even having the meaning of any real value. Well, it was a small and meaningless enough life, and I suppose it shouldn’t matter too much, even to me.

I wish I could close my eyes as I wait for the blow, but I can’t. Try as I might, I can’t stop looking.

High up, past the upraised knife, past the smoke from the fire, a speck in the sky, the hawk is soaring.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2014

 

Rembrandt, The angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, 1635. Source