wireless itself. 'Search lighting' the interior of the building, they found blood-stained clothes in the bathroom. They were later identified as the garments of Captain Riaz from Gujranwala. In the family quarters of the other ranks, they saw a young mother lying dead, an infant trying to suckle the withered breasts. In another quarter was huddled a tecor-stricken girl, about four, who cried out at the sight of the soldiers. ‘Don’t kill me don’t kill me please till my father come home. Her father never came home.’
Similar stories were reported from other stations. Some of them sounded too melodramatic to believe but they were all essentially true.
General Hamid, Chief of Staff, Pakistan Army, told me a few months later that the blame for this suffering must lie on Lieutenant-General Yakub 'who had opposed the arrival of West Pakistani troops in early March. Had he allowed us to build up the forces in time there would have been West Pakistani troops in all major towns to prevent these wild killings.’
General Yakub, it may be recalled, had opposed the move at a Army crackdown, with all its ugly repercussions; had commenced there was no bar to the dispatch of troops. Operation GREAT FLYIN was thus started as early as (but not before) 26 March. The arriving troops were quickly dispatched to areas under pressure.
One the situation had stabilized in the key cities, strong columns of troops were sent to provincial towns. Let me describe here the march of one column from Dacca to Tangail on 1 April, which I accompanied. The main column, loaded in trucks fitted with machine-guns, moved on the main road while two companics spread out over about five hundred meters on either side of the road. These foot columns were equipped for all contingencies-both animate and inanimate. Nothing was to escape their wrath. Behind the infantry column was a battery of field guns which fired a few shells at suitable intervals in the general direction of the move. The artillery bang was enough to scare away any rebels in the area.
The infantry column opened up on the slightest pretext or suspicion. A stir in a bunch of trees or a little rustle in the bari was enough to evoke a burst of automatic fire or at least rifle shot. I remember that a little short of Karatea, on the Tangail road. there was a small locality which hardly rated a name. The searching troops passed through it, putting a match to the thatched huts and the adjoining bamboo plants. As soon as they advanced ahead, a bamboo stick burst with a crack because of the heat of the fire; everybody took it as a rifle shot by some hidden 'miscreant'. This caused the weight of the entire column to be riveted on the locality and all sorts of weapons fired into the trees. When the source of danger had been 'eliminated', a careful search was ordered. During the search, the column stood at the ready to shoot the 'miscreant' on sight. The search party found no sign of a human being-alive or dead. The bamboo crack and delayed the march by about fifteen minutes.
