Today the Aeronautica militare indiana flies Rafales, Su-30MKIs E Tejas fighters and is one of the largest air forces in the world. On Thursday it turns 94. Its first combat unit was four fabric-covered biplanes and a handful of young pilots on an airfield outside Karachi.
Every year on 8 October, India marks Air Force Day, the anniversary of the date in 1932 when the force was legally born. This is the story of how it started: the Wapitis, the first cadets, and the man who was too short to fly.
Informazioni rapide
- Fondato: 8 October 1932, under the Indian Air Force Act 1932
- Stato: Auxiliary air force of the Royal Air Force in British India
- First unit: No. 1 Squadron, formed 1 April 1933 at Drigh Road, Karachi
- First aircraft: Four Westland Wapiti biplanes
- First commander: Flight Lieutenant Cecil Bouchier, RAF
- Royal title: Royal Indian Air Force from 1945; "Royal" dropped in 1950
An air force on paper
The Indian Air Force Act of 1932 created the service on 8 October that year as an auxiliary air force of the Royal Air Force. It wore RAF uniforms, badges, brevets and insignia, and for its first years it was very much a junior partner. But it was Indian, and for many of the young men who joined, that mattered enormously.
The first cadets had been sent to the RAF College at Cranwell in England. Five of them were commissioned as pilots in 1932: Harish Chandra Sircar, Subroto Mukerjee, Bhupendra Singh, Aizad Baksh Awan and Amarjeet Singh. A sixth, J. N. Tandon, had to switch to logistics duties because, according to the history of the service, he was too short to fly.
Peepul Tree World's short film on the birth of the Indian Air Force in the 1930s.
Four biplanes at Drigh Road
On 1 April 1933, the first operational unit came to life: 'A' Flight of No. 1 Squadron, at Drigh Road in Karachi. It had four Westland Wapiti biplanes and was led by Flight Lieutenant Cecil "Boy" Bouchier, a decorated First World War veteran of the RAF who had volunteered for the job.
The Wapiti was a two-seat, single-engine general-purpose biplane of the late 1920s, a sturdy workhorse built for army co-operation and policing the frontier rather than for dogfighting. It was hardly glamorous. But it was the aircraft on which the IAF learned its trade, and one survives today at the Indian Air Force Museum at Palam in New Delhi.
The squadron's barracks at Drigh Road were, according to the unit's history, nicknamed "Gandhi Hill" by the men who lived there, a small sign that the young force saw itself as part of a country that was beginning to think about independence.
From the frontier to Burma
No. 1 Squadron flew its first operations in September 1937 over the North-West Frontier, operating from Miranshah against tribal forces in Waziristan. When the Second World War came, the IAF expanded rapidly. No. 1 Squadron flew Westland Lysanders and then Hawker Hurricanes in Burma from 1942, and fought in the campaign around Imphal in 1944.
In recognition of that wartime service, King George VI granted the force the prefix "Royal" in 1945. It became the Royal Indian Air Force. When India became a republic in 1950, the "Royal" was dropped and the service became the Indian Air Force again.
The cadet who became Chief
Of the original five, Subroto Mukerjee went furthest. He rose through the war years and partition, and on 1 April 1954 became the first Indian Chief of the Air Staff, taking over from British officers who had led the service since its creation. He is still remembered as the father of the Indian Air Force, and a national school football tournament bears his name.
No. 1 Squadron, the unit that began with four Wapitis, still exists today. Known as "The Tigers", it is based at Gwalior and flies the Mirage 2000. Its motto, in Hindi, means "Strength in Unity".
The Quint traces the aircraft of the Indian Air Force, from the Wapiti to the Sukhoi.
Ninety-four years later
On Thursday, the IAF will mark Air Force Day with ceremonies and flypasts. It is a very different force from the one that started at Drigh Road: supersonic, nuclear-capable and short of fighter squadrons, as its chief warned only last week.
Its motto, chosen from the Bhagavad Gita, has stayed the same through all of it: Nabha Sparsham Deeptam.
Every Rafale pilot in today's IAF is part of a line that goes straight back to five young men from Cranwell and four Wapitis in Karachi.
WION traces the journey of the Indian Air Force from its founding in 1932.
Sources: Wikipedia (History of the Indian Air Force, Indian Air Force, No. 1 Squadron IAF, Subroto Mukerjee), Indian Air Force, WION, The Quint
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