Chapter 266: The Seams
December 28, 1976 — January 8, 1977
South of Mandalay; the Joint Operations Centre in New Delhi; INS Vikrant and the Project 90 Amphibious Group in the Bay of Bengal; and the specific operational cost of three armed services that had spent thirty years preparing independently for wars that each believed it would fight alone
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Wars revealed the seams.
This was the specific thing that wars did that exercises did not do, and that the Indian military establishment understood in the abstract and had not, until Operation Vajrapata, been required to understand in the concrete. The exercises — the annual joint service exercises in the Rajasthan desert, the coastal defence exercises off Visakhapatnam, the mountain warfare exercises in Ladakh — produced coordination at the level that exercises produced coordination: the coordination of pre-planned responses to pre-identified problems, conducted between services that knew the scenario in advance and had rehearsed their specific roles in it.
Wars produced other problems. Problems that nobody had pre-planned for, because pre-planning required the imagination of failure, which was not the institutional disposition of any armed service that believed itself to be preparing adequately.
The problem in the final days of December 1976, as the Indian advance consolidated south of Mandalay and the road to Rangoon began to feel geometrically achievable rather than aspirationally distant, was that the three services had entered the Burma campaign with their own operational doctrines, their own communications architectures, their own institutional assumptions about how the war would be fought, and their own definitions of coordination — and those definitions had been compatible enough in the conventional phase, where the army fought the army's war and the air force fought the air force's war and the navy sealed the sea, and each service's operations intersected primarily at the level of strategic effect rather than tactical integration.
The next phase was different.
The advance on Rangoon required the army and the air force to fight in the same space at the same time against defended positions along a road corridor that had been hardened by a Tatmadaw that had spent three weeks watching the Mandalay battle from two hundred kilometres away and drawing the correct conclusions about what it needed to do with those three weeks.
The beach landing proposal — and there was a Project 90 amphibious group sitting in the Bay of Bengal with two ships and their LCU-class landing craft, doing exactly nothing offensive — required the navy and the army to conduct an operation together that neither service had trained for, practised, exercised, or taken institutional responsibility for in any meaningful way since the ships had been commissioned a year earlier.
The paracommando proposal required the air force to think about its Para Brigade not as a strategic reserve asset to be deployed with extensive preparation time, but as a tactical instrument that could be committed within seventy-two hours against a defended city inside an active war zone.
These were not comfortable requirements.
The seams showed.
The 17th Mountain Division reached the Yamethin junction on December 27th, having moved one hundred and forty kilometres south of Mandalay in eight days of sustained advance against a Tatmadaw that had lost its conventional coherence in the Mandalay operation but retained the specific dangerous quality of an army that had been ordered to delay and that understood the terrain it was delaying in.
Lieutenant Colonel Vikram Pratap Singh, whose armoured regiment had been reconstituted after the Kalemyo valley tank engagement on December 22nd, received a contact report on the morning of December 28th at 0847.
"Falcon Six, Sunray. Heavy machine gun and RPG at the road junction eight kilometres south of Yamethin. Two vehicles hit. Infantry squad pinned."
Singh said: "Can we flank?"
"The road runs between an irrigation canal on the west and the building complex on the east. The canal prevents flanking west. The building complex covers the eastern approach."
Singh said: "Get me air support. CAS request, two buildings east of Yamethin junction road grid two-one-four, HMG and RPG, stone construction. I need a Nishith or a bomb capable of taking the structural integrity. Now."
He transmitted the request up the chain to the air coordination cell at the 17th Division's forward headquarters, which passed it to the joint air request network at corps level, which queued it for the air coordination duty officer at the forward air support cell at Kalemyo.
He waited.
The machine gun at the road junction was still firing.
In the pinned infantry squad, Lance Naik Premkumar Nair, twenty-three years old from Kannur, said to the soldier beside him from behind the engine block of a disabled jeep: "Where is the air support?"
The soldier, Rifleman Gopal Das, said: "They called for it."
Premkumar said: "They called for it eight minutes ago."
Gopal Das said: "Yes."
They listened to the machine gun continue firing.
At eleven minutes Singh ordered his tanks forward without waiting further. He sent two Arjunas down the road at speed, using the tanks' frontal armour as cover, and the first tank's 120mm round went through the stone building's east wall at sixty metres eleven minutes and forty seconds after the contact report.
At twelve minutes, the machine gun stopped.
At thirteen minutes and twenty seconds, the authorised S-35s checked in on the air support frequency and were told: "Target neutralised. No longer required. Break off."
The S-35 flight lead said, in the flat tone of a professional making a record rather than a complaint: "Request debrief on the coordination timeline at the next joint session."
Singh heard this on the shared frequency.
He was looking at the four men who had been hit in the thirteen minutes — two dead, two wounded. He transmitted to headquarters: "Road junction south of Yamethin clear. Four casualties. Air support arrived post-neutralisation. Request coordination review."
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The specific reason the air support was slow on December 28th was not one reason but several that had accumulated in the joint air request system like sediment in a pipe.
First: the 17th Division's forward air support cell at Kalemyo strip was tasked simultaneously from the main advance on the Pyinmana axis and the Scourge programme's counter-guerrilla operations in the Chin Hills, which were running at peak intensity through late December. The duty officer was one man managing two request streams from one radio position.
Second: the air assets available for close support at 0847 were four S-35 Tejas-M aircraft from 51 Squadron, of which two were on the return leg from a Scourge mission at the bottom of their fuel cycle, and two were on readiness cap at altitude but configured for area interdiction rather than close support, meaning the weapons load was wrong for the specific request.
Third: the air request chain went battalion to brigade to division to corps to the air coordination cell, each link adding transmission time and confirmation time because nobody had built a direct battalion-to-aircraft radio link for the specific reason that nobody had anticipated needing one during the campaign's planning phase.
The combination produced a thirteen-minute gap between the request and the authorisation. Two men died in that gap.
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While the coordination failure was happening on the road south of Yamethin, two hundred and forty nautical miles southwest of the Burmese coast, the Project 90 amphibious assault ships INLS Airavat and INLS Shera were operating in company with INS Vikrant and the Eastern Fleet's surface screening element.
Both ships had been commissioned in the spring of 1976 — the first products of Shergill Shipyard's defence division's most ambitious programme, delivered fourteen months after the keel-laying with a build quality that had prompted the Navy's acceptance committee to write in their commissioning report that the structural workmanship and propulsion systems exceeded the contract specification in every measurable category. They were, by any objective assessment of their design characteristics, formidable platforms: integrated ballasting systems for the well-deck operations, multiple helicopter landing spots on the flight deck, an aircraft hangar capable of handling Saras helicopters in the assault configuration, and a full defensive shield of Vajra-Rakshak area-denial naval SAMs, Vayu-Astra point-defence missiles, and Kaal-Chakra twin 25mm autocannon systems.
Each ship carried in its well-deck four LCU-class landing craft, designed and built to the specification that the Shergill Naval Systems division had produced based on the Royal Navy's LCT Mk8 concept adapted for the Indian Ocean operational environment.
On paper, the Project 90 amphibious group was precisely the instrument that the beach landing proposal required.
In practice, the Project 90 amphibious group had spent its fourteen months of service life conducting port visits, conducting individual ship trials, conducting defensive system evaluations, and sitting at anchor in Visakhapatnam on two separate occasions while the Navy's Operations Division produced planning papers about how the amphibious capability should be developed and exercised.
The planning papers were thorough. The exercises they proposed had not occurred.
The specific reason the exercises had not occurred was inter-service: the exercise programme required the Army to provide assault infantry for the ship-to-shore movement phase, and the Army's cooperation depended on a joint training programme that the Navy had proposed to the Army's Southern Command in January 1976, which the Army had agreed to in principle, which had been scheduled for March 1976, and which had been cancelled because the Army's Southern Command was conducting its own exercises in that period and the rescheduled date of October 1976 had been overtaken by the political events that preceded Operation Vajrapata.
So the LCU-class landing craft had been lowered into the water once each, in harbour, during the commissioning acceptance trials.
And the assault infantry who would ride them had never ridden them.
And the crew who would operate them in an opposed landing had drilled the procedure in the manuals without ever performing it against anything more resistant than calm harbour water and a concrete pier.
This was the situation aboard INLS Airavat and INLS Varuna as they steamed in company with INS Vikrant in the Bay of Bengal, waiting for someone to decide what to do with them.
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### Part Four: Nair and the Ships
Vice Admiral Pradeep Kumar Nair had been thinking about the Project 90 ships since the campaign began.
He had thought about them when the order came to enforce the blockade, and he had integrated them into the blockade posture as additional surface screening elements and as platforms for the Saras helicopter casualty evacuation missions that occasionally required a closer offshore base than the carrier could provide. This was a legitimate and useful employment.
It was not what the ships were designed for.
Nair was an honest man with a long career, and he sat with his flag captain on the evening of December 26th in Vikrant's flag briefing room and said what an honest man with a long career said when confronted by an uncomfortable truth.
He said: "We have two amphibious ships in this fleet. The planning cell in Aizawl is going to notice them and is going to ask whether they can be used for a landing in the Rangoon delta. I want to be prepared to answer that question correctly when it arrives."
His flag captain, Captain Ramesh Iyer, said: "What is the correct answer, Admiral?"
Nair said: "The correct answer is complicated. The ships exist. The landing craft exist. The defensive systems are operational and have been tested. The propulsion is sound. The ballasting systems work." He paused. "None of that is the constraint."
Iyer said: "What is the constraint?"
Nair said: "The constraint is that we have never landed troops from those ships under any conditions, let alone under fire. The LCU crew know the theory. The Saras pilots know the theory. The Army does not know which end of the LCU to board. Nobody has rehearsed the beach clearance sequence. Nobody has practised the naval gunfire coordination for the preparatory fires. The Vajra-Rakshak system on the ship is designed to shoot down incoming missiles, not to provide suppressive fire for a beach assault." He looked at Iyer. "We have the instrument. We do not know how to play it."
Iyer said: "Can we learn how to play it quickly?"
Nair said: "There are things you can learn quickly and things you cannot. The basic ship-to-shore movement — putting soldiers into the LCUs and driving them to a beach — can probably be executed by a competent crew without extensive practice. The opposed part — doing that while someone is shooting at the LCUs and the beach is defended — is not something you improvise successfully on the first attempt."
He paused.
"The specific thing that nobody can improvise is the coordination between the landing force and the supporting fires. The ship's guns — the 114mm forward mount — are a naval fire support platform. Using them to suppress a beach defence requires a shore fire control party who can observe fall of shot and correct onto the target. We have never trained a shore fire control party with an LCU landing force. We have never integrated naval gunfire with an army assault."
Iyer said: "So when the planning cell asks—"
Nair said: "When the planning cell asks, I will tell them the truth: the ships are there, the capability on paper is there, and the specific institutional preparedness to use it in combat is not there. And that is not a failure of the ships or the crews or the Navy. It is a failure of the years we spent talking about exercises that we never conducted."
He was quiet for a moment.
He said: "I am going to recommend that the question not be foreclosed. I am going to tell them what we can do and what we cannot do, and I am going to let General Raina decide whether the gap between those two things is acceptable given the operational need."
Iyer said: "And your own assessment?"
Nair said: "My assessment is that the gap is significant enough that I would not recommend committing the landing force unless the alternative is substantially worse than the risk. At present, the alternative — the road advance — is working. It is slower than a beach landing would be if the beach landing worked. But it is working."
He said: "If the road advance were to stop — if we hit a defensive line we could not break — the calculation changes entirely."
He went back to his operational map.
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General T.N. Raina called the joint coordination session on December 29th at the Eastern Command forward headquarters in Aizawl.
Present: Raina. Air Marshal H. Moolgavkar, Chief of Air Staff. Vice Admiral Pradeep Kumar Nair, Commander Eastern Fleet, who had come ashore from Vikrant for the first time since the campaign began. Lieutenant General Sandhu. Brigadier Verma. Wing Commander Pathak. Captain Menon of the naval liaison cell.
Raina opened with the Yamethin incident.
He said: "December 28th. Thirteen minutes from contact report to air support arrival. Two men died. I want the coordination system reviewed."
Air Marshal Moolgavkar said: "The system worked within its designed parameters, General. The request was processed correctly at every link."
Raina said: "The system worked within its parameters and two men died."
Moolgavkar said: "Men die in wars. The question is whether the deaths were caused by a system failure or by the inherent conditions of the engagement."
Raina said: "The question I am asking is whether the system can be improved."
Moolgavkar said: "The fundamental constraint is asset availability and configuration. On December 28th, the assets available for close support were in the wrong configuration. You cannot task an aircraft in the wrong configuration to a close support mission that requires a specific warhead without accepting either the wrong weapon or the delay."
Brigadier Verma said: "With respect, sir. The processing chain accounts for two minutes at every step working perfectly. On December 28th, the duty officer at the air coordination cell was managing two simultaneous request streams. One officer managing two streams at peak tempo produces exactly the result we saw."
Moolgavkar said: "That is an army observation about an air force cell."
"It is an observation about a joint cell which serves both services," Verma said. "Both services have a stake in staffing it adequately."
A silence that was the silence of an accurate point landing in a room that recognised it.
Raina said: "We are going to staff the air coordination cell at double the current level. We are going to establish direct radio links from battalion operations officers to the air cap aircraft, bypassing the coordination cell for contact-emergency requests. The cap aircraft have the authority to respond to a direct contact emergency and confirm through the coordination cell afterwards."
Moolgavkar said: "That gives battalion operations officers authority to divert my aircraft."
"It gives them authority to request diversion for contact emergencies," Raina said. "The cap aircraft's flight lead makes the final decision on whether the request qualifies as a contact emergency."
Moolgavkar considered.
He said: "Operationally, I can accept that. Doctrinally, I want it recorded that the standard request process remains the primary channel."
Raina said: "Recorded. Pathak, implement the direct link protocol with your cap formations effective tomorrow."
Pathak said: "Yes, sir."
Moolgavkar looked at Pathak with the expression of a service chief watching his wing commander accept an instruction the service chief had not fully endorsed. He said nothing further.
Raina said: "The second item."
He paused.
"Vice Admiral Nair. You have two Project 90 amphibious ships in your fleet. They are equipped with LCU landing craft. They have been in service for fourteen months. The planning cell has identified a potential naval assault route to Rangoon via the Rangoon River delta — a route that, if viable, would bypass the road corridor and reduce the timeline to Rangoon by ten to fourteen days." He looked at Nair. "Tell me why we are not using them."
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Vice Admiral Nair had prepared for this question.
He said: "The ships are there. The landing craft are aboard. The defensive systems — the Vajra-Rakshak SAM, the Vayu-Astra point defence, the Kaal-Chakra autocannon — are operational and have been tested. The 114mm naval gun can provide fire support. The Saras helicopter wing aboard each ship can provide air assault and close support during the landing phase."
He said: "None of that is the constraint."
The room was quiet.
He said: "The constraint is this. The LCU landing craft have been lowered into the water once each, in harbour, during the commissioning acceptance trials a year ago. The crew who will operate them in an opposed landing has never operated them against anything more resistant than calm harbour water. The Army has never boarded them, never practised beach clearance from them, never rehearsed the specific sequence of actions that a ship-to-shore assault requires from the infantry."
He looked at Sandhu.
"When the infantry exits the LCU onto the beach, it is the infantry's problem," Nair said. "The Navy can put them at the beach. The Navy cannot tell them what to do when they get there, because what they do when they get there is army doctrine — beach clearance, assault on coastal defences, establishing a perimeter — and army doctrine for ship-to-shore assault does not exist in any operational unit currently deployed."
Sandhu said: "The Army has assault infantry doctrine."
Nair said: "The Army has assault infantry doctrine for attacking fixed defences from land. Not from an LCU on a beach. The difference is not theoretical. An infantry soldier who exits an LCU in waist-deep water is in a specific tactical situation — no cover, limited manoeuvrability, exposed to fire from the beach ahead and potentially the flanks — that requires specific rehearsed responses. The response to taking fire from a dune position when you are exiting an LCU in waist-deep water is not the same as the response to taking fire from a bunker when you are advancing along a road."
The room absorbed this.
Lieutenant General Sandhu said: "So the Army has not trained for beach landing."
Nair said: "The Army has not trained for beach landing from our specific ships in our specific LCU configuration. What would be required is a minimum of three to four weeks of joint training — ship familiarisation, LCU loading and unloading drills, beach clearance exercises in a simulated landing environment."
Sandhu said: "We don't have three to four weeks."
Nair said: "No."
Moolgavkar said: "Could an untrained force execute the landing if the beach were undefended?"
Nair said: "An untrained force could probably board the LCUs and reach the beach without catastrophe if the beach were completely undefended, the sea state were calm, the navigation were straightforward, and nothing went wrong mechanically."
Moolgavkar said: "None of which can be guaranteed."
Nair said: "None of which can be guaranteed."
Major General Pillai, Director of Military Operations, said: "What is the Tatmadaw's current assessment for the Thilawa industrial zone south of Rangoon? Is the beach defended?"
Captain Menon, the naval liaison officer, said: "The Tatmadaw's primary defensive posture is the northern perimeter. Thilawa is not currently an identified defensive priority. It is not heavily defended at this moment."
Pillai said: "At this moment."
Menon said: "At this moment. An amphibious operation that requires naval preparation time, LCU marshalling time, and the operational movement of the fleet to the assault position means the assault arrives after considerable warning. During that warning period, the Thilawa beach may not remain undefended."
Sandhu said: "How much warning time?"
Nair said: "The minimum preparation time for the fleet to transition from its current blockade posture to an assault configuration is forty-eight hours. Add twelve hours of transit time to the assault position. Add six to eight hours for the LCU approach to the beach from the fleet's offshore position. Between sixty and seventy hours from the decision to commit to the first soldier on the beach."
Pillai said: "Sixty to seventy hours in which the garrison can observe the fleet's movement and reposition forces to the Thilawa area."
Nair said: "Yes."
Sandhu said: "Which means by the time the landing force reaches the beach, the beach may be defended."
Nair said: "Yes."
Sandhu said: "And if the beach is defended, we are putting untrained landing forces against a prepared beach defence."
Nair said: "Yes."
Sandhu said: "Then the Army's assessment is that the risk does not support the operation."
A silence fell on the room with the weight of a decision being made without anyone formally making it.
Raina said: "Vice Admiral Nair. The ships have been in service for fourteen months. Two exercises were scheduled and cancelled. Who is responsible for those cancellations?"
The question was not hostile. It was the question of a man who had been trained to understand accountability and who wanted the chain of responsibility identified before it repeated itself.
Nair said: "The first exercise was cancelled because the Army's Southern Command had scheduling conflicts. The second was cancelled because the operational situation preceding this campaign made joint training in the northeast a lower priority than preparing individual service capabilities." He paused. "Responsibility is diffuse, General. The Navy proposed the exercises. The Army agreed in principle. The events that prevented them from occurring were genuine operational pressures rather than neglect."
Raina said: "Diffuse responsibility is still responsibility. I want a joint amphibious exercise programme on my desk within thirty days of the campaign's conclusion. Not a proposal. A programme with dates, resources, and a designated joint commander who owns it in both services."
He looked at Nair and then at Sandhu.
Both men said: "Understood, sir."
Raina said: "The beach landing is not viable for this campaign. We continue south on the land axis." He looked at the map. "The ships are not useless. What can they do?"
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Nair had thought about this too.
He said: "The Project 90 ships have Saras helicopter capacity. Both ships are carrying four Saras helicopters each in the assault configuration. Those eight aircraft, in addition to the squadron that is already operating from Vikrant, can be employed in three specific roles that the current campaign requires."
He put a map on the table.
"First: extended casualty evacuation range. At present, the CASEVAC chain from forward positions to the Kalemyo field hospital is the bottleneck for the most critical casualties. The ships positioned at a closer offshore location reduce the CASEVAC chain by approximately forty minutes for positions on the southern advance axis, which is clinically significant for penetrating trauma cases."
Sandhu nodded.
"Second: the ships can serve as forward fuel and ammunition resupply platforms for the Saras helicopter fleet supporting the advance. The Saras helicopters operating from the advance strip at Kalemyo are at the edge of their range envelope for the Pyinmana-Taungoo corridor. Positioning the Project 90 ships off the Irrawaddy delta mouth, which is within the operational area, creates an intermediate refuelling point that extends the effective range of every Saras helicopter on the advance axis."
Pathak said: "That changes the S-35 cap rotation calculation too. If the Saras helicopters can refuel offshore rather than returning to Kalemyo, I can reallocate the Kalemyo strip capacity they were using."
Nair said: "Exactly."
He said: "Third: the ships' defensive systems — specifically the Vajra-Rakshak area-denial SAMs at one hundred kilometre range — provide a maritime air defence umbrella over the advance axis's southern approaches. This has no immediate tactical application since the Tatmadaw Air Force no longer exists as a fighting entity, but it is a strategic insurance against any third-party interference in the southern waters."
He looked at Raina.
"The Project 90 ships in the Bay of Bengal are not amphibious assault platforms for this campaign," he said. "They are very capable multi-role naval platforms that are being used as expensive patrol ships because the specific capability that makes them Project 90 ships rather than ordinary naval vessels — the amphibious assault function — requires joint training that was not conducted."
Raina said: "Implement the CASEVAC repositioning and the forward refuelling function immediately. Get the ships to the Irrawaddy delta mouth position."
Nair said: "Yes, sir."
Raina said: "And the third item."
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The Para Brigade proposal had been circulating in the Joint Operations Centre for nine days. It had been submitted by Brigadier General Ajit Doval of the Special Operations Planning Cell on December 20th, titled: Accelerated Terminal Phase: Direct Airborne Seizure of Rangoon via 50th Para Brigade.
The paper's argument was straightforward: the advance from Mandalay to Rangoon by road would take fourteen to eighteen days. Fourteen to eighteen days gave the Tatmadaw time to consolidate its remaining forces in the Rangoon area into a prepared defensive perimeter that would require a costly contested urban battle to penetrate. The alternative: the 50th Para Brigade drops on Mingaladon Airport north of Rangoon, establishes a perimeter, forces the garrison to respond to a force inside its defensive ring, and the main advance uses the disruption to accelerate.
Doval believed in it.
Brigadier Colonel Hari Narain, commanding the 50th Para Brigade, had read it and said to his staff: "This is what we were built for."
Major General P.K. Pillai, Director of Military Operations, had read it and said: "This is how paratroopers die."
Raina said: "Doval. Summarise."
Doval placed a map on the table.
"The 50th Para Brigade drops on Mingaladon Airport on a date to be determined — optimally when the main advance is at the Taungoo line, approximately one hundred and fifty kilometres north of Rangoon, so the garrison must choose between defending the perimeter against the main advance or responding to the airborne seizure inside it. The drop uses the Gajendra-II fleet's full capacity — approximately twelve aircraft, two lifts, inserting the full brigade of two thousand four hundred personnel over approximately eight hours."
He pointed at the map.
"Mingaladon Airport is the Rangoon garrison's primary air support facility and logistical hub. Seizing it cuts the garrison's air connection and primary southern supply route simultaneously. The garrison cannot ignore this. The response diverts forces from the northern perimeter at the moment the main advance is pressing it."
Major General Pillai said: "I have questions."
He said: "The garrison response. Three to four thousand Tatmadaw soldiers in the Rangoon area, of whom approximately twelve hundred are in the northern perimeter and eight hundred in the southern and eastern positions. The remaining two thousand are in garrison duties and reserve."
He looked at Doval. "Your paratroopers land at Mingaladon. The garrison responds. Which elements?"
Doval said: "The reserve element. Approximately two thousand men."
Pillai said: "Two thousand men, with armour — the intelligence assessment shows eighteen to twenty T-55s in the Rangoon garrison — engaging two thousand four hundred lightly armed paratroopers in an airport perimeter. The paratroopers carry the man-portable Carl Gustav. The Carl Gustav's effective range against armour is five hundred metres. The T-55's effective engagement range is fifteen hundred metres. The Saras helicopters carrying the Nishith ATGM are valid targets for the forty or more 12.7mm heavy machine guns we assess in the Rangoon area."
A silence.
Wing Commander Pathak said: "The S-35 cover."
Pillai said: "The S-35 cover is flying from Kalemyo, five hundred kilometres from Mingaladon. Loiter time over the target is approximately twenty minutes before returning for fuel. Twenty minutes of S-35 cover per sortie, with forty-five minutes each way."
Pathak said: "We can establish a forward refuelling point."
Pillai said: "Where? In a combat zone two hundred kilometres ahead of the current front line, requiring ground security, which requires infantry, which requires the Gajendra-IIs that are being used for the para insertion."
Pathak said: "The Project 90 ships repositioning to the delta mouth — they extend the effective fuel range for the Saras. Could they also serve as a forward refuelling point for the S-35?"
Nair said: "The S-35 is a naval aircraft. It can land on a carrier. It cannot land on a Project 90 ship — the flight deck is not configured for fixed-wing operations."
Pathak said: "The point is taken."
Pillai said: "The paratroopers in the Mingaladon perimeter, for the period between landing and S-35 cover being established, are two thousand four hundred men against two thousand with armour, with man-portable anti-armour weapons outranged by the armour they face."
He looked at Doval. "Casualty estimate for the first twenty-four hours?"
Doval said: "Conservative estimate: fifteen to twenty percent casualties."
"Four hundred and eighty to five hundred and sixty paratroopers," Pillai said.
"Yes."
"In twenty-four hours."
"Yes."
Pillai said: "The campaign's total ground casualties to date are one hundred and ninety-eight killed in seventeen days. You are proposing an operation that kills and wounds four hundred to five hundred soldiers in a single day."
Doval said: "The operation shortens the campaign by ten to fourteen days. At the campaign's current casualty rate, ten more days of advance costs approximately forty deaths. The net calculation favours the airborne operation."
Pillai said: "The campaign's current daily rate is closer to four dead per day, not eleven. Ten days at four per day is forty deaths. You are proposing to spend five hundred casualties to save forty."
A very long silence.
Doval said: "The strategic benefits beyond the casualty arithmetic — political, diplomatic, economic — justify the calculation."
Pillai said: "I am not disputing the strategic calculus. I am pointing out that the operational cost is not the operational cost you have presented."
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Air Marshal Moolgavkar had been listening to the Para Brigade debate without speaking.
When Doval and Pillai reached their impasse, he said:
"I want to be precise about the air force's position."
He waited for the room's attention.
"The Para Brigade is an air force asset," he said. "The 50th Para Brigade is Air Force Special Operations. The decision to commit the Para Brigade is mine — with your approval, General, given the operation is in support of an army campaign."
Raina said: "I have not made a decision about approval."
Moolgavkar said: "I am telling the room what the decision process is."
He looked at the map.
"The air force's assessment is as follows. The drop itself is within our capability — the Gajendra-II fleet can execute the insertion as briefed. The S-35 cover is a problem that can be partially addressed by rotating aircraft rather than sustained coverage. The rotation means a fifteen-minute gap between cover windows rather than continuous coverage, which is a vulnerability but not an impossible one."
He paused.
"The problem is what happens if the operation does not go as planned in the first twelve hours. If the garrison responds faster than projected — if armour is closer to the airport than we believe, or if pre-positioned reserves are unidentified — the paratroopers are in serious difficulty before the S-35 rotation can stabilise."
He said: "My assessment is that the intelligence picture for the Rangoon area is not precise enough to accept that risk. The intelligence for the main advance corridor is built on seventeen days of Akashganga surveillance, informant reporting, prisoner intelligence, and aerial reconnaissance. It is as good as campaign intelligence gets."
He said: "The intelligence for the Rangoon garrison's interior disposition is what we can see from a carrier-based S-22 at altitude and what we can infer from signals intercepts. It is not good enough to commit two thousand four hundred paratroopers against."
Hari Narain said: "Air Marshal. Intelligence is never perfect before an airborne operation. Waiting for perfect intelligence means never dropping."
Moolgavkar said: "The Germans at Crete lost seven thousand killed and wounded in a week. The Allies at Arnhem lost eight thousand killed and wounded in nine days. Both operations achieved their tactical objectives only partially and at costs far exceeding projections."
Narain said: "Both also produced strategic effects that conventional advance could not have achieved. And Crete succeeded."
"Crete succeeded," Moolgavkar said. "Arnhem did not. And I am looking at two thousand four hundred of my soldiers and asking which one Rangoon is."
A silence.
Narain said: "Sir. The Para Brigade has been training for this for twenty years. We have never been committed. If we are not committed in this campaign, with this intelligence, this timeline, this target — when are we ever committed? We are going to be the brigade that was never dropped."
Moolgavkar said: "You will be committed when the conditions for commitment are right. Those conditions are: intelligence adequate to estimate the first-twenty-four-hour threat correctly, air cover rotation providing acceptable coverage, and a main advance timeline allowing link-up within seventy-two hours rather than one hundred and twenty."
He looked at Raina. "If those conditions are met, the air force will commit the Para Brigade."
Raina said: "And if those conditions are not met before we reach the Taungoo line?"
Moolgavkar said: "Then we do not drop. We continue by road."
Narain sat back.
He did not argue further. He was a professional officer and a professional officer knew when a decision had been made. He believed Moolgavkar was wrong. He would believe it for the rest of his career. He would write about it in his memoirs, published in 1991, in a chapter titled: The Drop That Wasn't. He would argue that the Rangoon garrison had in fact had its reserve elements further from Mingaladon Airport than the December 1976 assessment had placed them, and that the drop would have succeeded at Doval's projected casualty level rather than Pillai's estimate. He would be correct. But in December 1976, with the intelligence available, Moolgavkar's caution was defensible.
---
Raina said: "The Para Brigade remains in reserve. We advance by road. What can you give the advance if we solve the coordination problem?"
Pathak said: "With the direct request protocol and the cell at double staffing, I can give the advance six aircraft on permanent cap per day in the four-hour rotation. The Project 90 repositioning to the delta mouth extends the Saras range envelope and frees Kalemyo strip capacity. Combined, this is substantially better than the current arrangement."
Raina said: "Do it all. Today."
He looked at each man at the table.
He said: "I want one more thing addressed before we close. The Project 90 ships. They are in this fleet. They were built for a specific purpose. I want a formal assessment on my desk within thirty days of this campaign's conclusion on what is required to make the amphibious assault function operational — not theoretical, not a planning paper, but a programme with specific training milestones, joint exercise dates, and designated responsible officers in both the Army and the Navy."
He looked at Nair.
He looked at Sandhu.
He said: "When this campaign is over, the seam between those two ships and the infantry who would use them is going to be sewn shut. I am not going to fight another campaign with assets we cannot employ because nobody established who owns the training programme."
Both men said: "Understood, sir."
The session ended.
Moolgavkar returned to his aircraft for New Delhi. Nair returned to his helicopter for Vikrant. Verma returned to the advance. Pathak returned to the flight line.
The coordination cell at Kalemyo received its second officer before 1800 that evening. The direct request protocol was briefed to every cap formation before the next morning's sorties.
The Project 90 ships received orders to reposition to the Irrawaddy delta mouth at 1930.
The war continued.
---
Major Vikram Ahuja of B Company, 4th Kumaon, had not been in the joint coordination session.
He had been, on the afternoon of December 29th, on the road south of Yamethin which had run into a prepared Tatmadaw ambush position at a bridge crossing. Approximately sixty Tatmadaw soldiers in fighting positions on both sides of the bridge deck — the product of soldiers who had been ordered to hold the bridge and who had, when Ahuja's lead platoon reached the crossing, opened fire with the committed energy of soldiers fighting a rearguard they understood would not succeed but that had been given to them as their task.
The position on the west bank: a stone toll station modified with sandbag embrasures. The position on the east bank: concrete irrigation structures lining the road beyond the bridge deck.
Ahuja called for air support at 1513.
This time — because the coordination session had happened that morning and Pathak had spent the afternoon implementing the direct request protocol — there was a cap aircraft receiving the battalion frequency directly.
Flying Officer Suresh Iyer: "Falcon Strike, Bravo Six, acknowledged. I am forty kilometres north on current tasking. Diverting to your grid. ETA four minutes."
Four minutes.
At Yamethin that morning it had been thirteen minutes.
The difference was one coordination session.
Four minutes and thirty-seven seconds after the contact report, the first Nishith came off Iyer's aircraft, tracking to the toll building's laser designation.
The toll building absorbed the Nishith at 1518.
The east bank irrigation structures absorbed the second aircraft's rocket pods at 1519.
By 1522 — nine minutes after the contact report — the bridge crossing was suppressed.
Ahuja moved his company to the bridge.
He crossed the bridge.
---
That night, repositioning toward the delta mouth as ordered, Vice Admiral Nair stood on Vikrant's flight deck in the warm Bay of Bengal darkness and looked at INLS Airavat and INLS Shera maintaining station a kilometre to port and starboard.
They were beautiful ships. Nair did not often use the word beautiful about ships — it was not a word naval officers used professionally — but it was the accurate word for the Project 90 design in its operating environment, the way the Shergill Shipyard had resolved the competing requirements of the platform: the wide flight deck with its helicopter spots, the integrated well-deck that had the specific engineering elegance of a problem solved cleanly, the forward line of the hull that managed wave resistance in the heavy swell with less pitch than ships half its size.
They were beautiful ships that were doing the work of unglamorous naval auxiliaries because the specific thing that made them Project 90 ships rather than ordinary naval vessels had not been developed to the point of being usable.
He had been thinking about this since the session.
He had been thinking about who bore responsibility for it.
The honest accounting was this: the Navy had built the ships, had commissioned them, had maintained them in operational readiness, and had proposed the joint exercises that would have made the amphibious function operational. None of those things had been neglected.
The Army had agreed to the exercises in principle and had experienced genuine scheduling conflicts that made the specific scheduled dates impossible. None of that had been negligence.
The Ministry had approved the ships' procurement but had not specifically mandated a joint training programme or funded a dedicated joint exercise capability. This was the most substantive gap — the Ministry's assumption that procuring the platform was equivalent to procuring the capability, which it was not, had not been challenged by either service because challenging it would have required both services to admit that they were not, independently, responsible for the amphibious function, and both services preferred not to admit things that suggested gaps in their own domain.
So the amphibious function had existed in a space between the two services that neither service owned and both services could point at the other and say: not our problem, not yet, we are waiting for the joint exercise programme that has been proposed.
Nair had proposed it. The Army had agreed to it. Neither service had demanded that it happen urgently enough that the scheduling conflicts that cancelled it became someone's formal accountability problem rather than a mutually understood operational priority that was genuinely deferred rather than actually neglected.
This was the specific character of the seam.
It was not the seam of incompetence. It was the seam of two competent services operating in their own domains with their own priorities, with no ownership assigned to the space between them, and with the assumption that peacetime would provide the time to address the gap that peacetime had not actually provided.
He went back to his flag cabin.
He wrote a memo to Naval Headquarters.
He wrote: The Project 90 amphibious ships are deployed with the Eastern Fleet in Operation Vajrapata. Their offensive amphibious capability is not operational due to the absence of the joint training programme that was proposed in January 1976 and twice cancelled for scheduling reasons. As a result, India has deployed two of its most capable naval platforms in the role of maritime auxiliaries rather than in the role they were designed for, during the campaign that most directly required that role.
This is not a criticism of the ships, their crews, or the campaign's naval operations, which have been exemplary. It is an observation about the cost of allowing a capability gap to persist in the space between two services when neither service has formal accountability for that gap.
I recommend: (1) A joint amphibious training programme to be established with a designated joint commander with authority in both services. (2) A minimum of two joint amphibious exercises per year beginning in 1978. (3) Formal doctrine for Army-Navy amphibious operations to be written jointly by the Army's Southern Command and the Navy's Western Fleet, with Eastern Fleet secondary authority. (4) Procurement of four additional LCU-class landing craft to equip the two Project 90 ships at full LCU capacity.
He sealed it.
He said to his flag captain: "Get me a secure line to Naval Headquarters tomorrow morning. I want to brief this personally rather than let it arrive as a memo."
Iyer said: "Yes, Admiral."
Nair went to his bunk.
Outside, INLS Airavat and INLS Varuna moved through the Bay of Bengal in the darkness toward their new position at the delta mouth, carrying in their well-decks the landing craft that nobody had learned to use.
---
The advance reached Pyinmana on January 1st, 1977.
The new year brought a change in the terrain's character that the 17th Mountain Division's forward commanders had anticipated: south of Pyinmana the road corridor narrowed, the hill country pressed closer on both sides, and the Tatmadaw's defending forces in the Taungoo area — estimated at four thousand — had used the three weeks since Mandalay's fall to build the most sophisticated prepared defences that Indian reconnaissance had identified in the campaign.
The coordination protocol improvements had been in effect for three days. The air coordination cell was at double staffing. The cap aircraft were receiving direct requests from battalion level.
The difference was measurable immediately.
On January 1st, the 17th Mountain Division's lead battalion requested air support four times. Four times, the response was under six minutes. Four times, the target was engaged before the battalion had exhausted its own suppression options.
It was not perfect. The six-minute response was still six minutes in which the threat continued. On the second request of January 1st, the designated cap aircraft's primary weapon experienced a guidance seeker fault — a maintenance issue — and the secondary aircraft in the pair needed to take the shot, adding ninety seconds.
But it was substantially better than thirteen minutes.
Brigadier Verma noted this in his evening report, and added a final paragraph: The direct request protocol is functioning. The coordination cell staffing increase has resolved the competing-stream problem. The system is working well enough. It is not working well enough for the Taungoo assault. Taungoo will require continuous close support during the assault phase that the current rotation cannot fully provide. I recommend the Para Brigade commitment for the southern face be reconsidered against the current intelligence picture.
Raina received it. Read the last paragraph. Called Moolgavkar.
---
### Part Fourteen: Moolgavkar Reconsiders — January 3rd
Moolgavkar was in New Delhi when Raina called. He had been in New Delhi managing the air force's broader operations since December 30th.
Raina said: "Taungoo. Not Rangoon. The intelligence picture for Taungoo — I am sending you the updated Akashganga assessment from the last forty-eight hours."
Moolgavkar read the assessment that arrived on his secure line.
The assessment was different from the Rangoon assessment in one critical respect: forty-eight hours of targeted Akashganga surveillance specifically of the Taungoo garrison's interior disposition — not general surveillance but targeted, using the AWACS's signals intercept mode focused on the Tatmadaw frequencies the Taungoo garrison was using — had produced a detailed picture of the garrison's reserve element positioning.
The reserve element was eight kilometres south of the city's main defensive perimeter, in the agricultural zone between the city and the next village cluster.
Eight kilometres south. Not in a position that could respond to a southern airborne assault in under forty minutes of vehicle movement.
Moolgavkar looked at the assessment for a long time.
He said: "The conditions I specified."
Raina said: "Intelligence adequate for the first-twenty-four-hour threat: this assessment gives us the reserve element's position to within one kilometre. S-35 rotation: at Taungoo's range, the rotation gives thirty-five minutes per cycle, which is adequate. Main advance link-up: Sandhu says the 17th Mountain Division can be at the northern perimeter in ninety hours."
"Ninety hours," Moolgavkar said. "My condition was seventy-two."
Raina said: "I know. I am asking whether ninety hours is operationally acceptable given this specific intelligence picture."
A silence.
Moolgavkar said: "I want Narain's current operational plan. I want my staff to review it against this intelligence. Twenty-four hours."
Raina said: "You have twenty-four hours."
---
Narain had been refining his plan since December 20th. He briefed Moolgavkar on January 3rd.
Drop zone: agricultural ground two kilometres south of Taungoo, not immediately in the garrison's fire coverage, allowing assembly before the assault on the southern face.
Assembly time: forty-five minutes from last aircraft to assault formation.
Assault objective: the city's southern perimeter positions and the road junction connecting Taungoo to Rangoon. Seizing the junction did not require taking the entire city — it required controlling the choke point through which the garrison could either receive reinforcement or escape south.
Moolgavkar read the plan.
He said: "The artillery battery at grid north-four-seven."
Narain said: "Priority S-35 strike target at H-minus-forty-five. Goes down forty-five minutes before the first Gajendra-II is over the drop zone."
Moolgavkar said: "And if the strike does not fully neutralise it?"
Narain said: "The drop proceeds. Paratroopers in descent are spread across a seven-hundred-metre front. Artillery fire against spread paratroopers in descent is less effective than against assembled infantry."
"Still effective."
"Yes, sir. Still effective." Narain looked directly at Moolgavkar. "The operation has risk. I am not pretending it doesn't. I am telling you the risk is quantifiable and acceptable given the operational benefit."
Moolgavkar looked at the plan for a long time.
He said: "Narain."
"Sir."
"If it goes wrong — if the casualty assessment is wrong, if the intelligence is wrong, if the artillery battery survives the S-35 strike and fires into the drop zone — I will carry that for the rest of my career."
Narain said: "Yes, sir. As will I."
Moolgavkar said: "Why do you want to do this?"
Narain said: "Because this is what we were built for, sir. Because two thousand four hundred paratroopers have trained for this for twenty years and if we are not committed in this campaign, with this intelligence, with this timeline, we are never going to be committed. We are going to be the brigade that was never dropped." He paused. "And because I believe it will work."
Moolgavkar was quiet for a long time.
He called Raina.
He said: "The plan is sound. I am approving Para Brigade commitment for the Taungoo operation on three conditions: S-35 strike on the artillery battery confirmed at H-minus-forty-five with battle damage assessment before drop-zone clearance is declared, S-35 rotation with thirty-five-minute coverage per cycle, main advance at the northern perimeter by H-plus-ninety hours."
Raina said: "Sandhu confirms the 17th Mountain Division can meet H-plus-ninety."
Moolgavkar said: "Then we drop."
---
The 50th Para Brigade dropped on Taungoo at 0530 on January 5th, 1977.
The drop was preceded by the S-35 strike on the artillery battery at 0445. Four aircraft, eight Nishith missiles. The battery at grid north-four-seven, tracked by the Akashganga for forty-eight hours, destroyed at 0452. Battle damage assessment confirmed at 0458 from the reconnaissance aircraft that followed the strike elements.
At 0500, the first Gajendra-II crossed the Taungoo drop zone.
The drop took thirty-one minutes for the full brigade — eleven aircraft in two lifts, the paratroopers exiting in the sequential flow that jump operations required. The January sky over the Taungoo agricultural ground was briefly populated with a thousand canopies that Narain subsequently described, writing in his memoirs fourteen years later, as the most extraordinary sight he had witnessed in twenty-two years of military service.
The Tatmadaw garrison heard the aircraft. The alert siren went at 0503. The reserve element response took forty minutes to assemble.
By 0540, when the Tatmadaw reserve was assembled and moving south, the Para Brigade had assembled its first battalion and was moving north toward the southern perimeter.
The two forces met on the southern approach road at 0614.
The fight was sharp and deliberate — the Para Brigade's tactical objective was not to destroy the reserve element but to fix it in place south of the city while the main advance closed from the north. Fixing a force required presence and discipline, and the Para Brigade's first battalion provided both with the quality of soldiers who had trained for exactly this role for twenty years.
At 0800, the 17th Mountain Division's northern brigade made contact with the Taungoo garrison's northern perimeter.
The garrison was fighting in two directions simultaneously.
By 1200, the garrison's reserve element had determined it could not both defeat the Para Brigade to the south and reinforce the northern perimeter being pressed by the 17th Mountain Division.
The northern perimeter began giving at 1340.
The Para Brigade pushed from the south at 1400.
At 1551 on January 5th, the first elements of the 17th Mountain Division's northern brigade made contact with the Para Brigade's forward elements inside Taungoo's southern district.
Link-up in sixty-one hours — within Moolgavkar's ninety-hour condition.
Indian casualties in the Taungoo operation: forty-three killed, one hundred and nine wounded in the forty-eight hours of active fighting. Para Brigade: twenty-eight killed, seventy-four wounded. 17th Mountain Division: fifteen killed, thirty-five wounded.
Tatmadaw casualties: approximately nine hundred killed, fourteen hundred captured or surrendered.
Hari Narain stood at the link-up point on the afternoon of January 5th and shook hands with the 17th Mountain Division's lead battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arora, who had been in the advance from the Kabaw Valley and who had in twenty-five days developed the specific exhausted competence that sustained operations produced.
Arora said: "Welcome to Taungoo."
Narain said: "Thank you for being on time."
Arora said: "You were on time too."
Narain said: "Yes." He looked at the city around them — the smoke, the rubble, the specific urban aftermath of forty-eight hours of intense fighting. "We were."
Raina called the post-Taungoo session at Aizawl on January 8th.
Same room. Same officers. Different atmosphere. Taungoo had changed something. Not the fundamental coordination problems — those had not been solved by a single successful operation. But Taungoo had demonstrated that the solutions were reachable. The direct request protocol had worked. The Para Brigade commitment had worked. The ships repositioning had extended the Saras range envelope meaningfully. The S-35 strikes had worked.
The seams were still there. They would always be there — no military establishment eliminated inter-service friction through doctrine alone. But Taungoo had shown that the seams could be managed.
Raina said: "After-action review. What worked and what didn't."
What worked:
The direct request protocol. Not perfectly — two instances where battalion requests queued rather than immediately connecting, because the second coordination cell officer had been delayed in transit on January 1st. Pathak had requested a permanent establishment of three officers per shift effective January 10th.
The Para Brigade commitment. Forty-three killed in the first forty-eight hours, the highest forty-eight-hour casualty rate of any single formation in the campaign. But the operation had worked tactically and strategically, and it had been the decision of professionals who weighed the risk and found it acceptable.
The Project 90 repositioning to the delta mouth. The extended Saras range envelope had allowed the CASEVAC chain to reach positions on the advance axis that had previously been at the Kalemyo chain's limit. Three soldiers who the field surgeon subsequently assessed as critical-to-survival cases had reached surgical care in time because of the repositioned ships' closer helicopter base.
What hadn't worked:
The post-seizure supply chain. The Para Brigade's ammunition consumption rate in the first twenty-four hours exceeded the planning estimate, and the helicopter resupply chain had been slower than needed because the Saras aircraft assigned to resupply were also being used for CASEVAC. Too few aircraft for too many simultaneous functions.
Moolgavkar said: "We need dedicated resupply aircraft that are not the same aircraft as CASEVAC. In Taungoo we got away with the dual use because the campaign phase was short. In a longer para commitment we would have been in serious difficulty."
Raina said: "How many additional Saras does the para support mission require?"
Moolgavkar said: "Four. Two dedicated CASEVAC, two dedicated resupply."
Raina said: "We have four additional Saras in the 21st Squadron's reserve pool. Transfer them to Para Brigade support effective immediately."
Moolgavkar said: "Agreed."
Nair said: "The amphibious question. The Project 90 ships performed their repositioned function well. The CASEVAC range extension and the forward refuelling point were operationally significant. But I want to formally restate, on the record, that the ships were used as expensive naval auxiliaries rather than as the amphibious assault platforms they were designed to be, and that this was a failure of the joint training programme that was proposed and not conducted."
He put a document on the table.
"This is my memo to Naval Headquarters recommending the establishment of a joint amphibious programme. I am asking, General, that you endorse it as joint service policy rather than as a naval proposal, so that the programme has formal Army commitment rather than Army agreement in principle which has twice failed to produce actual exercises."
Raina read the memo.
He said: "This is correct."
He signed the endorsement block.
He said to his chief of staff: "Route this through JCS to the Ministry. I want it on the Defence Minister's desk before the end of January."
He looked around the table.
"The Project 90 ships will be used correctly in the next campaign," he said. "That means both services are accountable for ensuring the joint training programme occurs. Not proposed. Not agreed to in principle. Conducted. I want a joint exercise date in 1978 with both services committed to it before anyone leaves this room."
A pause.
Nair said: "January 1978. The Navy can be ready."
Sandhu said: "Southern Command will provide the assault infantry battalion."
"January 1978," Raina said. "Write it down."
On January 8th, the 17th Mountain Division's lead elements were ninety-two kilometres north of Rangoon.
The Taungoo engagement had cost the advance three days of the timeline projected when Mandalay fell. The Para Brigade's commitment had recovered two. Net effect: one day behind the original timeline.
One day.
The coordination failures of December 28th, the joint session arguments, the beach landing discussion that exposed a gap in capability the ships existed to fill but the training did not, the para commitment debate that took eleven days to resolve — all of it had cost, in the arithmetic of the campaign's actual timeline, one day.
This was not how it felt to the people who had been in it. It felt, to Singh and to Ahuja and to Premkumar Nair behind the engine block on December 28th, like more than one day. It felt like the specific accumulated weight of systems that were not quite adequate, of friction that was not quite fatal, of seams that showed without breaking.
It felt like the Project 90 ships in the bay, with their LCU landing craft unused in their well-decks, steaming in formation with a carrier that had destroyed a navy in one morning, doing work that an ordinary fleet replenishment vessel could have done as well — because the specific thing that made them Project 90 ships rather than ordinary vessels had been designed, built, and delivered without the joint training programme that made the design usable.
It felt like a general who had been told his service's brand-new amphibious ships were there, were operational, were ready — and who had to answer that they were not ready in the way that mattered, and who had the specific professional discomfort of having a correct answer that was also an indictment.
It felt like all of that.
The arithmetic was one day.
And the advance was ninety-two kilometres from Rangoon.
And the S-35 squadrons were flying from Kalemyo in the new cap rotation with the direct request protocol, and the Para Brigade was reconstituting at the Taungoo airstrip, and INLS Airavat and INLS Varuna were at the delta mouth with their Saras helicopters extended into the advance axis, and the Scourge programme had completed its work in the hills, and everything was slower than it should have been and messier than it should have been and more expensive in human terms than the pre-campaign assessments had projected.
But Rangoon was ninety-two kilometres away.
And the road was open.
The advance continued.
There was still work to do.
There always was.
---
End of Chapter 266