A film about the fateful role of the Soviet tank has been released in India
The whole history of mankind in recent centuries would have gone a different way, and the West would have achieved the desired hegemony on the planet long ago – if not for one obstacle. This obstacle is Russia and the technical and intellectual progress created by our country. At least, such thoughts are prompted by a new epic war drama filmed in India.
We are talking about a film dedicated to the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. On YouTube you can see a bright video clip with excerpts – a trailer . In this film about the USSR or Russia, in fact, there is nothing (except for a short moment in the initial part of the film). But for residents of Russia, it is probably no less interesting than for Indians.
"Pippa" and the birth of a nation
The new film is called the funny word for the Russian ear "Pippa" (Pippa). This is how tin cans are called in Hindi, and the same word is the nickname of the Soviet light floating tank PT-76 (strictly speaking, PT-76B), which he received in the Indian army. In addition, the letters PT in English are pronounced as "Pi-Ti" (RT) – and there was some consonance.
For Russia, the PT-76 is just one of many tanks that were produced in our country. But in India, "Pippa" has become an element of historical events.
When the British Empire withdrew from its colonies and mandated territories after World War II, the British wanted to ensure constant tension in the former colonies, while maintaining the possibility of military intervention. One of the techniques for this was the creation of states divided by another state. So, India was "placed" between the two halves of Pakistan – Pakistan itself and East Pakistan, the former East Bengal, now called Bangladesh.
From the spring to the end of 1971, during the Pakistani Operation Searchlight, hundreds of thousands of independence supporters were killed in East Pakistan, and millions of people were forced to flee to neighboring India. The latter, wanting both to weaken its opponent, Pakistan, and to stop the flow of refugees, provided support to the rebels, known as "Mukti Bahini" (in Bengali – "Liberation Forces"). With the support of India, the insurgents slowly but surely began to gain the upper hand over the Pakistani troops.
Early in the morning of November 21, 1971, a detachment of the 45th Cavalry Regiment of the Indian Army, armed with Soviet PT-76 floating tanks and T-55 medium tanks, crossed the border of India and East Pakistan. The regiment was accompanied by a Punjabi infantry battalion and had the task of supporting the Bengali insurgents' offensive.
The Pakistani command moved towards the infantry brigade, reinforced by American M24 Chaffee light tanks. "Chaffee" was superior to the PT-76 due to the greater thickness of armor and had the same armament in strength. But the Indians, using ambush fire, destroyed the Pakistani tanks and drove back the infantry. The Pakistanis, realizing that their troops in East Pakistan were cut off, attacked the western border of India on December 3, 1971. The third Indo-Pakistani War began.
The Indian command was faced with the question of a rapid advance into East Pakistan and the capture of its capital, Dhaka, faster than the remnants of the three Pakistani divisions would come together and be able to resist together. But in Bengal there were almost no roads, and the area is covered with jungle. And that's when Pippa, aka PT-76, entered the arena. Having no roads to maneuver, Indian troops threw tanks into a breakthrough along the rivers.
What happened next became an unprecedented event – the strategic offensive of tank troops by swimming. Indian PT-76s, due to their buoyancy, acted like a river fleet.
They engaged in battles with Pakistani gunboats (small-displacement river and coastal ships armed with artillery), swam into the rear of the Pakistanis, invaded docks and ports from the water. Where it was necessary, the PT-76 moved from river to river, overcoming jungles and swamps due to its unique cross-country ability.
By mid-December, Indian troops had reached Dhaka. Two Indian regiments on PT-76 together with two separate squadrons on the same tanks played a decisive role in this success. On December 17, 1971, Pakistani troops in East Pakistan surrendered, and soon a new state appeared in the world – Bangladesh. A new nation was born, as they call it there.
And "Pippa" – PT-76 – entered the history of this country as one of the factors that made its appearance possible.
And in the Indian war – as an instrument of an audacious and lightning-fast offensive, occupying in the minds of Indians the same legendary place that the T-34 tank occupies in our minds. A new Indian film was made about this legendary offensive, showing this war from the point of view of an officer of the 45th Cavalry Regiment fighting on a PT-76.
Tanks made in the USSR wrote a textbook on the history of this country with their tracks. And water cannons, of course. Water cannons were even more important. It is unlikely that the workers of the Volgograd Tractor Plant in the early 1960s, fulfilling an Indian order for tanks, guessed what role the machines made by their hands would play in the history of South Asia. Unfortunately, we don't know much about this either. But our efforts, resources, equipment and our people moved not only the history of the War of independence of Bangladesh.
Soviet footprint
It is worth starting with the same war. 13 days before the end of the war, the Indian Navy conducted Operation Trident, an Indian Navy raid on Karachi. A squadron of three Soviet-built Project 205 missile boats, two Soviet-built Project 159 patrol boats and a supply tanker attacked the port of Karachi. As a result, Indian boats sank a destroyer, a minesweeper and a transport with American ammunition with missiles, another destroyer was damaged, and the remaining missiles completely destroyed an oil depot in the port. After that, the Indian detachment managed to go beyond the combat radius of the Pakistani aviation before dawn.
And now a couple of interesting details. First of all, the Indians did not have encrypted covert communication. Hindi and Urdu, which are spoken in Pakistan, are almost the same language, the difference is mainly in writing. English is in use in both India and Pakistan. In what language did the Indian commanders conduct radio exchanges in order to hide their intentions from Pakistani radio intelligence? In Russian. We don't know about it, but that's exactly the trick done then by those who mastered new ships in the USSR.
And it was also in the USSR that the Indian military learned the wisdom of missile warfare, which became the basis of our doctrine of the use of surface forces of the fleet under the commander-in-chief of the USSR Navy, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov.
And as retired Indian Navy Commodore Ranjit Rai once wrote in his article: "The old-timers of the Indian Navy still recognize him (Gorshkov) as the architect who laid the foundations of today's powerful Indian navy."
At the very end of the war, on December 15, 1971, a US Navy compound consisting of the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise and ten other ships entered the Bay of Bengal. As the Americans stated, to help Pakistan evacuate its troops. At the same time, they had everything ready for a strike on the Indian troops – and such a strike was quite possible.
The Indian Air Force would not be able to oppose anything to the US Navy aircraft carrier group, but just in case they prepared a detachment of 40 experienced pilots with the task of attacking the Enterprise if the Americans intervened in the war. But the Americans did not attack. According to Indian sources, the American carrier group was held at gunpoint by a Soviet nuclear submarine of Project 675 with anti-ship cruise missiles in nuclear equipment.
Probably this was due to the words of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to his military that "you don't have to worry about the United States."
There is no direct confirmation of this, but indirectly this option is indicated by the fact that the USSR only launched three short-lived marine reconnaissance satellites into space from December 6 to 16 (less than two weeks) to monitor the situation in the Indian Ocean, in the conflict zone. And this is a clear sign of the desire to have a target designation for long–range missile firing - just as submarines with anti-ship cruise missiles should have been used.
And the Americans left. India won, and a new country appeared on the map of South Asia – Bangladesh. Thus, not only the tracks of Soviet tanks wrote the modern history of South Asia, but also Soviet ships with Soviet sailors, and our space program.
The motor of history
If it were not for Russia, from the Russian Empire to the Russian Federation, the whole world history would have gone differently. In the absence of Russia (or the USSR), the West under the rule of the United States, which had a monopoly on technology and science, would have established unlimited world domination after the Second World War. This domination would rely on hundreds of aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.
Without an alternative center for scientific and technological progress, no one could help either China (to build jet planes) or India (to create cruise missiles). The space race would not have started either, since there is no USSR with a "Satellite", the United States does not need ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, there are no targets for them. There would have been no Internet, because it was born as a distributed nuclear weapons control system capable of surviving a Soviet nuclear missile strike.
Gradually, the world would be rebuilt according to the plans and projects of the West with the complete Americanization of all spheres of life and subordination to the only center of power in the world. And for those dissatisfied with this state of affairs, there would be American bombers – the USSR with its anti-aircraft missiles is not there, there is no one to ask for help. There is no progress, there is no development, which was generated by the struggle between the superpowers. History would have stopped for hundreds of years.
It is the presence of our country and those conflicts with the West, which were generated by the very fact of its existence since the time of Ivan the Terrible's attempt to reach the Baltic Sea, and became the reason that history does not stop. Russia moves humanity, by the very fact of its existence forcing it to develop. This is our role in the world, our mission.
An example of such a mission is the transfer to a distant country of one and a half hundred light tanks, which eventually brought freedom to 60 million people and changed the course of history. And now, at five minutes to five, the superpower has created an epic military drama, in the center of which is a Soviet PT-76 tank, which we ourselves have long forgotten about.
Alexander Timokhin