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IMAGE SOURCE,PRIVATE COLLECTIONThe remarkable evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk was a pivotal moment in World War Two. What is not well known is the story of nearly 300 Indian soldiers who were also part of the contingent.
Over the course of nine days in May 1940, more than 338,000 Allied forces were evacuated from the beach and harbour at the French port city of Dunkirk as the German military bore down on them.
In this sea of European servicemen was Major Mohammad Akbar Khan, an Indian soldier.
On 28 May, he led 300 Indian soldiers and 23 British troops in an orderly column along the bombed-out harbour to the East Mole, the nearly mile-long wooden jetty which featured in Christopher Nolan’s epic 2017 film, Dunkirk.
The imposing 183cm (6ft) tall soldier returned to India after the war and later became a senior officer in the new Pakistan army when British-ruled India was divided into India and Pakistan in August 1947. He was made a military aide to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the man who founded Pakistan, wrote more than 40 books, and met Chairman Mao on a visit to China.
Indian soldiers like Major Akbar who were evacuated from Dunkirk have been completely forgotten, according to British historian Ghee Bowman. He spent five years in five countries, tracking down lost archives and photographs from family albums and talking to descendants of the soldiers.
The Indian soldiers belonged to the 25th Animal Transport Company, who had travelled 7,000 miles (11,265 km) with their mules to help the British army. All but four of them were Muslim.
IMAGE SOURCE,PRIVATE COLLECTION
They wore khaki, tin helmets, caps and pagris (turbans). They carried no weapons, because none had been issued when they left Punjab six months before they landed in France.
In the bitter winter in France, the British army needed mules to replace motorised vehicles to carry supplies. But as they lacked “animal-handling skills”, the Indian troops were deployed to help them.
Some five million Commonwealth servicemen joined the military services of the British Empire during the war. Almost half of them were from South Asia. What happened with the Indian soldiers in Dunkirk has been unclear.
“The story of these soldiers and their comrades is one of the great untold stories of the war,” said Mr Bowman, author, most recently of The Indian Contingent: The Forgotten Muslim Soldiers of the Battle of Dunkirk.
Take, for example, Chaudry Wali Mohammad, who later recounted that “German planes [were] like terrible birds flying overheard and firing on us… I did not sleep for 15 days”. He and his contingent reached Dunkirk on 23 May.
“We didn’t think we would come out of Dunkirk alive… Everything was on fire. The whole of Dunkirk was alight. There were so many fires it was like daylight…
“The ship we were supposed to board was sunk. We got down to the beach and found the ship had sunk, so then we had to run back to the woods,” he later recalled. Two days later, Mohammad and his troops were evacuated.
Then there was Jemadar Maula Dad Khan who was feted for showing “magnificent courage, coolness and decision” in protecting his men and animals when they were shelled from the ground and strafed from the air by the enemy.
“I don’t think the significance of Indian soldiers lies in their numbers. It’s in the simple fact that they were there, as Indians, as citizens of the Empire, with a maulvi [Muslim priest] and pagris, and a whole different way of looking at the world,” Mr Bowman said.
IMAGE SOURCE,PRIVATE COLLECTIONThese men had spent much of 1940 in a village in northern France, just north of the city of Lille. Braving a biting winter, they exercised and fed their mules. They met local villagers, charming packed audiences with their “weekly gymkhanas where they performed tricks on mule back and danced bhangra [an energetic folk dance from Punjab]”.
Things changed rapidly in May when the Germans attacked France, and “within a space of two weeks, from being part of a well-ordered, disciplined, multi-national army, the soldiers were part of a chaotic retreat to the coast”, says Mr Bowman.
On reaching Dover, the historian says, they played Punjabi folk music, upon which even “many British spectators joined in the dance”.
They were welcomed into British homes and hearts, and had a set of toy soldiers reproduced after them.
Their lives had changed as they travelled from India to villages and towns across Britain and France until they returned home after the end of the war. Some were captured by Germans and held in prisoner of war camps in France, Germany, Italy and Poland.
IMAGE SOURCE,HULTON DEUTSCH/GETTY IMAGESThen why were these soldiers forgotten in the books and films of what Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War Two, called a “miracle of deliverance” in a famed speech in 1940?
One reason, according to Mr Bowman, could be that they were “involved in the business of supply, not front-line fighting, and such support troops are rarely remembered”.
“Public memory and public forgetting are fascinating processes, it’s hard to put your finger on all the reasons,” Mr Bowman says.
“The post-war environment was a very different one, in Europe and in India. In Europe there was a need for physical reconstruction and for building new societies. The focus was on the future, and the elements of the war that lived on in popular memory were taken from a narrow field, usually involving those with white faces and posh backgrounds.
“In India, the process leading to independence and partition took precedence. History is always a moving and unfolding process.”
Sudha G Tilak is a journalist and author of Temple Tales: Secrets and Stories from India’s Sacred Places
Public Health: The Vast Constitutional Blind Spot
Like a vaccine, our Constitution has inoculated Americans against most of the common strains of tyranny. We have, however, little natural immunity to the variant of public health.
The recent decision by a Florida judge upholding the power of school districts to impose mask mandates on students is no anomaly. Nor, for that matter, was the decision by Justice Barrett upholding a vaccine mandate at Indiana University, or that by Justice Thomas upholding the federal mask mandate on public transport.
Over the past year and a half, judges of all ideological bents have proven themselves startlingly willing to affirm pandemic-based restrictions on personal liberty. As Jacob Gershman pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, most legal challenges to lockdowns have failed, and even those that have succeeded were decided on relatively narrow grounds.
The justification for all this, cited repeatedly by judges and legal scholars, is the broad power of governmental authorities to implement restrictions in the name of “public health,” a term which, as currently understood, is so vague that it can be used to serve virtually any agenda. This indefiniteness was in evidence when thousands of health professionals deemed “racism” a public health crisis sufficient to loosen social distancing protocol for Black Lives Matter protests in mid-2020, while specifically excluding “protests against stay-home orders” from this exemption.
If the pretense of public health can be used to circumvent the First Amendment guarantee of viewpoint neutrality for public demonstrations, then there is nothing it cannot do. Further demonstrating the elasticity of the public health framework, “misinformation” (that is to say, free speech) has been declared by government officials and experts to be a public health crisis, as has climate change. With this logic, our freedoms are mere putty in the hands of public health bureaucrats.
This very danger was once recognized by the ACLU, when it said in a 2008 policy brief on pandemic preparedness:
The law enforcement approach to public health offers a rationale for the endless suspension of civil liberties…the war on disease will continue until the end of the human race. There will always be a new disease, always the threat of a new pandemic. If that fear justifies the suspension of liberties and the institution of an emergency state, then freedom and the rule of law will be permanently suspended.
Disturbingly, however, there are few actual legal safeguards against the abuse of public health power.
The Framers of the Constitution were not omniscient. They did not know, for instance, that the quartering of troops in private homes, which they considered important enough to place ahead of due process in the Bill of Rights, would quickly become a virtual non-issue. Nor could they have foreseen all the threats to liberty that might eventually emerge.
While measures like quarantines date back to before the founding of the country, our current lockdown regime is historically unprecedented. The Framers took no provisions against public health excess because they simply did not imagine that such a shortcut to tyranny might ever be blazed. That is why there is no anti-lockdown amendment in the Bill of Rights, not because the founding fathers, who fought a revolution over a tea tax, would have approved of our current state of affairs.
Like a vaccine, our Constitution has inoculated Americans against most of the common strains of tyranny. We have, however, little natural immunity to the tyranny of public health, a dangerous new variant of the totalitarian pathogen which has cleverly evolved to bypass our immune defenses, allowing politicians a workaround by which they might violate our civil liberties at will while nominally upholding the Constitution.
Nor do opponents of lockdowns have much in the way of legal precedent to fall back on. The case law on the matter is surprisingly scanty; lockdown supporters tend to rest their arguments primarily on a single 1905 case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in which the Supreme Court upheld a state law mandating smallpox vaccinations.
Jacobson was decided at a time before our modern understanding of civil liberties had developed, less than a decade after Plessy v. Ferguson and scarcely a decade before the Court would uphold the imprisonment of an antiwar leafleteer in Schenck v. United States. It has also inspired one of the worst decisions in the history of the Court: the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explicitly cited Jacobson as a direct precedent for forced sterilization, ruling that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
There are also clear differences between the facts of the Jacobson case and our current situation. Smallpox had a historical fatality rate of around 30 percent. It is simply not reasonable to treat a disease with a fatality rate that is well below 1 percent for most demographics in the same way. Similarly, arguments for lockdowns based on George Washington’s decision to inoculate his soldiers against smallpox, or the response to a yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, or cholera, or bubonic plague, or tuberculosis, or polio, completely ignore their relative dangers and the degree to which we have become increasingly risk-averse regarding infectious disease.
Yet this past year, the Jacobson precedent has been exponentially strengthened by the number of judges who have cited it in upholding lockdown orders, cementing it irrevocably into our case law.
Although few explicitly limiting principles on the public health power have been established, it must be remembered that even the Jacobson Court recognized the dangers of unchecked public health authority, writing that it “may be exerted in such circumstances, or by regulations so arbitrary and oppressive in particular cases, as to justify the interference of the courts to prevent wrong and oppression.” It is difficult to imagine a better test of this principle than that which we currently face.
While the failure of many of our era’s most respected jurists to take a stand against this madness will resound to their ignominy for generations to come, any sensible legal scholars remaining should direct their energies to closing this loophole before matters grow worse. To amend the Constitution—as may ultimately be necessary—is a great undertaking. But the costs of not doing so, in this case, may be far greater. Aspiring future tyrants should not rest with the reassurance that they need only stir up fear of a pandemic in order to render null and void the hard-won liberties of the citizenry.
Jason Garshfield is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Townhall, RealClearPolitics, and numerous other publications.
A World-Class Coues Deer Offers A Challenging, Long-Range Shot In High-Wind Conditions. The Hunter Is Using Cutting-Edge Long-Range Shooting Gear. Should He Take The Shot?
“Oh My Gosh! That’s a huge buck!” My shouted whisper was snatched away by the wind, bouncing off a mountainside in Mexico a few seconds later. My friend and hunting buddy Jordan Voigt had just spotted a Coues buck across the bend of a jagged canyon, and it only took a glance through my binocular to see that it was a really good deer. Even at 514 yards.
We had started the day high on the same ridge, crawling out of our bivy tents at dawn and making our way Ninja-style to a little jutting point. There we settled in to glass miles of classic Coues deer habitat. The wind was strong, battering our backs and shoulders and creeping its cold fingers inside our collars and down our necks.
We spotted a few does, which were holding tight to heavy brush and feeding on dry mesquite beans littering the ground under the older trees. It was the third day of our hunt. I had killed a great old warrior buck the noon before, and our plan called for us to exit the backcountry during this day’s noontime so we could resupply, as well as join some friends for a traditional Argentinian dinner. After a couple days of freeze-dried food, that sounded like heaven in Coues country.
We shivered behind our binoculars and huddled on rocky shelves below the rim of the cliff, trying to escape the brutality of the wind, telling ourselves that if we glassed just a little longer a buck would show itself.
There were three of us on this adventure; myself, Jordan, and another friend and hunting buddy Natalie. This was Jordan and Natalie’s first hunt for the elusive “Grey Ghost”, the diminutive Coues whitetail of the American Southwest. They (the deer, not Jordan and Natalie) have earned their nickname honestly, being some of the most illusive creatures alive to spot and stalk amid the cactus, dense brush, and hip-high grass of their native mountain terrain. They’re tiny things, with a big, old mature buck tipping the scale at just over one hundred pounds. That’s barely bigger than your neighbor’s German Shepherd, and hunting the little deer calls for an accurate rifle and precise shooting. And more often than not, long cross-canyon shots.
RIFLE, SCOPE, AND AMMO
Jordan was hunting with a bolt-action rifle chambered in the brand-new, cutting-edge 6.8 Western cartridge. It was an accurate setup, turning in an average group size of less than three quarter minutes of angle. Most of the 100-yard groups could hide under a nickel. Lightweight Talley rings mounted a snappy Leupold 2-12X44 VX6 HD riflescope atop the action, and a superb Javelin Pro bipod by Spartan Precision quick-attached to the forend via a rare-earth magnet. The rifle was zeroed at 200 yards, and a drop chart showing ballistic information and “come-ups” for every distance from 200 to 1,000 yards, at average local elevation and temperature, was pasted to the side of the rifle’s forearm. Jordan had used the rifle to ring targets out to six hundred yards and more the day preceding our hunt, and I had no doubt of his ability to place an accurate shot when the moment arrived.
The ammunition nestled in the magazine on Jordan’s rifle came from the Browning factory, loaded with a new 175-grain Sierra Tipped Game King bullet designed specifically for the new 6.8 Western. The diameter of the bullet is .277, exactly the same as a .270 Winchester. Long, sleek, and streamlined, the bullets sport an extraordinarily high G1 Ballistic Coefficient of .617. Starting downrange with a muzzle velocity of 2,834 feet per second, the round packs terminal energy and momentum far beyond any distance a reasonably intelligent person would want to shoot at a little critter like a Coues buck.
Photo 4
We finally gave up on spotting a buck from our windy point, and slunk back to stuff our bivy tents and sleeping bags into packs and swing them aboard sore shoulders. Determined to hunt along the way we stayed high, finally running out of ridge above a big bend in a canyon. We decided to stop and glass for a while, and I hadn’t even found a comfortable rock to sit upon when Jordan hissed “big buck!” jolting us into full-throttle predator mode. I put glass on the buck, gulped my heart back down where it belonged, and settled my spotting scope onto the deer to verify what a quick glance through my binocular had told me. Sure enough, the buck was a monster. Wide, heavy beams swept out and forward, with long brow tines and G-2s, 3s, and 4s reaching toward the sky. I never could get a perfect look at the buck’s left antler, but if it matched his right side – and every glimpse I got said it would – we were undoubtedly looking at a record book buck.
When we first saw the buck he was standing broadside on a jumbled boulder face that a goat would struggle to maintain its balance on. By the time I set the spotter up and Jordan found a field position to shoot from the deer had walked under the canopy of a giant old oak tree that overhung the cliff side, stopping with only his right antler and shoulder visible through a hole in the tree limbs. He was quartering slightly toward us, but remarkably, we had a good shot at his shoulder and the vitals beyond. Jordan gallantly asked if Natalie wanted to take the opportunity, and once she’d refused settled in behind his rifle. The distance was 514 yards. He checked his chart and adjusted the turret on his scope. His position was steady, but there was a problem:
The wind. The wind was ripping left to right, sweeping in jagged bursts up and across the canyon. I’m fairly confident in estimating wind up to about fifteen miles per hour, and this air was maintaining significantly more velocity that that. The gusts, I surmised, were ripping through at 35 to 40 miles per hour. Depending on what the wind was doing at the buck’s position, and in the 500-yard void between, the Sierra bullet would drift somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 11 minutes of angle. That’s equivalent to between 20 and 55 inches. Jordan would have to make a long range downhill shot with a violently gusting crosswind at one of America’s smallest big game animals. Through a hole in a tree.
But this was no ordinary buck. It was the biggest Coues buck I’d seen in my life; one that would very likely score well into the all-time Boone & Crockett record book. Would it be wise to push our luck? To try to make that shot regardless of the complications? We studied our options.
Could we sneak closer? Coues deer are notorious for seeing any movement and just disappearing. This buck was across a canyon, with no good cover for stalking. Our chances of finding him again later were not good either. The forecast called for continuing wind through the day and following night, so we couldn’t simply wait it out. We were between the proverbial frying pan and fire.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
Place yourself in Jordan’s shoes. You’ve drawn a coveted tag, flown to Arizona, worked your rifle out to long distances, and backpack hunted in the backcountry. You’ve done everything you could to prepare for a tough hunt, and a tough shot, at a hard-to-find animal. You know your rifle, and are confident you can make a good shot at greater distances than you now face. And you’re looking through the crosshairs at the buck of a lifetime.
But it’s impossible to figure the wind. What is it doing at 150 yards? At 250? At 400? Will it remain steady long enough for you to squeeze off a good shot, or will it gust at the last moment, drifting your bullet an additional 25 inches? You just don’t know. YOU DON’T KNOW.
Do you take the shot?
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED (TRUE STORY)
Jordan and I watched the wind. We tried to watch dust, cobwebs, debris, anything – to get an idea of what the wind was doing in between the deer and our position. We watched for any kind of pattern in the gusts. And then, agonizingly, we decided it would not be wise, or ethical, to take the shot. So we slid through the rocks and the ocotillo cactus and down the steep side of the ridge, trying to close to within 300 yard of the buck. If we could get that close, we could kill him. At 327 yards the buck spooked, bounded up his cliff like a mountain goat, and disappeared. Except from our dreams.
We didn’t get that buck. Nor, I believe, did we ever regret not attempting that shot. Passing was the ethical decision. Jordan did get a good buck a couple days later, with a first-shot kill at nearly the same distance. That day, there was no wind. But that is another story.
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A S&W M&P Shield, chambered in 9mm
