"We Know How the Parisians Felt"

TIME Correspondent Dan Coggin, who covered the war from the Pakistani side, was in Dacca when that city surrendered. His report:

FOR twelve tense days, Dacca felt the war draw steadily closer, with nightly curfews and blackouts and up to a dozen air raids a day. It was a siege of sorts, but one of liberation. Until the last few days, when it appeared that Pakistani troops would make a final stand in the city, the Indian army was awaited calmly and without fear. Most people went about their usual business -- offices were open, rickshas running and pushcarts plying. The sweet tea of the street stalls drew the same gabby old fellows with white beards. The mood of the overwhelming majority of Bengalis was less one of apprehension than pent-up anticipation. Said one Bengali journalist: "Now we know how the Parisians felt when the Allies were approaching."

The Indian air force had knocked out the Pakistanis' runways and, out side of the limited range of ack-ack guns, Indian planes could fly as freely as if they were at an air show. I was surprised at the extent to which India could do no wrong in the eyes of the Bengalis. They showed me through rocketed houses where about 15 people had died. Several Bengalis whispered that it must have been a mistake, and I heard no one cursing the Indians.

In the final two days of fighting, the Indians put rockets on the governor's house, starting a small fire and bringing about the prompt resignation of the Islamabad-appointed governor and his cabinet of so-called dalals, or "collaborators." They fled to the eleven-story Hotel Intercontinental, a Red Cross neutral zone that became a haven for foreigners, minorities and other likely targets. Thanks to three gutsy British C-130 pilots who made pinpoint landings on the heavily damaged airfield, all who wanted to go went, including two mynah birds and a gray toy poodle named "Baby" that had been on tranquilizers for a week.

Also at the hotel were all of ex-Governor A.M. Malik's cabinet members, who were mostly hand-picked opportunists from minor parties. They are expected to face trial as war criminals. Their wives and other Pakistani women lived in fear, and the frequent moaning from their rooms at the Intercontinental contrasted eerily with the noisy candlelight poker and chess games of the correspondents who were not standing four-hour guard duty to keep out intruders. The hotel roof could hardly have been a better place for TV crews to grind away at air strikes. During the raids, shrapnel was occasionally fished out of the swimming pool, and a large time bomb planted in the hotel was disarmed and replanted in a trench on the nearby lawns. Beer soon ran out, but there was always fish or something else tasty for those cured of curry.

Outside the city, reporters had to go looking for the war, and for the first few days they found the countryside, more often than not, as peaceful as North Carolina during military maneuvers. "We'll give those buggers a good hammering" had been a favorite boast of Pakistani officers. But once the serious fighting began, only a few of the outnumbered and outgunned Pakistani units fought it out in pitched battles.

One of the bloodiest was at Jamalpur north of Dacca, where the Pakistani battalion commander was sent a surrender offer by one of the three Indian battalions surrounding him. The Pakistani colonel replied with a note ("I suggest you come with a Sten gun instead of a pen over which you have such mastery") and enclosed a 7.62-mm. bullet. Apparently thinking the Indians were bluffing and that he was confronted by only a company or so, the Pakistani colonel attacked that night, with five waves of about 100 men each charging head-on at a dug-in Indian battalion. The Indians claimed to have killed nearly 300 and captured 400 others. The top Indian commander at Jamalpur, Brigadier General Hardev Singh Kler, 47, said later that the battle "broke the Pakistanis' backs" and enabled his troops to reach Dacca first. A Pakistani officer waving a white flag went to a Mirpur bridge two miles west of the city to make the first surrender contact.

"It's a great day for a soldier," beamed the Indian field commander, bush-hatted Major General Gandharv Nagra, who led the first red-bereted troops in. "For us, it's like going into Berlin." The scene at the Dacca garrison's cantonment seemed bizarre to an outsider, although it was obviously perfectly natural for professional soldiers of the subcontinent. Senior officers were warmly embracing old friends from the other side, amid snatches of overheard conversation about times and places 25 years ago. Top generals lunched together in the mess, and around general headquarters it was like an old home week at the war college.

After the surrender of Dacca, death was mixed with delight. Small pockets of Pakistani soldiers switched to civilian clothes and ran through the city of celebrants shooting at Bengalis and Mukti Bahini at random. By midday Friday most of them had been hunted down and either arrested or killed. I saw one summarily executed by three Mukti outside the U.S. Consulate General that morning, and a few minutes later the head of another Pakistani was laid on the corpse's chest. Civilians and soldiers were killed in nervous shootouts and accidents. Five died in front of the Hotel Intercontinental, as South Asia's greatest convulsion since the partition of India and Pakistan neared its bloody finale.

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