From flight to fight

HL: Book review: Eagles of Destiny

Shldr: A richly illustrated, tightly written history of PAF traces how it became a modern fighting force

By Syed Ali Hamid

Only a few institutions in South Asia’s post-colonial landscape have had to build themselves as rapidly as Pakistan’s air arm. Born overnight in 1947, led at first by seconded RAF officers and a sprinkling of seasoned ex-Royal Indian Air Force hands, within a generation it was thrust into two major wars. The Royal Pakistan Air Force (RPAF) and its successor the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) provide a compact study in institutional learning under pressure. Eagles of Destiny offers a concise, well-illustrated narrative of that transformation from partition to the end of 1971. It is written by long-time researchers of PAF’s history, Usman Shabbir and Yawar Mazhar.

Structurally, the book makes an intelligent choice: it treats 1947–56 and 1956–71 as distinct arcs. The first is about birth, identity and survival: the RPAF inherits bases, odds-and-ends inventories, and a cadre of professionals while relying on RAF leadership and the British operational model. The second is about modernisation and doctrine: after 1956, with “Royal” dropped from the name, the PAF diversifies its equipment and moves toward an American-style tactical air force, aided by US assistance and a changing geopolitical environment, and then fights two very different wars in 1965 and 1971. In both arcs, the authors keep an eye on the institutional storyline — how training, procurement, basing and command evolve — rather than merely tallying sorties and kills and helps a general reader to understand a complex narrative.

One of the book’s chief merits is its long gestation. Eagles of Destiny is the product of two decades of research, anchored in interviews with officers who either witnessed or shaped key episodes, alongside official documentation and private collections. The blend explains why the text often feels grounded in operational realities — how units trained, how squadrons were deployed, why certain aircraft were chosen — without ever tipping into memoir. It also explains the strong visual component: the volume is illustrated with dozens of rare photographs, commissioned maps and colour artworks, many of which have not been widely published. These images advance the narrative by showing bases, aircraft in Pakistani markings across eras, and personnel whose names recur in the text.

The early chapters on 1947–56 are crisp and humane. Rather than rehearse a generic “partition chaos” introduction, Shabbir and Mazhar pick a few telling seams: the challenges of inheriting mixed stocks, the dependence on RAF secondment for senior leadership, and the delicate task of defining roles — air defense, transport, and fledgling tactical strike — for a force that had to convince political masters it was more than a ceremonial adjunct. The prose is admirably clear about what changed and why: equipment rationalisation; the professionalisation of training pipelines; and the gradual indigenisation of command, which allowed the service to adapt doctrine to local geography and politics. The sense of a service finding its feet — shifting from British habits to the beginnings of a hybrid doctrine — comes through clearly.

On the 1965 war, the book walks a careful line between narrative and analysis. The air campaign is presented through a sequence of vignettes — preparations, early exchanges, high-tempo days, and the settling of tactics — that cumulatively give the reader a sense of momentum. The authors neither inflate claims nor stitch together a victory-lap; instead, they highlight mission profiles, unit movements, and tactical adjustments, including the value of training cycles and the role of radar and ground control. If your shelves already include air-power accounts of 1965, you may not encounter dramatic revisionism here, but you will appreciate the precision of operational detail — and the way the photographs and artworks make those details tangible. This coverage benefits from official sources and private collections, which helps the narrative avoid the circular referencing common in popular histories of the conflict.

The 1971 chapters are necessarily darker and more complex. The authors meet the challenge by emphasising constraints. The PAF’s geographic split, the strategic imbalance, the political unravelling, and the near-impossible logistics of sustaining operations in the East Wing are treated plainly. Rather than pretend that air power could have reversed strategic realities, the narrative asks: what could squadrons achieve within those constraints, and how did the service try to manage inevitable losses? This preserves the credibility established in earlier chapters and, for the reader, underlines a larger theme running through the book: air forces do not fight in a vacuum, and institutional excellence cannot fully compensate for policy failure.

A word on style. Shabbir and Mazhar are not writing literary history; their sentences rarely draw attention to themselves, and that is largely a virtue. The prose prioritises clarity, pacing and the steady accumulation of relevant detail. When the narrative slows — say, to explain why a particular aircraft or radar mattered — it does so to keep the reader oriented, not to display technical brilliance. The result is a text that a general reader of South Asian history can follow, and one that specialists can mine without impatience. If you are new to the subject, the authors’ signposting (“why this change matters,” “how this base supported that operation”) functions as a sober guide rope.

The book’s visual design deserves separate praise. Too many South Asian military histories shortchange the reader on images or include generic stock photographs. Eagles of Destiny is generous with visuals, and they are well-chosen — squadrons on dispersal, aircraft in theatre markings, personnel portraits, and base infrastructure — paired with captions that add information rather than restate the obvious. Several maps are “operational” in the best sense: they orient the reader to sectors, routes and base networks that recur across chapters, and the colour artwork gives modelers and aviation enthusiasts what they crave without hijacking the main story. The result is a volume you can browse for the images alone but which rewards cover-to-cover reading.

No book that compresses twenty-four years of service history into 223 pages can be exhaustive, and Eagles of Destiny sensibly resists that ambition. That economy comes with trade-offs. Readers seeking deep dives into the political economy of procurement, or granular sortie-by-sortie logs for key days in 1965 and 1971, will have to look elsewhere. The authors focus Pakistani documentary and oral sources — as you would expect — and this yields a coherent institutional perspective. However, in places, the book gestures toward that dialogue without fully developing it.

Those caveats aside, the authors’ command of PAF organisational history is impressive. They understand that aircraft are systems embedded in institutions. When they discuss, for example, how an American assistance program catalysed changes in training and maintenance, they are attentive to second-order effects: how basing decisions interact with sortie generation; how radar coverage shapes the confidence with which pilots are vectored; how the mix of types in a squadron affects readiness beyond simple counts of airframes. In this, Eagles of Destiny quietly models how to write service history: not as technology worship, not as “pilots’ tales” alone, but as a study in how organisations learn, codify and execute. The authors should be complemented on the book’s pacing and architecture. They know which episodes to expand and which to summarise; they keep the reader from drowning in abbreviations; and they maintain chronological discipline without losing sight of thematic threads.

Who should read this book? Aviation enthusiasts will appreciate the photographs and colour profiles. Military historians of South Asia will value the synthesis and the clean delineation of institutional phases. Veterans and their families will find their service represented with dignity and precision. And for readers outside Pakistan, the book functions as a compact corrective to caricatures of the PAF as either mythically invincible or irredeemably outumatched: it shows a small service doing the hard work of becoming competent, then fighting as well as circumstances allowed, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes grimly, always as part of a joint and political context that constrained choices.

In sum, Eagles of Destiny is the best short, illustrated history of the RPAF/PAF from partition to 1971 now available in Pakistan. Its strengths are clarity, research depth, and visual richness; its limitations are mainly those of scope and length. It gives the general reader a reliable map of the institution’s evolution; it gives the specialist a well-organised platform from which to pursue more granular questions. Most importantly, it treats air power as an institutional craft rather than a ring of dogfights — exactly how a history of a small air force, often outnumbered but seldom out-thought, ought to be written. For anyone interested in how organisations adapt under extraordinary constraints, this is essential reading.

Syed Ali Hamid is a retired Pakistan Army major general and a military historian. He can be contacted at syedali4955@gmail.com

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer

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