March 1971. The signs were ominous. There were uncomfortable developments, and people spoke of them in hushed undertones. Something was brewing and it did not bode well.
The political impasse appeared to have reached a breaking point by March 25. Dhaka seemed to hold its breath amid the suffocating tension.
There were a number of foreign diplomats, professionals, doctors, and aid workers who witnessed what happened that evening and later at night. They spoke of the Pakistan Army’s atrocities they had seen.
They saw how the army was unleashed on civilians. Others said they heard explosions, machine gun fire, and tank shells, and saw tracers streaking through the night sky.
Their accounts, written in dispatches and letters, or recounted to friends, remain among the earliest eyewitness records of the crackdown that marked the beginning of Bangladesh’s Liberation War.
Archer K Blood, then US consul general in Dhaka, captured the magnitude of that night in words that still resonate. “December 7, 1941 is remembered by Americans, in Franklin D Roosevelt’s [then US president] memorable words, as a ‘day that will live in infamy’. So too should the night of March 25, 1971 live on in the annals of the young nation of Bangladesh as a night of infamy.”
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DHAKA ON FIRE
Earlier that evening, Blood had hosted a dinner for 16, trying to maintain a sense of normalcy amid rising tension.
An emergency call shattered the calm.
Students were felling trees to barricade streets, and key West Pakistani leaders, including President Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had abruptly left Dhaka.
By around 10:00pm, a second call brought worse news -- the crackdown had begun.
Together with the guests (trapped at his house), the US consul general spent much of that night on the roof as they watched “…with horror the constant flash of tracer bullets across the dark sky and listened to the more ominous clatter of machine gun fire and the heavy thud of tank guns,” wrote Blood in The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat.
There was particularly heavy firing around the police lines and the East Pakistan Rifles barracks. “We could see many fires burning, some of them in old Dacca,” he wrote.
Siddik Salik, public relations officer of the Pakistan Army, described the night: “The gates of hell had been cast open.”
Salik wrote, “I watched the harrowing sight from the verandah for four hours. The prominent feature of this gory night was the flames shooting to the sky. At times, mournful clouds of smoke accompanied the blaze, but soon they were overwhelmed by the flaming fire trying to lick at the stars. The light of the moon and the glow of the stars paled before this man-made furnace.”
There was a curfew throughout the entire day, and it was lifted the following day (March 27) at 7:00am for several hours.
“We hurried to use this window of opportunity to check on the safety of the American community and to begin to piece together the events of the night of March 25, the horror of which we sensed but could not yet document,” Blood wrote.
On March 27, the US consular office submitted its first situation report saying that the Pakistan military was in complete control, that the crackdown on Bangalee nationalists had been carried out swiftly, efficiently and often with ruthless brutality.
In another dispatch on March 28, the US office reported that despite Radio Pakistan’s announcements, life had not returned to normal in Dhaka. It reported a continuous flow of people streaming out with their meagre possessions.
“We now are informed that the Army is attempting to pick up all Awami League leaders including MNAs, MPAs, and student leaders. All roads out of the city are blocked, hence it is impossible for well-known figures to slip into the countryside,” the situation report said.
‘THE NIGHT ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE’
A New Zealand-based independent scholar, Samuel Jaffe, writes in his book “An Internal Matter: The US, Grassroots Activism and the Creation of Bangladesh” that the Nixon administration’s response to Operation Searchlight was muted and cautious, with the White House “tilting” heavily in favour of Pakistan.
But for the general American expatriate community in erstwhile East Pakistan, the military crackdown provoked shock, outrage, and, for some, a sense of resolve.
The Rohdes were among many such Americans.
Jon E Rohde, working on cholera research at what is today icddr,b, and his wife Candy woke up to gunfire and explosions. They rushed to their balcony to see what was happening. Candy watched in horror as American-made Patton tanks rolled out from the nearby cantonment and moved towards the city centre. Their neighbour, Alfred Sommer, remembers it as “the night all hell broke loose”.
“I’ll never forget because my wife and I were asleep, and we woke up at about 1:30am, hearing ‘Poof! Poof! Poof!’ in the background. My wife says, ‘What’s that?’” Jaffe quotes Sommer in his book.
They ran up to their roof where they found Dhaka ablaze.
“... Old Dhaka was just burning in the distance,” Jaffe quoted Sommer as saying.
Nearby, Richard and Nancy Guerrant awoke to their night guard calling for help: “Saheb! Saheb! Let me in, they’re shooting outside!”
They let him in.
For months after they returned to America, Richard remembers that his young son would hear a car backfiring and say, “Mom, they are shooting again.”
Surrounded by an unfolding campaign of terror, several young American expatriates, during a break in the curfew the next day, ventured out. As the Rohdes cycled towards the cholera hospital, they saw the burning remains of houses.
BLOOD ON THE WALLS
The roads were clogged, Candy Rohde remembered, with “streams of terrified people” leaving the city, carrying what little they could.
The following day, the group visited Dhaka University, which had attracted much of the Pakistani Army’s wrath. The scene shocked Marty Chen, who recalled, “We pulled up to the apartment building in the university, and I said ‘oh my gosh!’ because the front steps were just caked with blood...”
Candy described her first impressions as a shaken survivor showed them inside a student hall: “Walking up the steps to the entrance, we noticed the walls are heavily pockmarked from countless rounds of gunfire.
“There are red streaks as if wounded or dead bodies have been dragged across it. Although gore is spattered everywhere, the most awful sight to me is finding the bloody prints of a student’s bare feet. Wounded, he must have run to find refuge in the bathroom, where the tracks suddenly come to an end.”
Henry Mosley, another doctor (cholera researcher), recalls “blood on the walls” where “subversive” academics were killed in the hallways: “it was an empty building by that time.”
In the narrow streets of Old Dhaka, Marty and Lincoln Chen walked through the burning, bullet-ridden remains of Shankhari Bazaar, a Hindu neighbourhood. There, they found houses “razed to the ground” and piles of “bodies and ash”.
GROUND WITNESSES
Jon wrote a letter to Senator William B Saxbe on April 17, 1971, after his evacuation, in which he described in stark detail how the Pakistan Army had begun its genocidal campaign.
Senator Saxbe presented this letter to the Senate on April 29, according to the book “Bangladesh Documents”.
After two days of loud explosions and continual chatter of machine guns, they took advantage of a break in the curfew to drive through the city. “In the old city we walked through the remains of Nayer Bazaar, where Moslem and Hindu woodcutters had worked, now only a tangle of iron and sheet and smouldering ruins,” Jon had written.
He wrote that complete documentation was difficult due to the thorough search of everyone leaving Dhaka. The young medic noted that complete censorship was facilitated with the burning of three prominent dailies -- the People, the Ittefaq, and the Sangbad.
According to “Bangladesh Documents”, another letter from James F Ragin to Senator Gordon Allott, and his address to the Senate on July 14, 1971, also vividly describes Pakistan Army’s brutality.
The senator described how people were executed at Sadarghat. He said that troops attacked the terminal on the morning of March 26. A machine gun was installed on the terminal roof and all men, women, and children were fired upon.
Inspection of the terminal on March 29 revealed pools of dried blood on the terminal floor. The toilets were completely soiled and soaked with blood.
According to a student witness, people waiting for boats at the terminal were all killed. After the massacre, bodies were dragged into buses and burned. On March 29, corpses were still floating in the Buriganga River adjacent to the terminal.
According to an American missionary living in Old Dhaka, machine guns were placed at the ends of the street and soldiers attacked the entire area without warning on the morning of March 28.
