The middle of the year 1965 was unquestionably the high point of the PAF's 40-year history. It brought into focus the fundamental character of this small air force when faced, for the first time, with a full scale confrontation with its enemy number one, the Indian Air Force. There had been peripheral skirmishes in earlier years, in widely different contexts, which had given each adversary a glimpse of the other's mettle: the IAF Tempests in 1948 waylaying a defencelsss PAF Dakota, and seeing it escape their cowardly clutches in the hands of a plucky crew determined to go down in flames rather than surrender; the stealthy IAF Canberra in 1959, presuming to exploit the festive relaxation of Eid, and getting ignominiously shot down in the bargain. Aside from the differences in characteristics, as reflected by such incidents, the overriding factor which had become something of an obsession with the PAF, was its adversary's overwhelming numerical superiority. Conservative estimates based on military intelligence put the ratio at 4 to 1. With such a great disparity in numbers, common sense indicated that, despite any discernible qualitative difference, the enemy had a clear upper hand. Since there was no question of trying to redress the quantitative imbalance, the PAF's primary concern, over nearly two decades, was to try to offset it in a variety of ways: with better equipment, better training, better planning, better leadership. Efforts in these respects were sporadic during the 'British' phase, and inhibited by British commercial interests, the absence of native leadership at the top, and by an inherited vagueness in matters of war planning and combat training. But the advent of American military aid in the mid-50s, coupled with nationalisation of top PAF leader-ship shortly afterwards, brought about a dramatic transformation by the end of that decade. And when, in 1965, it was eventually pitted against its giant adversary, the PAF found, much to its own triumphant amazement, that it had more than achieved the qualitative edge which it had so ardently sought. The following chapters give an account of the four distinct but interconnected stages of that 1965 sequence: Operation Desert Hawk, Operation Gibraltar, Operation Grand Slam, and the September War