Subroto Mukerjee

Subroto Mukerjee (born March 5, 1911, Calcutta [now Kolkata], India—died November 8, 1960, Tokyo, Japan) was an Indian military officer and the first Indian commander of the Indian Air Force (IAF).

Mukerjee was the youngest of four children in the family of a civil servant in the colonial British administration in India. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and the family lived in and around that city in what is now India’s West Bengal state as well as in England for periods of time. He received his education in both Indian and British institutions. From a young age he showed a strong desire to pursue a military career, following the example of one of his uncles, who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I.

In the early 1930s the British government acceeded to the growing demand in India for greater Indian representation in the higher ranks of the military. The IAF, founded in October 1932, became a truly Indian military unit, in which only Indians could be commissioned as officers. Mukerjee was one of the six Indian recruits selected for training at the Royal Air Force (RAF) College at Cranwell, Lincolnshire, England. After training at Cranwell, Mukerjee and four other officers were inducted as pilots into the first IAF squadron in April 1933.

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Mukerjee served in northern Waziristan in North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan) to assist the British military’s effort to quell a rebellion by Pashtun peoples there in 1936–37. In 1939 Mukerjee was promoted to squadron leader, the first Indian to receive such a command, and in 1942 he was back in the North-West Frontier Province. Mukerjee became the first Indian to lead an RAF station, commanding the installation at Kohat (now in Pakistan) for about 17 months in 1943–44. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945.

At the time of India’s independence from Britain in 1947, Mukerjee was the highest-ranking officer in the IAF. He was promoted to the rank of air vice marshal and posted as the deputy chief of air staff, under the British air marshal in India, Sir Thomas Elmhirst. Mukerjee served in that capacity for nearly seven years under three different British chiefs, which helped prepare him to take over the top post. In April 1954, after having undergone a course at the Imperial Defence College (now the Royal College of Defence Studies) in London, Mukerjee was named commander in chief of the IAF. In 1955 the position was renamed the chief of the air staff.

Mukerjee’s most urgent task after assuming the post was to reequip the force with newer aircraft and equipment. Negotiating for adequate resources from a reluctant Indian government, however, was difficult, especially after V.K. Krishna Menon—known for his suspicion of the armed forces—became defense minister in 1957. Some new aircraft were acquired during Mukerjee’s tenure, but offensive planes were not used during India’s conflict with China in 1962. By then, though, Mukerjee was gone. He was in Tokyo as part of the inauguration of commercial air service between Japan and India when he choked to death at a restaurant.