Edward Behr - 1926-2007 - was a distinguished foreign correspondent. He was commissioned into the Indian army in 1944 and served for four years. He was with the Royal Garwhal Rifles and served in Indonesia. He was later posted as acting Brigade Major in Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province and while there in the weeks after Partition, he ordered tanks to fire on anti-Sikh rioters and witnessed Pathans attacking the military hospital.
'The horrible thing was that the Punjab regiment that arrived in Peshawar just before Partition had seen the massacres of their own people by Sikhs, and they were in no mood to turn against their fellow countrymen, and the massacre of Sikhs that occurred in Peshawar was horrendous - something like 800 a day for ten days. And there was very little we could do to stop it until we used very direct and horrible methods, like blowing up cars - with tanks - that were looting Sikh properties and killing Sikhs at random.
'I got the squadron of tanks out on the streets and with the Brigade Commander's authorisation, I ordered them to open fire ... We were opening fire on Pathans, all of them armed, who had moved into Peshawar, who were driving around in stolen cars, who knew what they were dong. They attacked, burnt, plundered and killed Sikh residents, as many as they could. These same Pathans surrounded a Sikh stronghold in old Peshawar city and set fire to it. We had to blow up part of the building in order to stop the fire, having evacuated the people first of course. It was a war.''