Donn Morgan Kipgen

“My son, asked for thyself another kingdom, for that which I leave is too small for thee.” —King Phillip to his 20-yr-old son Alexander of Macedonia.
Ever since the British East India Company raised an independent regular army in India under Maj. Stringer Lawrence in early 1610s, military formations have come a long long way. Thereafter, it was enlarged into three units, viz, the King’s European, the Company’s European and the Company’s Indian troops. Most of the Officers, NCOs and the regular troopers were British and Europeans since native Indians were mentally and physically unfit or unreliable to be used as regular troopers. The Indian Kings and Princes and their soldiers were unprofessional, weak and ill-equipped at that time; hence, the spectacular victories of the small European detachments over large native-Indian forces. The Carnatic Wars and the Battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) had clearly shown the British led European soldiers could do with loyalty, honour, courage and professionalism.
It was Lord Robert Clive of Arcot fame who first organised the East India Company’s troops into regular battalions. It would have started like Maj. (later Col.) David Stirling’s L-Detachment of the Special Air Services Brigade, the British army’s crack paratroopers first accepted for just a mere propaganda forces to rattle Erwin Ronnel’s Afrika Korps by Gen Sir Claude Auchinleck in 1942.

Down the ages, the Western nations have different but well-organised military formations. The Romans had a 100-man Legion (one company-size combat unit) under the command of a centurion. They were divided as a square-shaped Phalanx (one platoon-size unit). The Roman and the Greek’s armies were led by spartan-like Senators, Tribunes, Pro-Consuls and city-states war-lords and princes. Of course, kings, tyrants and royal aristrocrats were the supreme commander-in-chiefs in their own nation-states who personally led their troops in open battlefields upto mid-19th Century AD. Emperor Julius Caesar, Pompeii, Mark Anthony were Roman Senators in the beginning whereas Alexander the Great was just 19½ years old when he first won his spectacular battles against other hostile Greek’s nation-states as a boyish prince with his trusted horse Bucephelus. Alexander swept aside all his revolting states with his crack Macedonian troops led by his fellow-trainee commanders called the Band of Brothers who later conquered all known kingdoms upto the Hindukush Mountain range.

A modern army consist of : 1. Rifle-squad of about 5 soldiers under the command of a corporal (naik); 2. Rifle-platoon of 25 to 30 soldiers under a JCO or a 1st Lieutenant; 4. Rifle-company of about 80 to 100 soldiers under a captain or a Major; 5. Battalion of 5 or 6 Coys under the command of Lt Colonel or full Colonel with about 600 to 700 combat soldiers; 6. A Brigade of 3 battalions or more under a Brigadier; 7. A division of 3 or more brigade under the command of a Maj. General; 8. A Corps (pr. Kore) under the command of a Lt. General with 3 or more divisions; 9. An area Army Command under a senior Lt. General which look after 3 or more combat Corps. All are under the direct command of the Chief of Army Staff. The US President is the Supreme-Commander-in-Chief of all US Armed Forces whereas the Israeli Defence Minister is the Commander-in-Chief of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
In India, all the paramilitary forces like the AR, CRPF, BSF etc., are under the command of a Lt. General and its equivalent rank of Inspector-General like the British Gorkha Rifles and the US Marines. Now, a new powerful post of Colonel-General Staff Officer (Colonel GS) has been put into divisional formation as the chief of all GSOs and all battalion commanders responded directly to him according to the command and control protocol, even though Col GS is just a senior combat Colonel. During WW-II, the Japanese had no rank of a Brigadier and so a senior Colonel looked after a brigade-size of 2500 to 3000 or more soldiers. One such powerful Colonel of the Japanese Imperial Army had officially signed a recommendation to a 15 yr-old hard working and honest youth called Paokhokam Kipgen (later an MCS Officer) near the eastern ridge of Moirang, saying that on official rewards would be given if and when the Imphal areas were captured by them. A Japanese general officer pointed towards Imphal Valley and hand-signalled to Pu P. Kipgen MCS, that the official letter be shown and submitted to him one they captured the Allied Forces HQ in Imphal, Manipur. But then they failed to do so. And the rest is history.

In 1978, the Japanese army officers and scientists and interpreters came to Churachandpur with an old WW-II battle-maps to retrieve the remains of all Japanese officers and soldiers buried en masse in different locations and the Indian officer-in-charge to lead the Japanese was none other Pu P. Kipgen MCS SDO/SDM, Churachandpur district HQ. They gave him a souvenir of well-knitted Mt. Fuji depicted calendar (wollen-scroll) and a brand new state-of-art shaving kit as a mark of respect and honour.