Lt Gen Stan Menezes – Napoleonic in body, Gibbonian in mind
Valmiki Faleiro
Lieutenant General Stanislaus (“Stan” / "Stanley") Francis Leslie Menezes, PVSM, SC (Veteran) – Napoleonic in body, Gibbonian in mind
With roots in Sangolda, the future Lieutenant General and Vice Chief of the Indian Army was born in Bombay on 13 Nov 1922. Educated in Mussoorie, he graduated from Agra University and aspired to join the Indian Civil Service, but with recruitment on hold during World War II, he joined the Indian Army in 1942. Given his sharp intellect, he would have surely made it to the Civil Services. But he was destined for greater glory in defence of the motherland.
He was commissioned 30 May 1943 into the Bombay Grenadiers. Only the bravest and strongest were selected for the Grenadiers, as it undertook the most dangerous combat tasks. It was the oldest regiment in the British Commonwealth.
With the battle cry of Sarvada Shaktishali (ever powerful), Grenadiers is one of India's most decorated regiments, with the most number of Param Vir Chakras (highest gallantry medal) among all of the Indian Army's infantry regiments. Lt Gen Menezes demonstrated his bravery in World War II ops.
During the 1947 Partition, he was a Major with 1st Battalion of 4 Grenadiers Regiment, then stationed in North West Frontier Province of newly carved out Pakistan. The unit, comprising largely of Muslims, had opted for India and was ordered to move to Bombay via Rawalpindi. The Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed Pakistan Army, General Frank Messervy, thought it would be safe to send the battalion to India by a special train. The journey should have ordinarily taken two or three days.
As the train reached Usterzai Defile, the rails were blocked with boulders rolled down the hill by armed frontier tribesmen, furious that a Muslim-majority unit had opted for India. As the train stopped, it came under a hail of rifle and machine gun fire. The train was attacked twice by armed Pathan tribesmen, resulting in 26 dead and 72 wounded, including seven officers. The British Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel RA Shebbeare, Major Stan Menezes and Captain TN Singh were seriously injured. It was here that the future Lieutenant General's qualities of leadership surfaced. Though injured, he took charge from the hospitalised British Commanding Officer and fended off attack after attack.
He persuaded the train crew to return to duty and got the track cleared. The train resumed its journey. Pakistani treachery led the train to being cordoned off at Lalamusa railway station near Lahore. The engine driver deserted, together with the engine.
Held up for two weeks, the injured Major Menezes heroically trudged almost 30 kms to Attari on the Indo-Pak border to beg, and then threaten, the Indian Railways for an engine. He shepherded his troops back to India.
Once inside the Indian border, the train, instead of proceeding to Bombay, was detained at Jalandhar, the unit vaccinated and put in charge of a Refugee Transit Camp, heavily infested with cholera, dead bodies and flies. The dead were buried and every soldier was tasked to kill at least 30 flies a day. Cooking food and eating were done under mosquito nets. It took the unit about a fortnight to clean the camp, only after which the unit was allowed to proceed to Bombay.
The two or three day journey had taken more than two months to arrive at destination. Unbeknownst to him, an order of July-1947 required Major Menezes to join the new Indian Army HQ as Asst. Adjutant General by 14 August 1947. He was almost declared a deserter for reporting three months late.
Mercifully, British officers at GHQ Pakistan confirmed the unit’s two-month saga from the North West Frontier Province to India. That is how the future Vice Chief of the Indian Army narrowly missed being court-martialed, punished and dismissed from the Indian Army!
Almost immediately, he was thrown into the 1947/48 J&K Ops, for which he was awarded the Shaurya Chakra. A manifest high degree of intellect saw him after five years service as a Lieutenant Colonel at age 25 – a rank those days gained after 25 years of service at around the age of 43 years!
When a Colonel, he was instructor at Defence Services Staff College, Wellington and later at the Infantry Combat School in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh.
As a Brigadier, he commanded a Grenadiers Brigade at a High Altitude Pass in Ladakh during the 1965 war, facing the Chinese army.
As a Major General, he commanded 14 Infantry Division in 1970 and then was Chief of Staff of operational I Corps (India's main and only Strike Corps at the time) deployed at the strategic Shakargarh Bulge on the western front during the 1971 war. He was awarded the PVSM for distinguished service of the most exceptional order in the 1971 ops.
Lt Gen Menezes was appointed Deputy Chief of Army Staff in 1973. He was General Officer Commanding IV Corps in Tezpur in 1973-75. He oversaw the shifting of the Grenadiers Regimental Centre from Nasirabad to Jabalpur and put into place most of the groundwork that made the Centre what it is today.
Lt Gen Menezes also served as Adjutant General of the Indian Army. With exceptional organizational skills, he rose to be the eighth Vice Chief of Army Staff, 1978-80. He retired in 1980, after serving over thirty-seven years. A brilliant Staff Officer, he held virtually every key appointment and earned every promotion Out of Turn.
Loved and respected by his men for his humane approach, uncompromising attitude towards their rights even in adversity, he was elected Colonel Commandant of the Grenadiers on retirement. He held the prestigious position from Dec 1972 to Nov 1982.
He was actively involved in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Britain had built a crematorium at Brighton-UK where bodies of Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated and ashes dispersed into the sea. He got the War Graves Commission to refurbish the Brighton crematorium and inscribe the names of the soldiers who had died during World War I.
He was a stickler for simplicity in all respects. He hated the Geru-Chuna culture that was creeping into the Indian Army. He was instrumental in having officers from all regions posted to battalions that were class oriented. Colonel Amrik Khaira wrote (in The Grinder Annual-2010), “General Stan Menezes was a man of few words, disciplined, strict, against any tendency of verbose diarrhea… a man of integrity and sincere about his profession.”
The Regimental history of the Grenadiers covering the period up to 1980 was published during his time. He chaired the first meeting of the Grinder Club (later the Grenadiers Association) in 1982.
Napoleonic in body but Gibbonian in mind, Lt Gen Menezes was a mighty legend for his amazing memory! Austere by nature, he was a generous raconteur. Amid others, he penned the authoritative book, Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty first Century, dedicating it to “The Soldier of the Indian Army, Better than the Best in the World”.
He abhorred hare-brained politicos and defence ministry bureaucratic attitudes towards the men who actually guard the nation’s borders. He wrote, “It was a practice … for some to magnify the shortcomings of the Indian Army through a microscope and use a telescope to examine their own.”
Lt Gen Menezes was son of Thomas Sebastian Menezes, a first class engineer qualified in England who retired in Central Provinces PWD. He was maternal grandnephew of Anthony de Melo of Saligao, the ‘Doyen of Indian Cricket’, the ‘Builder of Stadiums’ (including Bombay's Brabourne and sporting infrastructure in Delhi) who was the key organiser of the first Asian Games in Delhi in 1951 and established the Board of Control for Cricket in India, put India on the world cricket map, and generally guided the destinies of Indian cricket in the 20th century.
Lieutenant General Stan Menezes passed away in Delhi on 11 May 2012. The memorial service was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, New Delhi. His remains were cremated as per his wishes (ditto like Gen. SF Rodrigues and Lt. Gen. Eric Vas, as seen over the last two Sundays).
Part of the ashes were ceremonially carried by the Centre Commandant to be interred at the site of the Grenadiers War Memorial at the Regimental Centre in Jabalpur. Rest of the ashes were immersed in the Ganga. A prayer meeting was held a month later at the Cathedral Church, Gol Dakkhana, New Delhi.
(This first appeared in the Marathi language in Goa’s daily, Gomantak, 21 August 2022, and is excerpted from revised text of the book, Patriotism In Action: Goans in India’s Defence Services by Valmiki Faleiro, first published in 2010 by ‘Goa,1556,’ISBN: 978-93-80739-06-9. Revised edition awaits publication.)
