Chief of Army Staff
General Kodandera Subayya Thimmaiah assumed charge of the Indian Army, as the 6th Chief of Army Staff, on 7 May 1957. He briefly resigned his post in 1959 over a dispute with V. K. Krishna Menon, then minister for defence, He retired from the army in 1961, almost 15 months before the Chinese invasion of India in November 1962.
In 1959, he handed his resignation in protest to Prime Minister Nehru due to Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon's refusal to consider his plans for preparing the Army for the forthcoming Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru refused to accept it and persuaded him in withdrawing his resignation. However, little action was taken on Thimmayya's recommendations and he continued as the Army Chief till his retirement on 7 May 1961, completing 35 years of distinguished military service.
Read more about this topic: Kodendera Subayya Thimayya
Famous quotes containing the words chief of, chief, army and/or staff:
“Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men like himself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“He is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)