In September 1965 the war moved from Kashmir to the Punjab plain. Indian forces advanced toward Lahore across the Ichogil canal. Pakistan's 1 Armoured Division attacked at Khem Karan in Amritsar district with Patton tanks.
The Indian defence at Asal Uttar was set in sugarcane fields that had been deliberately flooded from the canal. The Pattons bogged. Between 60 and 100 Pakistani tanks were destroyed or captured over three days, and the battlefield was called Patton Nagar afterward.
Company Quartermaster Havildar Abdul Hamid of 4 Grenadiers destroyed several tanks with a recoilless rifle from a jeep and was killed. He received the Param Vir Chakra.
The villages of the Khem Karan and Fazilka belts were fought over and their people displaced.
The war ended with the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966. Punjab's border villages carry the bunkers from it and a good many still have them in their fields.
Patton Nagar was what the field was called afterward. Captured tanks were displayed there and later moved, and some of them stand on plinths at cantonments and outside museums across north India, which is where most Indians of a certain age have seen one.
The Ichhogil canal, dug along the border west of Lahore in the 1950s, was a water channel built as a tank obstacle and it worked as one. A defensive line disguised as irrigation is a piece of engineering particular to this plain and it is still there and still carrying water.
The border villages were cleared at a few hours' notice and a good many were fought through. The bunkers standing in fields date from this war and the next one, and the compensation for a house and a crop destroyed in 1965 was assessed by the same girdawari machinery that assesses hail damage.