In October 1947 tribal columns from the North-West Frontier entered Kashmir. The Maharaja acceded to India on 26 October and Indian troops were flown into Srinagar the next day.
The first Indian unit in was 1 Sikh under Lieutenant Colonel Dewan Ranjit Rai, who was killed at Baramulla within two days. The airlift into Srinagar, conducted in civil Dakotas, held the valley.
At Badgam on 3 November, Major Somnath Sharma of 4 Kumaon was killed holding a position covering the airfield and was awarded the first Param Vir Chakra. Naik Jadunath Singh, Company Havildar Major Piru Singh and Lance Naik Karam Singh, a Sikh from Barnala district, also received it for actions in this war.
Fighting continued into 1948 and ended with a ceasefire on 1 January 1949 along what became the ceasefire line and later the Line of Control.
Punjab was the base, the recruiting ground and the transit route for all of it, four months after it had been cut in half.
The airlift was improvised. Civil Dakotas belonging to the private airlines were requisitioned with their crews, loaded at Delhi and Ambala and flown into a strip nobody had prepared, at dozens of sorties a day. The induction of troops went on continuously for about five days.
Punjab regiments and the Patiala state forces were used through the whole campaign, and Patiala's troops held positions at Naushera and Jhangar.
The ceasefire of 1 January 1949 left a line where the two armies had stopped and that line has moved very little since. Punjab supplied the men, the transport and the airfields for all of it, beginning about ten weeks after being cut in half, and it was still moving refugees while it did.