Some 110 air force personnel and family members died when the wall of water crashed into the Car Nicobar airbase, one of India's most strategic complexes, destroying aircraft on the ground there on December 26.

"We could salvage 43 of my men and family members, and one soldier who was a priest performed the last rites before the cremations. Now we are leaving the archipelago," said base commander Group Captain V.V. Bandhopadhya.

Bandhopadhya led his surviving team, who operated almost 200 rescue sorties from their damaged airfield, as they silently boarded aircraft waiting to take them home from the Andamanese capital of Port Blair.

"I can never put this behind me. These were my men and their families but one has to move on," said the commander, clad in soiled dungarees that a mainland pilot had given to him.

Grim-faced flight lieutenant Srinivasan (attn eds: one name), hobbled aboard on injured feet as one squadron leader without name tags looked across the ocean, tears glistening in his hollow eyes.

"This officer lost his wife and ever since he has been scouring the beaches and it looks like he just gave her a final kiss," an exhausted-looking Bandhopadhya told AFP.

"She was a fine, noble woman, goodbye ma'am," the grieving husband said before entering an AN-32 plane.

The Nicobar group of islands, the most southerly point in the Andamans chain, bore the brunt of the towering waves following the massive undersea earthquake off nearby Indonesia.

Some 820 people are officially listed as dead with another 5,700 people still missing and presumed dead. Thousands more have been left homeless.

India's new air force chief Shashi Tyagi was on hand as the stunned and exhausted contingent shuffled across the tarmac in Port Blair.

"I salute them. These men lost everything. Their wives, their children, the men they commanded, belongings and even clothes and still these were the men who rescued 400 civilians within hours that day," Tyagi said.

"It was war. Perhaps war against nature and what they did was a glistening example of sheer courage," Tyagi said.

Officers like Srinivasan flew barefoot in their under garments the day disaster struck to pluck children, women, the aged and men from danger.

Since Sunday the Indian air force has conducted 182 sorties, mostly to the Nicobar group, ferrying tonnes of supplies and rescuing survivors, said Lieutenant General B.S. Thakur, Andaman's commander-in-chief.

"No medal is good enough for these boys," he said, adding that a search for the remaining military personnel will continue in the rubble of Nicobar's shattered, stench-filled airbase.

Fresh pilots and helicopters, meanwhile, began flying Tuesday into the Andamans through Myanmar and Bangladesh, Tyagi said.

"The two countries have graciously allowed us to fly through land routes of Chittagong and Yangon because no helicopter can travel across the 1,200 kilometres that separates mainland India and Andamans," he said.

"We are grateful to them," Tyagi said.

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