The Chinese-Indian Border War
A lively account of the 1962 border war between China and IndiaThe Setting
While this war has many names (mostly due to reshuffling of the words "Chinese" and "Indian" to indicate to whom the war belonged) everybody agrees that it was a border war. The Chinese and Indian borders meet in two places, and the war had two fronts. With Nepal in between, there is a long western and shorter eastern border between China and India. In the west, the area was nearly deserted. In the east, there were Tibetan populations that didn't view themselves as either Chinese or Indian. Imagine barren rockscapes and wide glacial valleys. Imagine grasslands and small villages alongside swift streams full of snow melt. It's difficult for planes to fly and men to breath in much of this area. Indian troops had to use explosives to dig defensive trenches in the frozen ground.
The Beginning
It was the evening of October 9th, 1962. A company of 50 indian riflemen were stopping to spend the night in a small village, having been ordered by Nehru himself to attack a chinese outpost the next morning. The outpost was well within the chinese border and guarded a desolate 16,000 ft. pass. In the morning, the riflemen prepared to leave and marched directly into a 500 strong brigade of Chinese soldiers. The chinese attacked with a "human wave" formation that the Indian's would come to refer as the "red ant swarm". Half the indians were killed or captured in the attack that began the 2 month border war between India and China.
Here are some questions:
Why were the Indians ordered to attack this outpost?
What were the extended effects of the war that grew out of this attack?
What do people in China and India think about it now?
Before any of those questions are answered, I'll tell you some more about the war.
The War
The Chinese were prepared to fight in the himalayas. Many veterans of the Korean war were still in active duty in 1962, having fought much of that war in desolate moutains. The chinese were skilled in several tactics that would confuse the Indians throughout the war:
• While the Indian troops confined their movements to the road, the Chinese troops could travel on foot and hiked mountains paths around Indian defences in several instances.
• The Chinese could move their artillery and other supplies with ease, where the Indians could not.
• Their purpose in the war was clearly defined (basically to push the Indians out of the territory claimed by China and no farther) and leadership kept them to this mission throughout the war.
• Their numbers were large. Something the Indian intelligence continued to miss.
In addition the Chinese had better intelligence, were better supplied, and fought under more experienced leadership. When it came to fighting, the war was brief. It lasted for about 2 months, but most of the serious fighting was over within the first week or so. The Indian army was sent to intimidate but not to fight, and their retreat was often made worse by poor decision-making. About 3-4,000 Indians were killed, and while the Chinese have never announced how many soldiers were lost their numbers are thought to be about the same.
The Answers
A company of Indian troops were sent to attack an outpost within Chinese territory because it was thought that the Chinese would surrender or retreat when faced with war. Jarwala Nehru, who was in many ways a good leader for India, made one big mistake in that he thought the new Chinese Communist regime would be as weak as the Qing Dynasty that preceded it. In fact, there had been little contact with China for the 50 years leading up to the war, due to China's civil war and the general mayhem of World War II. For several years Nehru had been in communication with the chinese government who were eager to settle the border based on the actual positions of troops along a stretch of land that had never been formally assigned to either country. In this dialogue with the Chinese, Nehru insisted on historical notions of this border rather than present position of troops. The exchange argued over these two positions for many months, with neither side really listening to the other. Nehru must have known his arguement was weak, because while he was arguing that actual control of the land was irrelevant, he was ordering his army to set up posts closer and closer to the Chinese. In several instances, Indian posts were set up inside the area claimed by China, and on the night of October 9th, Indian forces were ordered into an area beyond even the Indian land claim.
The Indians were pushed back from the border for several reasons. For hundreds of years, the Indian army was set up like this: the Indians were the soldiers and the British were the officers. When India gained independence in 1947, the army was spit up between Indian and Pakistan (1/3 to Pakistan and 2/3 to India) and all the British officers went back home. Because of this, there were almost no experienced Indian officers to command troops during the border war. In addition, following independence, India relied on peace and neutrality to keep it out of war and let it's military shrink while the money was spent elsewhere.
After the war, India made it's a military a priority and ended it's term of neutrality. Having mobilized against the Chinese, the nation was turned against communism which had previously done fairly well in the country. At one point they asked the US for assistance and Kennedy went so far as to order a carrier group to the region (the war ended soon after this exchange, but India had been forced to ask the US for help). Pakistan, a nation ruled by the military, saw how weak India's army was and this led to several border wars over the next two decades.
Although India started the war, the world unfavourably viewed China as the aggressor. At the same time as the war the rest of the world was watching the Soviet Union ship nuclear missiles to Cuba and the war between China and India was seen as another example of Communist expansion. By 1962, Chinese leadership had split with Moscow completely (they were denied military aid in the conflict) but this split wasn't fully recognized by the rest of the world and the timing with the cuban missile crisis was unfortunate. It's interesting that the Chinese lost the PR battle in this way, because they fought the war with incredible discipline. Having pushed the Indians out of the land claimed by China, they immediately pulled back to defensive positions and on one occasion made great ceremony of returning captured Indian equipment. After the two nations re-commited to peace, China returned almost all of the disputed land (all but a strip surrounding a new military road in the western front that allowed them to resupply troops while avoiding an area that had been popular with Tibetan rebels in the past). China showed to the world that it was willing to go to war to protect even the smallest interests, and they reinforced this by going to war with Vietnam for similar reasons in the years to follow.
As for current views of the war, most of China is uninformed due to the fact that they study almost no recent Chinese history in the schools. I talked to one woman who told me that the Chinese army had invaded New Delhi during the war and then pulled back after sufficiently teaching the Indians a lesson. I asked her to repeat what this and tried to clarify that she said New Delhi, the capital of India. She told me this was correct and noted how odd it was that so few people knew about it. To clear things up, there was no fighting outside of the thin strip of disputed border land and that as powerful as the Chinese might have been, invading New Delhi was the last thing they had on their mind. Some people have talked of uncles or grandparents who fought in the 1962 war, but these relatives never discuss the war itself.
In India, the war is seen as a tragedy. A tragedy that a leader as blessed as Nehru could get into such a mess. The Times Of India has a large section on the war, with several editorials claiming that India could have won the war if only they had used their superior air power. The relevent articles can be found here.
Also of use was a paper written by a US marine in 1984. The paper draws some good cold war conclusions out of the conflict. These include the observation that if China was willing to go to war over land it claimed as traditionally Chinese, including Tibet and the border region with India, that it might someday reclaim the large chunk of southeast Asia that it also traditionally Chinese. A lovely presentation of this extensive paper can be found here.
There's a website dedicated to brief overviews of all wars. I found some of the "stats" misleading or wrong, but it's helpful for giving central information on a lot of subjects. It can be found here.
A thorough overview of Chinese history, including good details of Communist China's early years can be found here. This site is wonderful and makes enjoyable reading.
