A shooting buddy of mine, a Zoroastrian (!) Parsi of Indian extraction, recently borrowed my copy of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, so he could read it in advance of the movie.
(300 is Miller’s tale of the few hundred Spartans whose deaths at Thermopylae ultimately allowed the Greeks to rally against and defeat the Persians. Had the Persians won, Western civilization as we know it would never have existed.)Â
Yesterday, my friend came into my office and mentioned that in school in India, he and all his classmates learned of a similar small band of heroes who fought to the last man, in this case defending a Himalayan pass against thousands of Chinese infantry in the 1962 Indo-Chinese war. However, to his shame he didn’t recall the name of the unit.
A quick Google search showed that it was “C” Company of the 13 Kumaon, an Indian battalion primarily comprised of cattlemen and farmers. On November 18, 1962, the 127 men of “C” Company held off wave after wave of Chinese despite a withering Chinese artillery bombardment (the 13 Kumaon was beyond the reach of friendly artillery support), despite being armed only with .303 Enfields vs. the Chinese self-loading SKS-variants, and despite being woefully outnumbered.
In the end, 14 men of the 13 Kumaon survived, nine of them grievously wounded.
Little was known of the battle until after the war, when a shepherd stumbled upon the frozen battle site. The positions of the dead, unchanged from the day itself, told the story of what happened. The men of “C” Company became national heroes in India. An excellent writeup is here.
I’d never heard of the 13 Kumaon. Outside of Indian schools, it’s probably fated to remain in obscurity; unlike Thermopylae, it was not a battle of strategic importance to the war. But what inspired this post is that in all my US public-school experience, the curriculum never included, and the teachers never discussed, any stories of Americans’ sacrifice and heroism similar to that of the 13 Kumaon. I had to go search those stories out on my own. Indian public schools seem to be doing a lot better job in this respect.
1962 Indo-Chinese War??? Sweet shivering Shiva, ANOTHER huge gap in my high school world history class. F.U. very much, liberal education. Grrrr.
Excuse me while I go read. And thanks in advance.
My junior high school history textbooks all ended in the ’50s, and high school was a little better, but it definitely didn’t include anything about the Indo-Chinese war. I graduated high school in 1987, BTW.
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Don’t you all know that there’s nothing in the 1960s worth studying except the US civil rights movement, the JFK assassination, Vietnam-especially the anti-war movement, and Woodstock.
So you don’t learn about Buford’s cavalry at Gettysburg, or the Lost Battalion of WWI, or Wake Island, or Bataan and Correigedor (other than the Death March), or the Pusan Perimeter, or the retreat from Chosin, or Khe Sahn, or the Alamo (if you’re not in Texas, anyway.)