Fifty-five years ago, India suffered the ignominy of a military debacle at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army of communist China. Perceptive strategic analysts now attribute the Himalayan blunder to the untenable ‘Forward Policy’ and Pandit Nehru’s diktat to a fund-starved, ill-equipped, ill-clad, and unprepared army to ‘throw out the Chinese’. Painful memories of that defeat still linger in the national psyche.

However, what is not so well known is that there were many instances of raw courage and indomitable spirit even during the embarrassing course of the 1962 campaign – for example Brig (later Lt Gen) NC Rawley’s brigade held out for 22 days against the Chinese, despite overwhelming odds, at Walong along the Lohit River in eastern Arunachal Pradesh. In the west, one such battle was fought at Rezang La, a pass at 16,000 feet on the south-eastern approach to the Chushul Valley in Ladakh.