Reading this letter alone boils my blood. That bloody basterd didn't even mobilise the army in the east nor did he use the air force and still went to the americans holding his dysfunctional dick in those lusty hands , if we had let him have his way indian army would have been disbanded. Someone should have assassinated him back in 47 with bapu mohandas
Everyone was in on it. The pilots of the air force doing Dakota deliveries to Ladakh/Leh area saw hordes of Chinese in narrow foothill paths every day. It was not difficult to take some bombers and snuff them out. Heck, the pilots of the bombers themselves wanted to go, but the top brass of the air force refused. The official reason was that Chinese MiGs could retaliate(they couldn't in reality. Sino-Soviet relations were shitty back then, and China didn't even have a MiG airbase that could support an up-and-running fighter, nor deploy operationally).
This is an excerpt from Shiv Kunal Verma's book on the 1962 war. Page 234.
All of them were outdated. If you read more about it, during the time when entire groups like 2 Rajput were wiped out, the officers from the WW2 era(in the 60s during their retirement!) were called and put on station. These officers had actually zero interest in doing anything, and even dared to put their HQ tens of kilometers away from the frontlines..
Forget about WW2 officers. Nobody actually had any idea of how the NEFA geography was actually like, and the one officer who did during that time, was mysteriously shifted to the Western command.
1962 was an actual tragedy for us. Do you know the funniest thing? The Chinese who captured some of the Rajputs and officers actually asked what we fed and trained them with, because even while being surrounded, they managed to take an astonishing amount of Chinese casualties.
Everyone on the ground level was performing more than whatever could be asked of them, in conditions where their own superiors abandoned them. Most of the top brass of the time should have been court martialled of exceptional cowardice.