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One of the fighters at Chagra Pembar, Dechen, clearly remembers when the first Chinese planes flew overhead: "Then one day, the Chinese surrounded us. A Chinese aeroplane came in the morning and dropped leaflets which told us to surrender and warned us not to listen to the ‘imperialist’ Americans because nothing good would come of it. After that, every day, some fifteen jets came. They came in groups of five, in the morning, at midday and at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Each jet carried fifteen to twenty bombs. We were in the high plains so there was nowhere to hide. The five jets made quick rounds and killed animals and men. We suffered huge casualties." Thousands of men, women and children were killed, both at Chagra Pembar and Nira Tsogo, in the aerial bombings and artillery barrages that followed. Of the parachute teams, only five men managed to escape and reach India safely. The rest perished, either during the fighting or afterwards, while on the run.
The last of the missions inside Tibet was made in January 1960. A seven-man team was parachuted into Markham in eastern Tibet. The team was led by Yeshe Wangyal, who had already been on the first unsuccessful mission to Namtso. Wangyal’s father, a chieftan of the area, was reported to be heading a resistance group but once on the ground the men learned that he had already been killed. Wangyal and his men managed to link up with the remnants of his father’s force but from the very beginning, they came under attack from the Chinese. For days, they fought running battles, dogged by an ever-increasing army of Chinese troops until one morning they were surrounded from all sides. They prepared for the last stand, each man ready to fight til the death.
The only survivor of that team, Bhusang, remembers the intensity of that last battle: "Then the whole mountainside was swarming with Chinese. We fought them nine times. We suffered our heaviest casualties that day. During the battle, the Chinese would shout out to us, ‘Surrender! Surrender!’ We shouted back, ‘Eat shit!’ I swear, we said, ‘Eat shit! You invaded our country, what do you mean by surrender?’ We shot at them instead. We really fought. It was intense, like a dream, it didn’t seem real. And then, at around 10 o’clock, I looked around and saw that two men from our team had taken their cyanide capsules and were dead. It was the end. I put the capsule in my mouth because later I might not have had time." But before he could bite into the capsule, Bhusang was knocked unconscious from behind and taken prisoner. Wangyal and the others in his team were all dead. Bhusang would spend the next 20 years in a Chinese prison. |
