Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, a Vietnamese leader who drove France and the United States out of his country, died on Friday in Hanoi at the age of 102.
General Giap’s death was reported by several Vietnamese news organizations, who said he died in an army hospital . It wasn’t clear what he passed from.
Giap was born on August 25, 1911 in the village of An Xa. His father was an educated farmer and a nationalist who encouraged his children to resist French rule. He earned his degree in 1937 after studying law and political economics at a private institution in Hanoi.
The former leader was one of the last survivors of the Communist revolution . In the decades after World War II, he and others freed the country from colonial rule and fought superpowers to a stalemate war.
In his last years, Vo Nguyen Giap was more of a reminder of an old war , though he didn’t fade away from public view. Instead, the former general was considered an elder statesman whose once-hard-line views softened with the end of the war that helped unify Vietnam.
Giap offered his support to causes like economic reform and even advocated for closer ties to the United States. However, his American adversaries considered him only second to his mentor, Ho Chi Minh.
Military historians around the world consider Giap one of the 20th century’s leading practitioners of modern guerrilla warfare. He began with a group of 34 men assembled in a northern Vietnam forest in 1944. From there, General Giap built a fighting unit that turned into the Vietnam People’s Army.
The small group, which formed in December 1944, had only a few guns, but their weapons grew by August 1945, when the US Office of Strategic Services supplied weapons to the group’s 5,000 members. Giap led the army for almost three decades and won despite the odds against better-supplied, better-equipped enemies. He effectively ended about 70 years of French colonial rule in Indochina in 1954.
While his relationship with much of the world was tenuous, Vo Nguyen Giap was considered a national hero.
[Image by Ricardo Stuckert (PR/ABr/Brazil) via Wikimedia Commons ]
