Bill Hayton looks back at Vo Nguyen Giap's life
Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who masterminded victories against France and the US, has died aged 102.
His defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 effectively ended French colonial rule in the region.
He went on to oversee the Tet Offensive against American forces in 1968, often cited as one of the factors that led to the Americans' withdrawal.
Gen Giap also published a number of works on military strategy.
He was born into a peasant family in the central Quang Binh province of what was then French Indochina.
At the age of 14, he joined a clandestine resistance movement.
By 1938 he was a member of Ho Chi Minh's Indochinese Communist party and fled to China with Ho, ahead of the Japanese invasion of Vietnam.
Gen Giap organised an army from his Chinese exile and returned to Indochina to wage guerrilla war against the occupying Japanese.
While he was out of Vietnam, his first wife was arrested and died in a French prison. He later remarried and had three daughters and two sons.
After his role in the war against the French, Gen Giap is also remembered for the 1968 Tet Offensive against US forces, when his troops attacked more than 40 provincial capitals and entered Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, briefly capturing the US embassy.
After the war, Gen Giap retained his position as defence minister and was appointed deputy prime minister in 1976.
However, he found himself sidelined by the regime and retired from government six years later.
SOURCE: BBC
