Vietnamese military mastermind Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated French and Americans, dies | iNFOnews | Thompson-Okanagan's News Source
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Vietnamese military mastermind Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who defeated French and Americans, dies

FILE - In this 1950 file photo, Ho Chi Minh, right, who became president of North Vietnam, poses with Vo Nguyen Giap, minister of Interior in Ho Chi Minh's provisional government in Vietnam. Officials said legendary Giap, the military mastermind who drove the French and the Americans out of Vietnam, has died on Friday in hospital in Hanoi where he had been since 2009. He was 102. (AP Photo, File)

HANOI, Vietnam - Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant and ruthless self-taught general who drove the French out of Vietnam to free it from colonial rule and later forced the Americans to abandon their grueling effort to save the country from communism, has died. At age 102, he was the last of Vietnam's old-guard revolutionaries.

Giap died Friday evening in a military hospital in the capital of Hanoi where he had spent close to four years growing weaker and suffering from long illnesses, a government official and a source close to Giap said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because his death had not been formally announced.

Giap was a national hero whose legacy was second only to that of his mentor, founding President Ho Chi Minh, who led the country to independence.

The so-called "red Napoleon" stood out as the leader of a ragtag army of guerrillas who wore sandals made of car tires and lugged their artillery piece by piece over mountains to encircle and crush the French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The unlikely victory, which is still studied at military schools, led not only to Vietnam's independence but hastened the collapse of colonialism across Indochina and beyond.

Giap went on to defeat the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government in April 1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and noncommunist states. He regularly accepted heavy combat losses to achieve his goals.

"No other wars for national liberation were as fierce or caused as many losses as this war," Giap told The Associated Press in 2005 in one of his last known interviews with foreign media on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the former South Vietnamese capital.

"But we still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom," he said, repeating a famous quote by Ho Chi Minh.

News from © The Associated Press, 2013
The Associated Press

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