General Giap: military genius, humbler of the West

General Vo Nguyen Giap, who died today aged 102, was considered one of history's greatest military strategists and was the architect of Vietnam's stunning battlefield victories against France and the United States.
Second only to late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh as modern Vietnam's most revered figure, the former history teacher's first military lesson came from an old encyclopedia entry about the mechanism of a hand grenade.
The son of a poor scholar, he went on to defeat Vietnam's colonial masters in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, the battle that ended French rule in Indochina and started direct US involvement leading to the Vietnam war.

Over the next two decades the founding father of the Vietnam People's Army, whose guerrilla tactics inspired anti-colonial fighters worldwide, again led his forces to victory with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
"When I was young, I had a dream that one day I would see my country free and united," Giap later recounted in a PBS interview. "That day, my dream came true."
Giap's brilliance as a strategist places him "in the pantheon of great military leaders" with the Duke of Wellington, Ulysses S Grant and General Douglas MacArthur, wrote American journalist and author Stanley Karnow.

"Unlike them, however, he owed his achievements to innate genius rather than to formal training."

Others have pointed to the tremendous human toll Giap was willing to incur in the struggle for liberation, which left millions of Vietnamese dead on the battlefield.
Born on August 25, 1911 in a village in central Quang Binh province, Giap was an admirer of Napoleon and Sun Tzu but did not always appear destined to become a soldier.
Fluent in French, he studied political economy in Hanoi before teaching history and literature at a college and working as an underground journalist.
A member of the Indochina Communist Party, he fled to China in 1939, where he joined Ho, the enigmatic leader who had planned the revolution during decades in exile.

Giap's wife, who stayed behind with their newborn child, died in a French prison, a personal tragedy that would fuel Giap's anti-colonial fervour.
He returned with Ho to Vietnam's northern jungles in 1941 to train an army of revolutionary peasant soldiers and co-founded the Viet Minh.