Who is ho chi minh

Photos of the chaos in the streets as men, women and children jostled for space on the last helicopters was broadcast across the world.

On April 30, , the last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. Only the Americans have been defeated. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In order to combat better-supplied American and South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam War, Communist guerrilla troops known as Viet Cong VC dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels, including an extensive network running underneath the Cu Chi district northwest of The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

The Vietnam War started in the s, according to most historians, though the conflict in Southeast Asia had its roots in the French colonial period of the s.

Over the next four years, the general directed much of U. The Tet Offensive was a coordinated series of North Vietnamese attacks on more than cities and outposts in South Vietnam. The offensive was an attempt to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its involvement in For the next 77 days, U. It was passed on August 7, , From air power to infantry to chemicals, the weapons used in the Vietnam War were more devastating than those of any previous conflict.

United States and South Vietnamese forces relied heavily on their superior air power, including B bombers and other aircraft that dropped It was a school designed to perpetuate Vietnamese nationalist traditions. In he went to France, where he worked at many odd jobs and became active in socialist politics and as an advocate of Indochinese independence.

At the Versailles peace conference, he petitioned the delegates on behalf of Vietnamese self-determination but was ignored. In Ho became a founding member of the French Communist Party. After spending several years at sea, Ho settled in London during World War I; there he worked in a restaurant and was first exposed to Marxist ideas.

Moving to Paris, he adopted the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc Nguyen the Patriot and first came to public attention when he presented a petition to the Versailles Peace Conference demanding independence for Vietnam in accordance with the principle of self-determination. He also because active in radical circles and in became a founding member of the French Communist Party. During the next three years he worked actively among radical exile groups from the colonies who were living in France, participating in an Intercolonial Union formed under Communist sponsorship and publishing an anticolonial journal, Le Paria The Pariah.

He went to Moscow in , joined the Comintern and met with Lenin. After Chiang turned on the communists in , Ho fled to Moscow. During the s he founded the Indochinese Communist Party, studied in Moscow and fought alongside Mao. In he returned to Vietnam. In Ho was summoned to Moscow, where he studied Marxist doctrine and worked at Comintern headquarters. Already identified as a vigorous spokesman for the anticolonial cause, he served as a delegate with the Peasant International and urged the Communist International to take the lead in promoting revolution in Asia.

In late he was sent to Canton as an interpreter for the Comintern mission to the revolutionary government of Sun Yatsen. His real assignment was to establish a communist movement in French Indochina.

Within months Ho recruited radical Vietnamese patriots living in exile in South China into a new revolutionary organization, the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League. He spent the next three years in Europe and in Siam, where he recruited within the Vietnamese exile community living in the provinces. In early he returned to South China to resolve a factional squabble within the league and, at a meeting held in Hong Kong, presided over the formation of a formal Communist Party.

He was President of North Vietnam from until his death. Vietnam was then a French colony, known as French Indo-China, but under the nominal rule of an emperor. Ho's father worked at the imperial court but was dismissed for criticising the French colonial power.

In , Ho took a job on a French ship and travelled widely. He lived in London and Paris, and was a founding member of the French communist party. In , he visited Moscow for training at Comintern, an organisation created by Lenin to promote worldwide revolution.

He spent the s in the Soviet Union and China. After the Japanese invasion of Indo-China in , Ho returned home and founded the Viet Minh, a communist-dominated independence movement, to fight the Japanese. The French refused to relinquish their colony and in , war broke out.