General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Vietnam's military victories over France and the US has died at the age of 102.
The general was one of Vietnam's best known 20th-century figures, ranked by historians among such military giants as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur.
The son of a peasant scholar, he was considered the mastermind of the historic defeat of the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and the communist victory over US-backed South Vietnam 21 years later.
He died on Friday evening after spending several years in a Hanoi military hospital.
In a 2004 interview at his villa in central Hanoi, the veteran warrior insisted Vietnam's independence wars were a "victory for colonised countries all over the world".
The general (back left) with President Ho Chi Minh (second right) in 1950 He recalled that on a visit to the UN in Geneva the previous year, he was handed a book to sign.
"I wrote ... and signed Vo Nguyen Giap, General of Peace," he said.
Born in 1911 in central Vietnam, the general was a close friend of the late revered president Ho Chi Minh and was held in high esteem alongside former prime minister Pham Van Dong.
But his critics and his nemesis, the late US General William C Westmoreland, said he was effective partly because he was willing to sustain huge losses in pursuit of victory.
"Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked overnight," General Westmoreland was quoted as saying in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stanley Karnow's 1983 book Vietnam. A History.
General Giap meeting the then Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2003 Karnow wrote that General Westmoreland seemed to misunderstand how determined the communists under Ho Chi Minh and his general really were.
General Giap is known to have opposed several important military decisions, including the costly move in 1968 to delay the withdrawal of forces from unsustainable positions in South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive.
He held back again in 1975 on a decision by Hanoi to commit all its forces - leaving the capital unprotected - to the spring campaign which climaxed in late April with the fall of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.
Later, he opposed Hanoi's decision to maintain an occupying force in Cambodia following Vietnam's late-1978 invasion.
This, coupled with long-harboured resentment by some members of the establishment towards him, is said to have contributed to his declining political influence after the war years.
He remarried after his first wife died in a French prison in 1943. General Giap had three daughters and two sons.
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