Advertisement

On This Day: Ho Chi Minh dies

Ho, whose Northern forces renamed the former Southern capital of Saigon after him following their ultimate victory in the Vietnam War, died from heart failure at age 79

On This Day: Ho Chi Minh dies

SEPTEMBER 2, 1969: Vietnamese communist revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh died on this day in 1969 while war in the divided Asian country continued to rage.

Ho, whose Northern forces renamed the former Southern capital of Saigon after him following their ultimate victory in the Vietnam War, died from heart failure at age 79.

His body was embalmed – despite his request for a simple cremation – and is currently on display at a museum in the now united country’s new capital, Hanoi.

A British Pathé newsreel shows Ho’s successor Le Duan along with American troops fighting in jungles against South Vietnamese Viet Cong communist insurgents.

The guerrilla fighters were supported by the North Vietnamese Army, supplying weapons via hundreds of miles of tunnels known as the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Ho, whose father was a magistrate in the former French colony, became politically after leaving Vietnam in 1911 to see the world.

He lived in London between 1913 and 1919, before moving to France, where became a founding member of the French Communist Party.

In 1923, Ho moved to the Soviet Union, where he worked for Moscow’s Comintern international revolution organisation, before travelling on to China the following year.

He settled in Canton, where he married native Zeng Xueming and taught Vietnamese exiled about communism, before being banished by right-wing nationalists in 1927.

He returned to China in 1938 to help the Chinese Communist future rulers battle the Japanese before finally coming back to Vietnam in 1941 to fight for independence. 

His Viet Minh insurgents attacked the Vichy French and Japanese occupiers during the WWII after being supplied by American weapons.


[On This Day: Germany invades Poland]


Following the war, he organised the 1945 August Revolution and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north of the country.

Just days later Chinese nationalist forces took over while British troops occupied the territory south of the 16th parallel.

France, which had by then been liberated and uprooted its former Nazi puppet regime, was given the south by the British and traded concessions to get the north from China.

Ho, believing the French were weak and fearing China might end up ruling Vietnam like it had for 1,000 years before the French arrived, agreed to the deal.

At the time, he famously said: “I prefer to sniff French s*** for five years than to eat Chinese s*** for the rest of my life.

Ho initially helped French forces tackled anti-communist insurgents before declaring war against the European colonists in late 1946.

By 1954, after a wave of French defeats, the country was split between a communist North Vietnam and capitalist South Vietnam.

After this, Ho’s government then began a terrifying land redistribution programme by killing 172,000 alleged landlords – with up to 500,000 others dying as a result.

After encouraging and supporting a Viet Cong uprising in the South, North Vietnam invaded its capitalist rival in 1964.

The following year the U.S. sent combat troops to the country in a bid to repel the insurgents and dissuade other communist revolutions elsewhere in the world.


[On This Day: Martin Luther King delivers 'I have a dream' speech]


Ho died just as the war was beginning to look unwinnable for the Americans, despite them committing 500,000 soldiers.

In 1973, the U.S., which lost 58,000 lives during the controversial Cold War conflict, pulled all its forces out in what was seen as a deeply humiliating exit.

The war, which led to the deaths of up to 3.1million people, ended on April 30, 1975 after the North seized Saigon, which is now known as Ho Chi Minh City.