REPORT: Vietnam pays last respects to 'Red Napoleon', war hero Vo Nguyen Giap

     
Vietnamese poured into the capital on Sunday to bid farewell to Vo Nguyen Giap, the general who masterminded historic defeats of France and the United States to become one of the 20th century's most important military commanders.    

Crowds lined the streets of Hanoi cheering, crying and holding aloft pictures of "Red Napoleon", a national legend with a domestic standing second only to the leader of Vietnam's struggle against colonialism, Ho Chi Minh.    

Giap died on Oct. 4, age 102, after four years in a Hanoi military hospital.    

Short, slightly built and a man of no formal military training, Giap was ranked by historians among giants such as Montgomery, Rommel and MacArthur for victories over vastly better equipped armies that ushered in the end of foreign intervention and cemented communist rule in Vietnam.    

"He was the general of the people, always in the people's hearts and in history," said Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the ruling party that Giap's forces brought to power in 1975 after driving the United States out of what was then a democratic South Vietnam.    

"This is a big loss," Trong said in a speech at his state funeral, broadcast live on national television.    

Hundreds of thousands thronged to catch a glimpse of Giap's coffin as it was driven on a military vehicle past an unbroken line of mourners to an airport 30 km (18 miles) away. Giap's body will be flown to his home province of Quang Binh for burial.    

The funeral has brought a show of unity that Vietnam's current generation of leaders have struggled to foster in a country where three quarters of the 90 million population were born long after Giap's battlefield victories.    


REUTERS