After World War One Ho founded the French Communist Party and received political training in Moscow, which is not surprising because Russia was known widely for communist rule at that time. In 1924 Ho went to China to organise a revolution with Vietnamese exiles. When this was discovered he was expelled from China by the authorities.
Ho returned to China in 1930 and founded the Indochinese Communist Party also known as the ICP. In June 1931 Ho was arrested by British police and released in 1933. After Ho had served his sentence he headed back to Moscow where he spent seven years recovering from a sever illness. The illness was rumoured to be Leukaemia. After his recovery he headed back to China where in 1938 he became the adviser for the Chinese Communist Armed Forces.
In 1941 the Japanese invaded Vietnam and then occupied the country. Ho later re-established contact with the ICP and joined with them to found the Communist Independence Movement, which was commonly, know as the Vietminh.
In 1945 when the Japanese surrendered after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki their forces pulled out of Vietnam. A perfect opportunity for the Vietminh to seize power in Vietnam and they did. The country was proclaimed to be the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Ho became president. Although the French were unwilling to grant independence to their colonial subjects Ho still had plenty of power and in 1946 war broke out.
The Vietminh guerrilla’s fought the French violently in every terrain possible. The French were defeated at the decisive BATTLE OF DIEN BIEN PUH IN 1954. Although Ho had won the war against the French he was deprived of victory. World leaders in Geneva decided that the country would be split into two, unsurprisingly called North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The north fell under the rule of Ho’s party.
At this point in time Ho wished to concentrate on building a respectful communist society in the north. In the early 1960’s the communist led guerrilla’s fought the US regime in Saigon and so began the true Vietnam War, the north versus the south. During this time Ho played more of a ceremonial role than anything else. The policy of the party was to be decided by others and the war raged on for many years.
Ho Chi Minh otherwise know as Nguyen Tut Thanh or Nguyen Van Ba died on the 3rd of September 1969 of heart failure.
In his honour after the Communist conquest of South Vietnam in 1975 Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh city.
Throughout the world Ho is widely respected for his role in Vietnamese history. He is not only admired by those that benefited from the wars he won but also by those that he fought. He was regarded as a great leader of his armies, through wartime and what was once, his country.