It is a curiosity of history that the French lost control of Dien Bien Phu, in the northwest corner of Vietnam, two years before the famous 1954 battle there that spelled the end of French colonial ...

‘And this,’ our guide said, ‘is where Colonel Piroth committed suicide.’ We were standing by a fenced-off scrap of wasteland on the edge of a busy market. The only evidence that anything of ...

Vietnam won the Dien Bien Phu battle 70 years ago, forcing the French government to sign the Geneva Agreement in July 1954 and marking the end of the French military presence in the Indochina. The ...

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap earned his reputation as one of history's great military commanders on May 7, 1954, when 16,000 French soldiers surrendered to him at Dien Bien Phu after a 57-day siege. The ...

A nurse, she tended to the wounded as the French were under fateful attack by Viet Minh forces in 1954. Hailed in France and the U.S., she was given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. By Adam ...

Sixty years ago, French troops were crushed by Vietnamese fighters in a landmark battle that led to the country's independence, dented Paris's prestige and fuelled independence movements in other ...

Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the ...