Võ Nguyên Giáp

Born in 1911 to a peasant family in Quảng Bình, Giáp joined anti-colonial movements at fourteen and studied law in the 1930s before teaching history. He rose as military leader of the Việt Minh during World War II, fighting Japanese occupation, then turned his forces against the French in the First Indochina War. His decisive victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ended French rule. As commander and defense minister, he led North Vietnamese forces through the Vietnam War, overseeing the 1968 Tet Offensive and 1972 Easter Offensive before stepping down as commander but staying on through the 1975 fall of Saigon. He engineered the Ho Chi Minh trail - a logistical network through Laos and Cambodia recognized as one of the century's great feats of military engineering - and transformed scattered rebels into a combined-arms force capable of conventional warfare. He resigned as defense minister in 1980, left the Politburo in 1982, and died in 2013 at 102.