Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me.

As in all his subsequent dealings with France, Ho Chi Minh's demands were a model of modesty.

Ho, or Nguyen Ai Quoc, thus became the first Vietnamese communist and a founding member of the French Communist party, born out of the split.

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

France turned a deaf ear to the demands, but Ho had succeeded in attracting great publicity in progressive French circles to the situation in Indochina.

And just as there was something of every Vietnamese in Ho Chi Minh so there is something of Ho Chi Minh in almost every present-day Vietnamese, so strong is his imprint on the Vietnamese nation.

Of thousands of others, nearer the centre of the explosion, there was no trace. They vanished. The theory in Hiroshima is that the atomic heat was so great that they burned instantly to ashes - except that there were no ashes.