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.

My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

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.

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.

Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.