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.

The police chief of Hiroshima welcomed me eagerly as the first Allied correspondent to reach the city.

My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon - although that anger came later.

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.

When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.

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.

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.