Battle of Dien Bien Phu
Guns hauled up mountains by hand end an empire in Asia
The French command built a fortified camp in a mountain valley, convinced the enemy could not bring artillery there. General Võ Nguyên Giáp's Viet Minh hauled guns up the surrounding slopes by hand. After a 56-day siege the garrison surrendered on 7 May 1954. France left Indochina, and the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 15 years earlier
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 9 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 7 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 5 years earlier
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 21 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 18 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 13 years earlier
- 1952 Great Smog of London — 2 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 13 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 12 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 9 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 3 years later
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 7 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 22 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 25 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 2 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 4 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 9 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 13 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 25 years earlier
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 1 year later
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 5 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 15 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 16 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 18 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 13 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 12 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — same year
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 5 years later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 80)
- Albert Einstein (aged 75)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 73)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 65)
- Mao Zedong (aged 61)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 36)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 25)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 24)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 20)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 70)