Domestically, the victory of the Viet Minh army under the overall control of Ho Chi Minh in 1954 led to the country's independence.

"Dien Bien Phu signalled the end of colonisation," said Dao Hung, a member of the Vietnamese Association of Historians.

In Geneva that same year following the military success, Ho Chi Minh secured peace in exchange for the division of the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel.

The Geneva Accords would have been unthinkable without the victory. "On a political level, it is the great turning," said Hung.

This thinking is reflected in the way Vietnam is celebrating this week's 50th anniversary of the battle, which together with the liberation of Saigon in 1975, is still used by the communist regime today as the historical pillar of its legitimacy to rule.

"Dien Bien Phu is the battle of Valmy of the Vietnamese. It is there that it all starts for them," said a French diplomat in Hanoi, evoking the 1792 victory of a French volunteer army against the Prussians that preceded the adoption of France's new constitution.

"The celebrations commemorate a victory against colonialism but do not represent the expression of an anti-French feeling. The Vietnamese simply feel an ideological need to commemorate this battle," he added.

For those who fought in the battle, it brings back sharp memories.

"I have images that return from time to time. In particular that of the surrender of French troops," said Colonel Tran Dong.

"It was the afternoon of May 7. We had just tackled a position close to the HQ of Castries", the 75-year-old said, referring to Christian de la Croix de Castries, head of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

"A column of soldiers went by holding up white flags. There included French, Algerians, and Vietnamese," he said.

But the legacy of the battle reached far beyond Vietnam's shores.

For France, it marked the beginning of the end of its worldwide colonial empire.

Two years later in 1956, Tunisia and Morocco obtained independence, after which France became bogged down in the Algerian campaign, sounding the death knell for a French colonial army forced to call on conscripts.

"Dien Bien Phu was not only a victory of the Vietnamese people but for many other countries around the world," Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary general who commanded the Vietnamese forces during the battle, told reporters on Friday.

"It proved that a nation with enough determination can win against foreign aggressors no matter powerful they are," said the 92-year-old.

Christopher Goscha, a historian at the University of Lyon II, agrees the Vietnamese triumph at Dien Bien Phu was "a milestone in the history of modern military science".

"Not only had the Asian 'colonised' defeated the Western 'coloniser' in a set-piece battle, but the Vietnamese had also created a modern army from scratch in a time of war," Goscha said in October's edition of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

People living under the yoke of European colonialism in other parts of the world realised that building a modern fighting force was essential to achieving indepenence, he said.

"In this sense, the Vietnamese defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 is as important as the Japanese defeat of the Russians at Tsushima in 1905," he added, referring to the first victory by an Asian army over Western forces.

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