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landings in Ireland and Scotland in 1945, and the subsequent campaign which drove the Germans south through England, had proved easier than pessimists (including the Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower) had feared. But the defending forces were known to be much stronger on the French coast. It was only the thought of Djugashvili claiming the credit for victory over Germany which finally prompted the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy in the summer of 1951.
    The disastrous failure of the D-Day landings set the seal on the Russian victory. Arriving in Vienna while the Anglo-Americans were still picking up the pieces of the débâcle, the Holy Army found itself in effective control of Central Europe. The only question was whether the remaining German forces in the West, exhausted by their repulsion of the Anglo-American landings, would be willing to fight on. Once it was clear that the capital had fallen, they chose not to. Djugashvili lost no time in informing Churchill that he regarded their earlier agreement about ‘spheres of influence’ as having been overtaken by events. From now on all of Europe, with the exception of Paris (which he magnanimously divided into Eastern and Western zones) would be the Russian sphere of influence. This done, Djugashvili returned to Moscow and crowned himself Tsar Joseph I.
    Yet the surrender to Russian dominance in Europe did not imply similar American pusillanimity in Asia. From an early stage, it had been clear to Churchill that the American states cared more about the Pacific theatre of war than about the European. The emergence after Roosevelt’s death of a new generation of politicians, more committed than he had been to purely American rather than Anglo-American interests, paved the way for an era of recurrent conflict with the Japanese-dominated Asian Co-Prosperity Zone.
    Despite their success in sweeping aside the old European colonial regimes, the Japanese had never wholly extinguished local resistance to their rule in China and Indo-China. Peasant wars, often led by messianic figures like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, tied down substantial numbers of Japanese troops. The costs of these wars also limited the extent to which the Japanese could build up their own naval defences. For any American government seeking to weaken the Japanese position still further, the temptation to intervene was obviously very great. Roosevelt began the process shortly before his death by publicly referring to China as a future great power. In 1948, his successor Dewey sent aid to Mao, who proceeded to drive the Japanese back to Shanghai. A similar strategy was adopted in Korea. This time, however, American troops were sent to assist the rebel North against the Japanese South.
    No American Prime Minister did more to deepen American-Japanese confrontation than John F. Kennedy, the son of Roosevelt’s Anglophobe consul in London, Joseph Kennedy. By a huge margin - mainly owing to the Catholic vote in the North’s crowded cities - Kennedy won the 1960 election. The following year, he scored a minor triumph when a successful invasion reclaimed Cuba from the last remaining Nazi forces in Latin America. Emboldened, he began to examine the possibility of another military intervention, this time in support of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese revolt against the Japanese-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.
    In many ways, JFK was a lucky prime minister. He was spared the difficulties of the black suffrage movement which plagued the political career of his Southern counterpart Lyndon Johnson. He survived an assassination attempt while visiting Johnson in Dallas in November 1963. His Centralist party smashed the states’ righters led by Barry Goldwater in the elections of 1964. But Kennedy’s good luck deserted him in Vietnam. True, the war was popular; but Kennedy could not win it. When he was forced to resign in 1967, following revelations that his brother, the Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, had authorised phone-tapping of