Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20151023184552/@comment-25626-20151024172802

I agree with your Stalin attempts to flip allies plan in the short term. As you've pointed out, it's really the best option now for any traction, and it might actually achieve a win. And Stalin was more than capable of dealing with his enemies if it furthered his goals.

The internal move against Stalin: well, we do know some US scheme is in the works. Beria (as I've suggested elsewhere) has often been tagged as a possible traitor against Stalin. In his memoirs, Molotov claimed that Beria bragged about poisoning Stalin. Khruschev claimed that while Stalin was on his death bed, Beria badmouthed him while he was unconcious, but was typically obsequious when Stalin was awake. Obviously, both men engineered Beria's own demise later, so we should probably take those stories with some salt. For storytelling purposes, however, those bits of "evidence" are enough to allow me to accept a plotline that sees Beria colluding with the US to kill Stalin if HT went that route. (As I've said elsewhere, in OTL Beria fell pretty quickly, so that might generate its own set of problems if that's what HT does.)

France: as I think about it, HT could plausibly go a number of directions. A successor government, de Gaulle or otherwise, would have enough chaos at home that getting out of the war would be sensible. On the other hand, having the Soviets staring across the Rhine at them, and maybe even sitting in the Low Countries as well, would be a terrifying prospect. Even de Gaulle, as much as he hated NATO, may have to consider that long term issue. Kind of a push there. I'd swallow either course of action.

Attlee and Adenauer: I don't think HT dislikes Attlee as much as he really enjoys writing scenes for Churchill: WW, JS, even TWPE and 191 feature really meaty scenes with Churchill desperately trying to take over the novel. Conversely, Attlee, while remarkable and important as a politician, isn't the most remarkable personality. HT's treatment of Attlee isn't even that negative: in MwiH, he notes that Britain is actually in the process of rebuilding its monuments like Attlee promised, whereas de Gaulle is still talking about rebuilding things, but hasn't even bothered to start. (I do think HT's view of de Gaulle is rather negative.)

Adenauer is somewhat the same way. MWiH directly depicts Adenauer as rather stiff, and Truman calls Adenauer a tightass in BA, but from what I can tell from the little research I've done, Adenauer was widely perceived as a stiff-necked and stern, even by the Germans. While his sheer force of will was awesome, he was a very reserved person. And HT seems to acknowledge his importance: I found Adenauer's untimely death in MWiH to be appropriately tragic on a number of levels.

(An aside: for people HT almost certainly has a negative view of, see his treatment of Montgomery, Rommel, Patton to an extent, and, especially, MacArthur.)

Britain: In rethinking what I wrote about elections and such, I have to concede that I really just want an article about a British election for our little project. So I may be letting that color my predictions. I'm also contemplating how much HT obviously enjoys writing Churchill (see above), but I may be overvaluing that as well. I do think a coalition government is plausible, with Churchill as deputy PM, much as Attlee was Churchill's deputy PM in WWII, thereby giving Churchill some voice in the government without bringing the whole thing crashing in at such a precarious time. And based solely on seats (Labour had 315 to Conservative's 298), Attlee arguably would have to give up quite a bit in order to keep Labour in power.

As far the British bomb: I agree no organic way for them to build a bomb from the ground up, but if Truman quietly transferred a working one or the technology (in violation of US law), then maybe the Brits can reverse engineer and get an early one? This is a time tested HT trope (all powers relied on Race tech in WW, but the Soviets built theirs almost exclusively based on the Race's tech, and the CS had a lot of help from the UK in 191 for their jumped-up dirty bomb).