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What if Churchill hadn't been the junior partner?


I think that if Churchill, and not FDR, was the senior partner in the western alliance, there might not have been an iron curtain at the end of the war. Of the big three, Churchill was the champion of freedom and self determination for the polish and other Eastern Europeans. He even told FDR that they should threaten war against Stalin if he didn't withdraw the red army from the countries that had been overrun by them. Of course this fell of deaf ears. FDR believed naively that Stalin was reasonable. Churchill, however, had always known that Stalin could not be trusted and that he posed a threat to Europe even before the war broke out. Hitler, however was the greater immediate threat to Britain, and the alliance with Stalin was one of convdnienc only. But Churchill knew it wouldn't last forever.

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The Red Army would have laid waste the Western Allied forces in Europe.

British units were already so short of men that units from the United States had to be put under British command just to keep their Army Group intact as a fighting force.

Contrary to your comments, it was Churchill who had the better relationship with Stalin, as they both believed in having control of empires after the war. FDR did not trust either of them.

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I have to agree with Xenopharb. As I recall it, it was Churchill who was most anxious to make a deal with Stalin, even at the cost of handing over to him half of Europe, when the reason the UK and France went to war in the first place was because Hitler had taken Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, and then Poland.

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2/3 of Poland ... the Soviet Union invaded shortly after Germany did.

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True, a "little detail" we overlooked once the USSR was invaded by Germany in June, 1941.

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People often ovelook that, at one stage Britain did very briefly consider conflict against the Soviets but did not have the manpower to fight both.

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... and then the Soviets invaded Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

The Soviet Union had dirty hands when they joined the Allies, but the United Kingdom and France still had empires when the war began. There wasn't a whole lot of democracy going around in the third world.

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