TLIAD: Shuffling The Deck
- Thread starter Meadow
- Start date
Dom
Moderator
Well, Eden was Prime Minister IOTL, so not sure if tah works out.
The talk of the Churchilian exit seems to imply that Eden doesn't do too great a job, but I could be reading too much into things...
The fate of the Axis is pretty much sealed by now, provided 1942 has largely gone as in OTL the tables have already turned in the Pacific and Torch and Uranus are just around the corner. Not that Eden couldn't find some other way to do poorly I suppose but I can't see too many differences in the immediate period, possibly no Percentages Agreement.
Great start guys, I've done the 'Eden takes over in 1942' once or twice myself but it's usually him taking over from Churchill in the wake of a vote of no confidence due to the war going badly, very interesting to see how things will turn out provided things are largely going as OTL otherwise.
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Very good. I kept wondering where the PoD was going to arrive, and then a bombshell.
I actually lost it when The Red's inner monologue started talking in Cyrillic.
Really looking forward to seeing what you do with this - and I want a pack of those cards!
Really looking forward to seeing what you do with this - and I want a pack of those cards!
Dom
Moderator
Ah, true.
Let's blame it on lack of sleep, rather than lack of knowledge this time, eh, comrade?
1942-1945 Anthony Eden (Conservative leading Wartime Coalition)
1945-1947 Anthony Eden (Conservative majority)
The 9 of Diamonds
The Right Man At The Right Time
When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government in 1940, it was with the proviso that he kept out of domestic policy wherever possible. His successor, taking office in such tragic circumstances (after the opening of a sealed letter handed by Churchill to the King in August 1940) - held no such scruples, and when he chaired his first Cabinet meeting on 28th October, 1942, he made it clear that he would be far less of a figurehead than Churchill had been with regard to the Home Front.
Eden, an officer of the Great War, took a more level-headed approach to commanding the British war effort than his predecessor. While Churchill had been a calmer leader than his opposite number in Berlin, he had been prone to occasional wild flights of fancy and too much self-belief. Months before his death, the disaster at Dieppe had secured for Churchill a place in the Canadian national memory quite unlike his standing in the British canon.
Eden had watched this in silent concern, and learned from it. Leaving even more to his generals than Churchill had done, he paid careful attention to the equipment being used by British forces. During one of the infamous Tank Debates in the House of Commons, he risked the wrath of the Ministry for Information by admitting that there were ‘serious contentions’ over the battle-readiness of British tanks. A commitment to greater orders of M4 Sherman tanks (nicknamed ‘Winstons’ very soon after Churchill’s death, not by decree but as a spontaneous occurrence across the Eighth Army) quelled the discontent, but the Cruiser line of armoured vehicles was quietly discontinued in early 1943. Resources were diverted en masse to what pre-war strategies had called ‘infantry tanks’, such as the Matilda, Valentine, and the now poignantly-named Churchill.
Eden was also a careful commander when it came to strategy. General Eisenhower grew tired of his handwringing across 1943 and threatened to launch the invasion of Western Europe ‘with or without the English’. This was, of course, hyperbole and impossible, but on seeing the cool-headed mediator lose control of his temperament, Eden pulled himself together. Operation Spencer began in June 1944, and British casualty rates were significantly lower than their American counterparts. Eden had begun to earn his reputation as ‘the man who saved European civilisation and British boys’.
It all made sense. As Thompson once wrote, ‘the Lieutenants of the Somme led the Armies of Normandy.’ Eden had been deeply affected by what he saw as poor leadership from above in the First World War, and become only further disillusioned with the ruling class during Appeasement. Determined never to lose touch, he continued to feverishly and slavishly read through every possible document relating to a proposed operation. The twin operations of Market and Garden, proposed by Montgomery in mid-1944, were rejected after two weeks of consideration. Eden was determined not to waste lives through shortcuts. This war would be won the way the last one should have been - a broad front march to Berlin.
Thankfully, Eisenhower agreed with the British PM on this point, and relations between the two men were positively pleasant by the end of 1944. The Suez Conference in December of that year was a moment of triumph for Eden, and Eisenhower’s cooperation with him at Suez is what convinced President Roosevelt to accept that no meaningful breakthroughs could be achieved until the snow thawed in Europe. A spate of ill-health in the spring of 1944 had robbed the President of most of strength and - on the advice of his Doctors - he refused to run for a fourth term in the November election, handing power to his designated successor, the naive Missouri Senator, Harry Truman.
While Eden would get on with Truman on a professional level, relations with Stalin were rather more frosty, as the Marshal was only too willing to interpret Western cautiousness as a desire for Russia to bleed herself dry on the Wehrmacht. Eden’s winning charm did little to win over the General Secretary - though a late-night conversation about life in the trenches is alleged to have sparked a rare connection with the bloodthirsty Soviet leader.
On 10 May 1945, the M4 Winstons of XXX Corps crossed the Rhine, as the Red Army struggled in the meatgrinder of Seelow Heights. Eden warned that while the war in Europe was drawing to a close, the conflict against Japan was still not over. When news of Hitler’s death reached London on 26 June, Eden is alleged to have quipped ‘I don’t suppose we can give this Fegelein fellow a knighthood?’
Hermann Fegelein was already dead (and, for that matter, a Nazi) and the red flag flew from the Reichstag. But while spontaneous celebrations broke out across Britain, Eden had his eyes firmly on the other great conflict he had been preparing for since 1942 - the battle with the Labour Party.
As Foreign Secretary, Eden had watched disapprovingly as Clement Attlee - the Lord President of the Council and Deputy Prime Minister - had staked out a position as the government’s domestic policy majordomo. The Labour leader served ably as Churchill’s Deputy, with a broad remit to ensure that the frontlines were well supplied and the Home Front was placated. In this role, Attlee had succeeded tremendously - mild-mannered and calm, he had been a perfect foil to the bullish and quick-tempered Prime Minister.
Within weeks of moving into Downing Street, Eden had already begun to plan for a government that marginalised the Labour Party. Unlike Churchill, whose diaries had spoke of little but winning the next election by default, Eden was acutely aware of how little the Conservative government was trusted in terms of “winning the peace”, which all commentators expected the forthcoming election to be fought upon. As a survivor of the various National Governments of the 1930s, on his tours of the cities of the North and the slowly growing industrial suburbs of London, Eden was left in no doubt that the Conservatives were identified as the party of the Great Depression.
In April 1943, with the memory of the Tank Debates fading, Eden reshuffled his Cabinet. Although Attlee kept his position as Deputy Prime Minister (as leader of the Junior Party in the Coalition, there was little alternative), control of the Lord President’s Council given to the brilliant Education Secretary, Rab Butler, with Attlee ‘pushed upstairs’ to the Foreign Office. In the same afternoon, both the Minister of Supply, Lord Reith, and the Chancellor, Viscount Waverley, were sacked and replaced with two of the Prime Minister’s acolytes, in an event still known to history as “The Night of the Long Johns”. The cumulative effect of this was to greatly erode the Labour Party’s dominance of the domestic agenda. This, when coupled with Eden’s enthusiastic support for the Beveridge Report in his Christmas Message of 1942, allowed the Conservatives to “steal the Radicals’ colours from in front of their faces”. A Low cartoon of 1944 shows the perma-tanned Prime Minister grabbing a number of clothes from a washing line using a billhook, whilst Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin look away, oblivious.
The dip in Conservative support has been ascribed to the ‘guilty men’ effect that the young journalist (and later Labour Leader) Michael Foot had described in his devastating treatise of 1940. Both Eden and Churchill had in fact been highly praised by Cato, but as eyes of the world turned away from Berlin towards Tokyo, the long-bubbling tensions within the Coalition finally splintered. Pre-empting a vote from the Parliamentary Labour Party, Eden announced an election on the eve of Operation Olympic.
The General Election of 1945 was spectacularly ill-tempered. While Attlee made every effort to remain above the fray, offering a thoughtful and mercurial air, Eden had no such scruples, critiquing the Labour contribution to the Coalition as “woeful”, Attlee as “insipid” and the majority of Labour candidates as “closeted Bolsheviks” - a matter that was proven to have a shade a truth when the spying activities of several young Labour Parliamentary Candidates were unmasked in the week before the close of polling.
A high Common Wealth vote also damaged Labour, aided by a J.B. Priestley radio broadcast that said Mr Attlee’s plans for nationalisation would ‘do little more than replace the boss with the bureaucrat’. Common Wealth itself only won nine seats, but is speculated to have denied Labour more than thirty.
As Olympic was delayed for what were officially ‘weather-related reasons’ and the world held its breath, a single B-29 Superfortress took off and headed for Kokura. As Anthony Eden changed the face of British politics, a nuclear explosion on 20 September 1945 changed the world forever.
The atomic age had begun.
But Eden would not play the part in it he expected he would. Charisma and diplomacy proved to be tools ill-suited to the post-war Europe of austerity, and the businesslike manner in which Truman set about running Western Europe from Washington did not sit well with the English gentleman in Number 10. The full implementation of the Welfare State would be left to his successor, but the National Hospital Service Act, 1946 and Rab Butler’s belated Educational Reform Act, 1947 resurrected Tory Democracy for the 20th Century. The Dominion of India Act briefly settled the constitutional settlement in favour of the Conservatives - although it would prove to be a sticking point during the 1960s.
As Britain suffered through the bitterly cold winter of 1946-47, the fuel situation began to damage the Conservative Party in the polls. With domestic stockpiles of coal almost empty owing to the slow demobilisation efforts, emergency imports from Canada and Australia became a necessity, although delivering them to the industrial centres of Lancashire and the Midlands proved problematic until the Prime Minister forced through a controversial nationalisation of the Manchester Ship Canal - whilst historians have since praised the action as brave one, it cost Eden numerous allies from the Conservative Right, especially from within the House of Lords. After a particularly fractious a Cabinet meeting in early March, a number of senior party figures visited him and compelled him to step down. Lacking the support from his senior Ministers, he resigned the following afternoon. With no formal mechanism to elect a successor, the “Magic Circle” of Conservative peers and grandees formed a conclave to send their preferred candidate to the King, who was then recuperating following a successful operation to remove a tumour from his larynx.
Anthony Eden, 1st Duke of Avon, died in the summer of 1980, forty years after the hot months when he and his mentor had saved the nation from certain peril. While during his lifetime and just after his death he had a somewhat messianic quality, it is rare to hear him spoken of today without ‘and Churchill’ following in the same breath. He remains fondly remembered in his own right. The right man at the right time, he kept a firm hand on the tiller, prevented unnecessary loss of British life, and won the Second World War. That he did not know how to win the peace is rarely held against him.
Questions
Will there be a larger British Army on the Rhine in post war Europe? Will we see the development of nuclear power as an alternative to coal?
Will there be a larger British Army on the Rhine in post war Europe? Will we see the development of nuclear power as an alternative to coal?
Thande
Donor
Very original. Almost as much a reinvention of Eden as the right man in the right time as with Mosley in EdT's TL (and indeed I recall Ed himself making the same point about Eden's potential in that TL). Good way to get the very difficult challenge of a Tory victory in 1945. I assume Eden framed the campaign as calling for a Conservative government rather than a "National" continuation like OTL, which would help him make a break with the past.
The question is, what does this do for the Labour Party? Certainly they can claim to have dramatically shifted the Overton Window and dragged the Tories to the left, but now they're still the upstart party who've never had a majority and have had only one PM, who promptly left to join the other side. They're almost going to be a blank slate related to OTL and their image could be totally different, defined by however and with whoever they do win a majority. I mean, the other day when I was at that political event there were a couple of elderly supporters of Labour and the Lib Dems and they were literally using "1945" as an adjective and noun. "How much 1945 do you think there'll be in Miliband's manifesto?" "Well it'll be more 1945 than the last one, at least, but not as 1945 as I'd like". Just to illustrate how defining a moment that was.
It must be rather confusing having both "Winston" AND "Churchill" tanks in the same army...
The question is, what does this do for the Labour Party? Certainly they can claim to have dramatically shifted the Overton Window and dragged the Tories to the left, but now they're still the upstart party who've never had a majority and have had only one PM, who promptly left to join the other side. They're almost going to be a blank slate related to OTL and their image could be totally different, defined by however and with whoever they do win a majority. I mean, the other day when I was at that political event there were a couple of elderly supporters of Labour and the Lib Dems and they were literally using "1945" as an adjective and noun. "How much 1945 do you think there'll be in Miliband's manifesto?" "Well it'll be more 1945 than the last one, at least, but not as 1945 as I'd like". Just to illustrate how defining a moment that was.
It must be rather confusing having both "Winston" AND "Churchill" tanks in the same army...
A very interesting beginning. I really don't know who will succeed Eden as PM. It appears to me that he is unlikely to be too succesful whoever he is.
The title and the events thus far suggest that the office of PM (or Tory leader, perhaps), will before too long develop a reputation for the holder leaving abruptly. I doubt that reputation would deter many from pursuing the top post though.
I await more eagerly.
The title and the events thus far suggest that the office of PM (or Tory leader, perhaps), will before too long develop a reputation for the holder leaving abruptly. I doubt that reputation would deter many from pursuing the top post though.
I await more eagerly.
My only quibble would be Harry Truman being nominated in 1944 as the actual candidate. Whilst a great Veep choice for all the same reasons as OTL I can't see him either having the will, the popularity, or the influence to snag the top of the ticket without even more convenient circumstances that allowed him to become the Veep nominee in OTL.
Interesting stuff here, Meadow. What's the detail behind this Dominion of India Act?
Pepper has some of the same problems as Wallace, I was thinking Hull as well though or perhaps Harry Hopkins.
Zeldar155
Banned
Henry Wallace was pretty unpopular with the leadership IIRC.
It's part of the reason Truman got the vice presidency IOTL.
Of course but he was obviously a bigger personality than Truman and was certainly in a much senior position to succeed FDR in 1944.
I can't see Eden getting the eight strawberry leaves, whilst he will have won the war, I think that offer really would have been restricted to Winston. Also Duke of Avon feels wrong, it's OK as an earldom, but it doesn't feel right as a ducal title.
Now, did Eden palm Randolph off with a hereditary to get the Spencer-Churchills out of the way?
My bet is on Rab Butler for the next leader.
Now, did Eden palm Randolph off with a hereditary to get the Spencer-Churchills out of the way?
My bet is on Rab Butler for the next leader.