Chronicle Commentary: August 15, 1941
Pictured on the front page and page A-5 are President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the top military brass of both nations attending church service aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales “somewhere in the Atlantic.” We posted about the meeting last week, which secretly took place off the coast of the new United States base Naval Air Station Argentia.
I’ve always thought how interesting it would be if someone managed to invent a historical simulator, where you change something and see how the course of history plays out… Just imagine, given their monumental contributions during the 20th Century, how the world would look if you switched out George Marshall (smiling) and Winston Churchill for someone else. Sure, we could have done worse than Franklin Roosevelt, but we could have done better. I would argue that you have a decent chance of replacing FDR with someone else in our theoretical simulator and coming out ahead, but a world without a Marshall or Churchill — or especially both — would have ended up with a lot more Germany and a whole lot less freedom.