WI: Wallace at Normandy, Dewey at Yalta

So here's the scenario: In June of 1944, the day before D-Day, FDR suffers a fatal heart attack or stroke, putting Henry Wallace in the Oval Office. That August, at the 1944 Democratic National Convention, there's a movement to prevent President Wallace from getting the nomination. There's a dragged-out fight on the convention floor, including figures suck as James Byrnes, Harry F Byrd, and James Farley putting their names in the ring. At its peak, a movement to nominate Harry Truman as a compromise candidate gets 494 votes on the convention floor, but ultimately, on the 19th ballot, President Wallace prevails. What follows is a long campaign in which Dewey bests Wallace, taking advantage of disaffected Democrats staying home or switching to his side, including the tacit support of some Democrats, provided that certain members of FDR's cabinet stay on in a Dewey administration.
How does Wallace handle the war for the eight months he's commander in chief? How does the campaign in the West go? How does Dewey treat with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta? How does a Dewey Administration deal with the rest of the war? How does he handle the postwar era? What about the strikes in 1946?
 
I think the war would end sooner in the west since Wallace was a stronger Soviet sympathizer than Roosevelt (plus it would be very likely that he puts Alger Hiss, Soviet spy, high up in the State Department). There would be a more ruthless assault on Nazi Germany. Also the war against Japan would likely be put on hold for a while because of that, so battles like Leyte Gulf and the invasion of the Philippines wouldn't happen.
However all of that would be gone when Dewey takes office, considering the Truman Democrats he would keep are as anti-communist as Nixon hypothetically. Yalta wouldn't go well for Stalin, and the Iron Curtain would be a ways east. I think Japan still get's the atom bomb, but they get off with far less damage and maybe retain Formosa.
Oh, and Nationalist China get's full aid from the Dewey Administration.
 
Barbara Delaplace's short story "No Other Choice" has President Dewey invite Japanese observers to witness a atomic bomb test, only for Japan to refuse to surrender and Dewey reluctantly has a second bomb dropped over Tokyo.

Sadly there's not much fiction dealing with Dewey, which is a bit of a shame seeing as he would've been a good president. My two cents is that he would've stood up more to Stalin at Yalta more then FDR.
 
"Standing up" to Stalin would have achieved precisely dick except maybe exacerbate already considerable Soviet paranoia. The idea it could is a result of hindsight bias informed by the Cold War then by what the dominant perspective actually was among the Western Allies populace in early-1945 and what the actual facts on the ground were. The fate of Eastern Europe had already been dictated by the advance of Soviet armies much more then any agreements reached at Yalta... as Stalin himself observed when Molotov worried that some wording of the OTL agreement might impinge the Soviets ability to act in Eastern Europe: "Never mind! We'll do it all our own way anyways!"

A similar story is at work in the Pacific: once Germany falls, Stalin will swoop in and take what he wants and it is impossible for the WAllies to stop him, both politically and militarily. In military terms, Soviet armies were already on the Oder by the time the meeting took place while Eisenhower's armies were still west of the Rhine. Stalin only waited as long to take Berlin because he did not percieve the WAllies as trying to beat him to it until early-April. If the WAllies try to move and take it earlier, he'll surely accelerate the Berlin operation, pre-empting them and seizing the city ahead of them anyways. He'll also likely arrange "accidents" with whatever column heads toward Berlin with Soviet Frontal Aviation and/or (if in range) Soviet artillery, and when the WAllies complain about it, his response will be to remind them that had they agreed to a demarcation line and stuck to it then maybe such a tragic accident would not have happened. This kind of military-political tactic works much better for the Soviets then it does the WAllies because the WAllies are not willing to sacrifice their people's lives for political gain while the Soviets are.

Politically, three-and-a-half years of "the Russians are our friends, the Germans and Japanese are our enemies!" propaganda could not be (and was not) reversed overnight. Any attempt to shaft the Soviets in '45 before the war with Germany and Japan is over will be met by a hellish public backlash in the United States and Britain. By Yalta, it's too late to frustrate Soviet imperialism-in-arms.
 
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Dewey would not handle Yalta substantially differently from FDR. Yes, he made a few noises about Poland in the 1944 campaign. IMO that was to win the Polish-American vote--period.
 
Instead of Yalta being about big promises which can later be broken, or at the very least will be hard to keep in changing circumstances,

maybe Yalta is more of a ping-ponging arrangement, you do something positive, I do something positive, etc., etc., etc.

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And we on the Allied side didn't exactly allow the people of Greece to decide for themselves. In late '44 even before the war was over, Churchill was siding with and arming the former Nazi collaborators (yes, really) against our former partisans some of who were members of the Greek communist party.
 
Would the same people run without FDR ? or would anybody else put themselves into the ring without him as an obvious front runner ?
 
Barbara Delaplace's short story "No Other Choice" has President Dewey invite Japanese observers to witness a atomic bomb test, only for Japan to refuse to surrender and Dewey reluctantly has a second bomb dropped over Tokyo.

Sadly there's not much fiction dealing with Dewey, which is a bit of a shame seeing as he would've been a good president. My two cents is that he would've stood up more to Stalin at Yalta more then FDR.

I agree. It seemed like Roosevelt actually was personally intimidated by Stalin.
 
I don't think FDR was either naïve nor intimidated by Stalin at Yalta. When Admiral Leahy warned him of the vagueness of the agreement on Poland, FDR replied, "I know, Bill — I know it. But it's the best I can do for Poland at this time." I agree with David M. Kennedy's judgment: "And it was--unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint." https://books.google.com/books?id=cL85ggyT9oYC&pg=PA802 Does anyone really think Dewey would have done that?
 
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