In the middle of World War II, Nazi military intelligence discovered a seemingly easy way to win the war for Adolf Hitler.

The three heads of the Allied forces, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, were planning to meet in Tehran in October 1943.

Under Hitler's personal direction, the Nazis launched Operation Long Jump, a plan to track the Allied leaders in Tehran and assassinate all three men at the same time.

Well, obviously they didn't succeed, and after the fact when Roosevelt learned about the attempted assassination, he said,

I suppose it would have made a pretty good haul if they could have got all three of us.

This episode is the final part in a series that I did for the members of History Unplugged Membership Program, the Nolan's Rangers.

I did a 15-part series looking at Nazi attempts to assassinate the Big Three, how they set up the operation, the different branches of Russian and British and American and German intelligence in Iran, and why the plot failed.

In this episode, I'm going to be sharing the final part of that series where we look at what would have happened if the operation would have succeeded.

What would it mean for the Axis powers if the leadership of the Allied Alliance was decapitated?

First of all, you can imagine the shock in the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire if people woke up and suddenly learned that the leaders had been killed in far away Iran.

But there's many other factors that consider long-term.

Who would succeed Joseph Stalin in a bitter struggle to become the next Soviet premiere?

Who would follow Winston Churchill?

We know that FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace would have become President, but as somebody who had later become the presidential nominee of the left-wing progressive party in 1948, he would have been a very different type of President.

Would he have pursued closer relations in peace with the Soviet Union?

Or were going to dig into these hypotheticals in this episode?

Maybe some good could have come out of Stalin, Churchill, and FDR being assassinated, namely a less brutal Soviet premiere who wouldn't kill millions.

But there are also many other frightening scenarios that emerge, like an American Soviet pact against Europe, or even a cold war that goes hot in the 1950s.

Suffice it to say there's good reason to think that in the infinite alternate timelines that include a successful assassination of the Big Three, most of them are bad.

So that's what we're going to look at in this episode.

And also, if you want to check out dozens of bonus episodes like these, you can join History on Plug's membership program by going to patreon.com slash unplucked.

That's patreon.com slash unplucked.

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