Shouldn't the US take over the Allied faction from the U.K., since that's what happened historically?
Does US ever take over the Allied faction?
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Is it?
I'm not even sure there's a "faction leader" in the same sense as a game mechanic historically.
I'm not even sure there's a "faction leader" in the same sense as a game mechanic historically.
I don't think there was a transfer of leadership at any point. UK and USA were the leading nations, but neither dominated the faction.
After the war NATO was formed with America leading it. I guess you could count that.
Yes, it is historic. The Atlantic Charter basically laid out the terms to which the US would enter the war under the auspices of the fledgling United Nations. Under that agreement, Churchill negotiated away the right to maintain the British Empire after the war in order to enlist US help.
Also, the Supreme Allied Commander was an American, named Dwight D. Eisenhower who reported to and was still subject to the authority of the US President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Force_Headquarters
According to the BBC: "Roosevelt added to Churchill's version of the Charter, broadening its interpretation. He was effectively forcing the British Empire into granting independence to its colonies."
And also:
"Roosevelt is reported to have told his son Elliot:
'I've tried to make it clear to Winston - and the others - that, while we're their allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we're in it just to help them hang on to the archaic, medieval Empire ideas ... Great Britain signed [sic] the Atlantic Charter. I hope they realise the United States Government means to make them live up to it.'"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1138529.shtml
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I hate to be picky, but not a single one of the things you list (all of which I know about) are related to the game's mechanics. Ike can't lead a combined force of Allied troops. You can't dictate what allies do with colonies. You can't even really do the Atlantic Charter.
In fact, most of those things seem to be represented by war participation. You get to dictate more terms at the peace table if your war participation is higher. Except that in HOI4, you can't even tell Britain that decolonization will take place with your war score (although wouldn't that be a neat idea for a DLC?).
So, I stick by my earlier assertion. In terms of game mechanics, faction leader is just a mechanic with little bearing on the historical situation when it comes to the Allies.
With the Axis, it makes some sense, as Germany was senior partner. The same goes for the COMINTERN.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind if a rule was put in the game giving human players (in SP) faction leadership when they join a faction.
At the time of the charter, the US had no concrete plans to enter the war. Churchill was upset at some of the wording of the charter which emphasised national self-determination, but it certainly didn't constitute an agreement to 'give up' the Empire. Churchill simply chose to view the statement as pragmatic and conditional rather than ideologically principled, and ultimately his flexible interpretation of the charter won out (which is why Gdansk is not called Danzig any more and Hong Kong was ruled by a colonial government until 1997).
As for the Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower's successor was Henry Wilson, who was succeeded by Harold Alexander.
Seriously, there was no leader of the allies. In real life the Soviet Union signed the Declaration by United Nations and was thus a member of the allies, yet to say that the USA was "leading" the Soviet war effort would be absurd. Cooperation between the allied nations was voluntary and, for the most part, dictated by pragmatic need, not by a political hierarchy.
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The British Empire fell apart because of tensions in those colonies, and because the British economy was in bad shape in the post-war period. Not because America demanded decolonization. That interpretation has a big whiff of American textbook off it.
The faction leader determines who may join the faction. Since the Atlantic Charter was the founding document of the Allied faction IRL and contained language mostly that favored the US's anti-imperialist views, then I definitely think that the US should be the faction leader in game too.
Faction gameplay needs to be expanded, period. The ability to co-ordinate War Goals, the ability to set theater priorities for individual nations within the faction, and so on. It would help both with AI and Peace Conference shenanigans.
I don't know where you get the idea that decolonization was in any way an important feature of wartime diplomacy or denotes the basis of any kind of hierarchical relationship among the allies. The UN did not adopt decolonization as an official policy until the 1960s, at which point the British Empire was already well on the road to decolonization. It's completely outside the game's timeline and while it may be fun to speculate about the power dynamics of private negotiations between leaders, ultimately the document which actually came out of it is a compromise. It is not a commitment to decolonization and was not interpreted as such by the British government.
Not to mention, the Atlantic charter was an agreement between the USA and Britain. The founding document of the Allies was the Declaration by United Nations.
I would agree that the USA was definitely the leading nation of NATO but NATO formation isn't part of this game.
Yep, the British Empire came apart at the seams because of the huge expenditure it put into WW1 and WW2, plus the changing nature of the world economy/political scene. No political decision is the US or elsewhere really brought this on. It was a global movement that was replicated in all the European empires, whether they be the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy etc. The fact that the US gradually transitioned to temporary world hegemon, does not increase its importance in the early 1940's.
It is relevant if you continue play past the first war between three factions ("World War II"), to see what happens between the remaining two (e.g., Allies and Comintern in a Cold War -- or hot one, as the case may be).
Might make a new little tree of National Foci.
There is always the 'American interpretation' of history, and the real interpretation.
Well, the source I cited that said that the US basically forced the UK to give up the empire was the BBC, so sure.
The US wasn't even the main military power of the Western Allies in Europe until 1944 (Late 43 if you want to argue Italy, but either way it's certainly debatable) and it certainly wasn't the political leader. I would certainly argue that the UK remained the political leader of the Allies right up until the Yalta conference (when Churchill was the primary negotiator with Stalin).
The US was of course the leader in terms of military might and industrial power post late 42 (not to mention their huge lend lease contribution to the soviet effort), but being a faction leader is a political position, and it is at the very least highly debatable whether the US ever assumed the role as leader of the allies.
Post World War 2, the US used the leverage it came to swiftly and ruthlessly knock the UK from its perch and assume its role as western leader, but during world war 2 that is a much more contentious statement.
The comments regarding the "US Textbook" is fairly easy to explain. Many Americans (not saying you) have a grossly distorted view of World War 2, whereby they were the primary fighting force and were the primary belligerents in every single theater that they fought in. This is understandable given the lack of hollywood airtime given to the Soviets or the British. Very few Americans would know for example, that the British lost 50,000 men fighting the Japanese in Burma, or that on D-Day more commonwealth forces landed than American (80,000 vs 70,000 I believe?), and that air and naval power for D-Day was overwhelmingly British, or that the British had as many (almost?) war dead as the Americans (from a vastly smaller population). All this without even mentioning the lack of airtime given to the Soviet Union!
I'm not accusing you of doing any of those things, just trying to give perspective of why people are often quick to accuse Americans of having a bias/distorted view.
You can thank the Cold War for that.
Hollywood was willing to make the film Tora! Tora! Tora! (Oscar winning, I might add) with Japanese filmakers and Japanese co-direction in 1970, and they were the hated enemy of the United States in WWII thanks to the events depicted in that very film. But you spend decades in a world-spanning Cold War with the Soviet Union, so a lot of my fellow Americans never ever hear about Stalingrad or Operation Hula.
Of course, I have undergraduates who think WWII started in 1916 when Germany invaded Austria because they were hungry, so you get some Baldrics in every sampling.
Silly kids these days. Anyone from my generation could, at that age, have correctly told them it was Hungry-Austrians who started the war when they ate some Archduke named Ferdinand.