Was the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich Worth It?

[Pannonian]

Heydrich living may have spared a few thousand men and a few dozen man hours from anti partisan activity. The ability of one man to affect institutions are overblown in this thread.

Mers-El-Kebir , Dontiz being denied his U boats, and repulsion from Moscow are the watershed moments in the second World War. I suppose you could add midway but probably not.

The appointment of Churchill as PM is probably the UK's equivalent of the repulsion from Moscow; stiffened the country's resolve sufficiently to drag out the war and allow the US to get properly involved. Churchill the individual was also more conducive to making the UK-US alliance work than probably any other UK politician. Any other leader may not have managed to get US public opinion sufficiently onside to allow Roosevelt to wholeheartedly throw the US behind a Germany-first strategy.

Thinking about it, the early stages of WW2 may have been one of those rare periods in modern history where the personalities of the national leaders may have had a genuine effect on how events unfolded. Without Hitler, would there have been war? Without Stalin, would the USSR have been so ruthlessly efficient in its war direction? Without Churchill, would the UK have managed to hold out for and hang on to their allies? Perhaps only the US, separated by an ocean, had the luxury of choosing its course. That said, were there any other candidates for the presidency who were remotely as Anglophilic as Roosevelt? Among the chiefs of staff, only Marshall could be described as so; every other chief ranged from disdainful of to utterly hating the British. Choosing to fight the Germans wasn't a foregone conclusion.