The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German...

Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...

Moreover, the Red Army did the majority of the 'heavy lifting' in Europe during WW2. There are some pretty striking political cartoon from Dr. Seuss about this, depicting the US and Britain traveling in comfort to Germany, while the USSR carries all of their luggage.

Apart from the other fronts and the destruction of the German infrastructure and blockading supplies to Germany?

I don't imagine they were saints, but statistically they did the heavy lifting there.

Without UK/US, all of Europe would have been in the USSR

It's extremely glib to point out that the Nazi's lost to the Russian winter (let's be frank, Russian weather did more to the Nazi's than Russian soldiers ever could...) without recognizing that:

- Hitler's strategy that lost in Russia was completely predicated on the knowledge of the Western Front. No UK/USA, we may not have had Hitler losing in Russia.

- The USSR would have taken all of Europe had it not been for the USA liberating France and meeting the USSR in Berlin.

Easy to say Russians did the heavy lifting when the truth is that Hitler fucked it all up.

Easy to say that Russians did the work, when the truth is that the reason why France and UK aren't post-communist bloc countries is because of what Americans did.

I'm not trying to be glib. In America the Soviet contribution to killing the Nazis is almost entirely written out of mandatory education so I think it's often relevant in American-heavy discussions to point it out.

Also, I recall hearing a talk about how one of the effects of post-WW2 soviet communism on western/northern europe was the creation of lots of social welfare programs. (Sadly I'm not in a place where I can source this but I could have sworn it was a talk by Michael Parenti.) The reason I bring this up is because I think it's disingenuous to claim that if it hadn't been for Britain and the US that France would today resemble the Balkans or Ukraine. What we typically associate with "post-communist bloc" countries happened far later when the USSR fell apart. It's a big jump to say that places like Britain would have become part of then suffered under Soviet Communism.

In the past, I have actually about the historical education of several people who went to school between 1985-2009 and no one I've met has had any education of history past reconstruction covered in primary & secondary education (outside of Civil Rights-era, which is independently covered).

Even if you are one of the ~1% of APAM students it's spoken about in broad terms and hazy generalities after Teapot Dome (unless you count history of Baseball, which somehow is somewhat inexplicably regarded as a critical component of America history).

I find this interesting because many Americans broadly understand the succession of events leading up to and constituting WWII. On the other hand, the topics that are covered to death are barely recalled: The Revolutionary War? Washington fought that one. Civil War? Harper's Ferry & Manassas? 1812? "The time we fought the Canadians".

That thesis is the western government needed to show that they looked after their populations better that the WP did.

Before Stalin died, he believed that a conflict with the US was imminent. There was blatantly a hot war brewing between the US and the USSR along the borders of the West/East divide in Europe.

The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite.

That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.

The USSR's "territorial lust" was aided and abetted by FDR and Churchill and guaranteed by their militaries. They divvied up Europe into spheres of influence at Yalta, and the US and UK were perfectly happy to gift Stalin Eastern Europe to further their own geopolitical objectives.

I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.

Honestly, would you have done things differently, if you were Churchill or FDR?

In the 20th century we had already gone through a war so terrible it was called the war to end all wars, until 20 years later when we made it look small by comparison. The deaths in WW2 accounted for 3% of the entire population of the world. And we hadn't even invented the atomic bomb until the very end.

After WW2 we were on the precipice of the next war potentially eliminating the human race. I can see why we were reluctant to jump into it all over again by "battling evil" and forcing Russia to give back the territory they took from Germany.

Their choice was entirely reasonable. War is rarely the right answer.

It's just kind of silly to portray the American military as "standing up to Stalin" because Americans are taught Stalin equals evil and America equals good and ipso facto America must have stood up to Stalin.

I think the west did a pretty good job of standing up to Stalin as much as they could without actually igniting WW3. The cold war ended without any direct conflict between belligerents after all, and the soviet union fell.

That is, if you take as a constraint that you don't actually want to start an all-out war, the post-WW2 west stood up to Stalin in probably the best way it possibly could have.

Our industry was literally born from the Cold War, yet now everyone wants to pretend it didn't exist. The Cold War was not just rhetoric and flag-waving. Even outside of Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan there was continual military activity and those engaged in it took it as seriously as if the world could end.