Artful Dodger:

> They got beat by a bunch of farmers.

> We saved them in WWI and WWII.

Americans keep telling themselves that they saved the world from the Nazis. This is the myth they have repeated to themselves since the end of WW II.

But history shows that up until 1942 the US was doing business with the Nazis. The US did not decide to stop doing business with the Nazis until Pearl Harbor was attacked and until it was clear that the Nazis had lost the battle on the eastern front with the Soviet Union. The Traidng with the Enemy Act was not passed until 1942, and those Americans who collaobrated with the Nazis are well known.

The true saviors were the Soviets who lost 23 million people in order to give Hitler a crushing defeat. So bad was Hitler defeated by the Soviets that he had little left to defend the western front. The Soviets marched across Europe virtually unopposed. If the US had not entered the war, the Soviet Union would have completely taken over Germany and France under the Vichy government.

Well, Americans give no credit to the Soviet Union or to Nikita Kruschev, probably the best military leader of the 20th century. That is a legacy of the Cold War. The US and Western Europe downplayed the Soviet contribution to the war out of fear that people might see the Soviet Union as the ones who defeated Hitler.