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"Americans tend to think that Private Ryan and the Band of Brothers won the war against Hitler. Britons remember when they stood up to Hitler all alone. But with 27 million dead, more than all the Allies combined, most Russians would agree with Stalin's assessment that the British bought the time, the Americans put up the money, but the Russians paid the blood."

Very true. By the time we landed in France in 1944, the Soviets were already polishing off the bulk of the German Army in the east, leaving only a few underequipped, hopelessly outnumbered divisions to face the Western allies.

The real effect of D-Day was not to defeat the Germans, but to give the West a claim on the continent and stop the Soviets in East Europe, rather than at the Rhine or the Atlantic.

Southeast Asians suffered horribly under the Japanese occupation, but many willingly joined the Japanese because they opposed their British, French, and Dutch colonial masters more. Indians are still unsure of whom to commemorate -- the heroic soldiers of the British Indian Army who fought and died opposing a Japanese invasion or the Indian National Army, made up mostly of Indian soldiers recruited in Japanese prison camps, who fought alongside the Japanese against their own countrymen because they believed the British were the real enemy.

This seems the most agregious example of attempted moral equivelance but the entire article is that. I am sure the facts are true but the frame of reference and the things not stated change history's meaning.

Since the Japanese were perhaps the most brutal of the Axis, with the Russians not far behind, and Japanese prison camps were things of horror, I suspect many who changed sides did so for that reason rather than any equal distaste for their "colonial masters".

WWII was won chiefly by PRODUCTION. We outspent, outproduced, AND outmanned the produced items. The best that could have been hoped for is if Hitler had not been insane and ended up with a truce keeping most of Europe.