“It seems the Brits have totally rewritten the history of World War II and our part in that war.”
The same phenomenon can be observed among Russians, who conveniently forget that we were fighting the Japanese from early 1942.
I was living in Europe during the Marshall-plan years and Berlin airlift. Even then, many Europeans thought that the US was acting for purely self-interest reasons and felt no gratitude towards America.
And in the movie The Great Escape, where the film makers went overboard on American involvement in the escape which was a mostly British effort.