Lend lease was absolutely critical to the Soviet effort. A relative of mine was in the merchant marines handmade the murmansk trip several times. He spent the rest of his life amazed that he lived. And the Russians do you have something to be proud of in the seven out of every nine dead German soldiers were killed on the Eastern Front.
The truth is that they did most of the heavy lifting. And the truth of it is, that had the Landings in Italy France and Normandy not been conducted, it would have been a much longer harder fight for them to make it all the way to Berlin. It’s also just as true that had we landed in 42 we would have faced a much larger, better equipped, and more dangerous Nazi army. The fact of the matter is we benefited from their effort, and they’ve benefited from D-Day and the fight in Western Europe. Neither of us really could have accomplished it without the other, which is why that Alliance existed
See my post. #41.
Overstated
The US unlike Russia was fighting on two fronts on opposite sides of the world
We couldn’t have landed in 1942 in any strength for multiple reasons. Chief among them was a lack of landing craft. Heck, Normandy was pushed back from May to June by Eisenhower just to get another “month’s worth” of LST production over to England. They’d already stripped the Med of all it’s LST’s which pushed back the Anvil Landings in southern France to August. The original plan had those landings to be near-simultaneous.
I’ve always believed that the US Army needed to be “blooded” — North Africa & Sicily did that. It worked the kinks out in our Operational methods and taught important tactical lessons to the units that would be in the 1st wave at Normandy. Italy probably was a foolish move. The Germans were able to bottle up 2+ allied armies with a relative handful of divisions through skillful use of terrain.