You said: "...they have a very different take on “The Great Crusade” than Americans learn in school..."
Can you elaborate on that for me? Are you speaking of the sentiment: "...“the war served a generation of Britons and Americans as a myth which enshrined their essential purity, a parable of good and evil...”?
It goes beyond that; the fact is that 2 evil forces were fighting for domination of Europe, and the Western Democracies stood to gain little by involving themselves in such a war (and in fact did gain little). Many of the new coutries forged after WWI lost the independence which had been used as an excuse to fight in that war, and they remained enslaved for almost 50 years.
The end result of the war (Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and influence in Asia that would lead to the fall of China and wars in Korea & Vietnam) demonstrated what an exercise in futility it had been.