It is hard to understand how anyone can try to reduce issues as complex as these to resolution by short zingers. (Don't get me started about the way Finland played games during the war against fascism. And how its leaders escaped culpability after the war.) One can't establish real truth by selective facts taken out of context. The context here includes not only the war itself, but what led up to it, and most importantly I think, what happened just after, from 1945-1953 especially. People's judgments are affected by Lend Lease, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Blockade and the Berlin Airlift, the building of The Wall, the Russian massacre at the Katyn Forest of thousands of the best and brightest of Polish leadership, the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty for the invasion and division of Poland, the millions of slave laborers taken by the Soviets for a decade and the millions who died in Siberia, the betrayal of promises for self-determination in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other east European nations, and many other important factors that go beyond comparative body counts. D-Day was not the end of American deaths offered up for the liberation of Europe, it was not even the start. Ask the US families who still visit graves that mention Sicily and Anzio, the Battle of the Bulge and other fields of blood. Please consider that the United States was already engaged in a Pacific War against Imperial Japan that it did not start, the slow, lethal progress of island hopping, one bloody beach and brutal jungle at a time, from Guadacanal to Saipan to Iwo Jima to Midway to Guam to Okinawa. Visit the Military Cemetery of the Pacific some time. Most important, if US involvement was not critical to victory, then why did Uncle Joe Stalin so stridently beg, plead, and demand that the Western Allies open a second front? He needed it to seal his chances of victory. I'll close on a lengthy passage discussing the role of the US in Europe before it invaded European beaches. Russia would have starved and been defeated without many hundreds of thousands of tons of food and war materiel. The truth is that the Western Allies in general, and the US in particular, saved the Soviet Union from obliteration. We had not been invaded as Russia had. We were not fighting for our very survival as it did. To a very large extent, US contributions, sacrifices, and blood were expended heroically, with far less self-interest than the other combatants, because it was the right thing to do, the American thing to do. I'd pray only that my country could again acquire the noble ideals that guided its conduct during that generation.
See -
Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Book Review). Here's an extract:
With major agricultural regions of the Soviet Union under enemy occupation, and the unsatisfactory system of distribution and transportation, to say nothing of mismanagement, the Soviet state had more than a nodding acquaintance with famine. Without Western aid, during the war the Soviet population would have been in danger of sharing the fate of those trapped in Leningrad and the earlier victims of collectivization. Even with the American aid, many Russians died from lack of food. Equally important was Lend-Lease?s contribution to transportation. It would have been impossible for the Red Army to move the masses of troops and supplies on the primitive roads to the front lines without American Studebaker trucks, which also served as the launching pads for the dreaded Soviet rocket artillery. The trucks were also used for more sinister activities, including the deportation of the North Caucasus Muslims. Less satisfactory for combat were the Western tanks, inferior to the German machines and particularly disadvantaged in the open terrain of the Eastern Front. The memoirs of General Dmitri Loza, published in English in 1996, give us a vivid picture of how these tanks were employed by the Russians. American aircraft, flown by Russian ferry pilots across the vast expanse of Siberia, were put to good use by the Soviet air forces even with planes that were less than popular with Western pilots. A case in point was the Bell P-39 Airacobra, used both as a low-altitude fighter and as ground support. Its odd shape gave Soviet censors fits because it was difficult to conceal that it was the favorite mount of their second-highest-ranking ace, the future marshal of aviation, Aleksandar I. Pokryshkin.
Besides weaponry and food, Lend-Lease provided the Soviet Union with other resources, ranging from clothing to metals. With the start of the Cold War, Lend-Lease became a forgotten chapter in Soviet history and was only revived after glasnost. Now, thanks to Russian researchers and this excellent study, the West will have access to the real story. Lend-Lease provided vital help for the Soviet Union when the country was in desperate straits and made a significant contribution to the final victory. It also strengthened Josef Stalin, a fact that did not bother its chief architect, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who saw beyond the Allied victory and looked at Stalin as a counterbalance to the European colonial powers.
The victory over Nazi Germany was achieved through the economic power of the United States and the lives of millions of Soviets, who for reasons that defy logic made the ultimate sacrifice to keep in power a regime as brutal as their Nazi enemy. What the Soviet Union needed after the war was a peacetime version of Lend-Lease, in this case the Marshall Plan, which Stalin rejected. Misled by the victory, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors embarked on an imperial policy that would have put the tsars to shame, and one the USSR could hardly afford. Resources were deployed on military and space programs and every Third World thug, including those who had jailed the local Communists or became Soviet clients. To the USSR?s eternal shame, anti-Semitism became national policy.