History Lesson

An American chap was causing a fuss on the train this morning because his seat reservation had gone wrong. He asked the steward if they could help him out and said 'come on, I'm an American, we saved you in World War II'. Whoa there! Hang on. The US did help us with food during the war and they sacrificed many lives in the Normandy landings and thereafter. But WWII was won by the Russians. 80% of the German troops were engaged fighting the Russians. The Russians sustained such heavy losses because a few years earlier, in a fit of paranoia, Stalin had shot all of his top generals leaving his army with no top level experience. The main reason the US helped out in Europe was to make sure that the Russians didn't seize all of Europe after the war.

The other main reason the US entered the war was because of Japan, a growing economic rival in the Pacific. This is why the Americans needlessly bombed the hell out of many non-strategic Japanese cities: they simply wanted to set the Japanese economy back by a few decades (the later Japanese recovery was rightly dubbed the 'Japanese economic miracle'). And of course we have the atomic bomb, dropped to ruin a few cities and show the Russians that the US had the bomb. The first Uranium bomb was dropped even though the American generals knew that there were US prisoners of war in the drop zone. The second Plutonium bomb was dropped even though the US knew the Japanese were to surrender and it was done purely to test the technology. So, yes, the US helped the UK during WWII but the motives were not so altruistic.