alt Hacker News> don’t forget, the US alongside anglosphere allies liberated Western Europe at the same time Japan was being fought
Let's not forget the Soviet Union, who did most of the actual heavy lifting of liberating Western Europe. If D-Day had never happened, the Soviets would have rolled right through Germany and then occupied France and the low countries. The Nazis would still have lost, but all of continental Europe would have been behind the iron curtain for the Cold War.
The anglosphere allies didn't defeat Germany so much as stop the Soviets from occupying Western Europe.
> "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view l several times in conversations with me."
> - Nikita Khrushchev, political commissar overseeing Red Army generals during the Battle of Stalingrad and later the leader of the Soviet Union, as written in his memoirs.
> "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."
> - Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union and the Conqueror of Berlin (AKA the guy who got Hitler to blow his final thoughts out all over a wall), as overheard by a KGB monitoring device in 1963.
@Sensei_of_Philosophy, Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryWhatIf/s/z7gcaTaxy9