World War II: the standard narrative

Growing up in the 60's, I saw many movies and documentaries and read many books about World War II. There was a standard narrative running through them all, that went something like this:

In the 1930's an evil man came to power in Germany. The rest of the world was blind far too long to his evil, and allowed him to come close to conquering the world. Finally there was courageous leadership in Great Britain and in the US, who refused to give up, mobilized the population, and the democratic forces progressed from staving off defeat, to taking the offensive, to finally crushing the evil dictator. And if we remember the history of World War II, we will remember not to make this mistake again of appeasing a murderous dictator.

One of the ways that Solzhenitsyn changed my world view forever, was by showing that this standard narrative contains a lot of myth. The standard narrative implies that the English speaking nations had learned not to appease murderous dictators, yet Solzhenitsyn shows how the English speaking nations continued to appease Joseph Stalin, and never stopped. We handed over Soviet refugees to Stalin at the end of the war against their will, we even handed over to Stalin refugees who had never been Soviet citizens.

And in portraying the dilemma of the Vlasov men, Solzhenitsyn highlights a savage truth. For the whole eastern half of Europe, World War II presented a cruel dilemma, do you fight for Adolf Hitler, or for Josef Stalin? When any person with a heart would vote "neither".

But I should add here that these comments don't mean that I think the British and American forces did not wage an effective and serious war effort against Nazi Germany. I believe they did. Conducting an amphibious invasion against a hostile shore takes an immense amount of organization, and this was the bulk of the British-American war effort up into 1943, and during this time Hitler chose not to sit still and organize devastatingly effective Atlantic defenses, but plunged his army into a life and death battle against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union might have gone under without the supplies sent by Britain and America, and also the North African campaign and the bombing campaigns over Germany diverted a significant amount of German strength away from the eastern front. And the 1943 invasion of Italy knocked out Italy as a German ally.