“I don’t think Hitler invades Poland without signing the Non-Aggresion Pact with Stalin.”
Exactly. And after Russia stabs the civilized world in the back, in the Poland split, we were expected to do everything in our power to save them from the Germans. I would like to think our leaders were just stupid, but that is very difficult. I guess you could ask the East Germans, as well as several other Eastern European nations, if our slowing down on the Western-front and allowing the Russians to take Berlin, was a good thing. The Russians profited hugely in Germany, absconding with German technology as well as German nuclear and rocket scientists.
I would dare say, without our “assistance”, Russia would have remained the same festering, relatively powerless, s#!+hole it was before the war.
In fact, had Hitler not started the war, Stalin was going to attack Europe by 1943, when he built his armed forces back up after the 1938 purges. The Non-Aggression Pact was meant to buy time, but Hitler beat him to the punch in 1941.
I think that Churchill & Roosevelt were both worried about casualties to their own troops. Having the Soviets take on the bulk of the German Army was a double-edged strategy.