The Americans did help for sure. But they were comfortable enough pretending there was no war until they were attacked themselves. Even then, they only got involved in Europe because Japan and Germany had linked their fates with a pact.
If we have anyone to thank, it's the Russians who sacrificed millions, fighting their way from moscow to Berlin.
While the Americans did speed up the process of ending the war, it was already turning in favor of the allied forces by the time they arrived.
The US did make a significant difference in the timeframe, but let's not oversimplify things to the point where your message is just propaganda.
There are just as many black pages in the US history as in ours, and pretty much anyone elses.
American arrogance has us as the greatest contributors to the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the reluctant hero's who bore the greatest brunt of the war. I lived in Bruxelles for a bit as a student, and had the pleasure and privilege of travelling around the continent quite a bit on holiday.
I wish so many of the dumb hicks I share a country with could have seen what happens to the consciousness of a people when the tumults of war have devastated their own backyard. When food was so scarce, stews were made from grass and old leather...for months on end. When elder sisters would sell their bodies to US G.I.'s for rations, so they could feed their younger siblings...parents having been executed by the Nazi's. (which side should they thank? The Germans who shot their parents in the head, or the Americans who baited them with sustenance to act like whores?).
I wish my hick compatriots who think Europeans should grovel in thanks could see the shrines made out of things like tanks that ran out of gas. A tank breaks down in a march through the countryside. The locals, so happy that help has come, keep it freshly painted and covered in flowers to this day. And you want to accuse them of being ingrateful? Get out more, and grow up.
I wish my hick compatriots that insist Europeans suck up all pride for the rest of their lives could meet and lunch with the Europeans who had to try to rebuild a continent after the liberation. We bombed parts of Germany into the dark ages. I knew a Dutch woman who, after seeing the Germans kill her parents, her sister, her nieces and nephews; had been raped and beaten and broken by the occupying forces; and after having been in the resistance where members killed each other on suspicion alone, joined a humanitarian brigade that ran trains into Germany to fetch German children starving in the streets, schlep them to better grounds to feed them and nurse them back to some semblence of help, then return them to the streets of rubble with some supplies and collect the next round of starving oprhans. No Americans to be seen; Europeans, helping other Europeans...the ones who had been terrorizing them for the last decade of war.
WW2 did not hit our shores in anything resembling a destructive wave. We rationed meat, while they had none. 1-in-3 Russians were killed in the war, making it really hard to find a Russian citizen who was not directly affected by loss.
I was private security for a woman who was in the Dutch underground, and one of the caretakers for Anne Franks family, mentioned in the Diary. After Schindlers list came out, she was invited to speak at a UC Irvine event. A panle of speakers was aksed to tell their stories: A young medical student, placed in the concentration camps & made to conduct amputations with a piece of wire and no drugs...an American tank driver, first in the gates at Buchenwald...the families of people whose names were on the list. And outside, a parade of
American neo-fascists, insisting it never happened, protesting loudly on the sidewalk outside the hall, while inside the old tank driver broke down in tears, describing trying to save the prisoners, only to accidentally kill them with single bites of food and small sips of water bursting their stomachs...where you could have heard a pin drop, for real.
I love my country, what it stands for. I've bled for it, and would again. But I can't stand the abhorrent ignorance that governs the minds of so many Americans. And while we had the exhorbitant largesse of the 1980's putting yuppies in large houses and convertibles, countries like Britain and Belgium saw a huge working class struggling just to break even in a heavily taxed economies, old pairs of trousers with sewn holes, and Ireland looking like a 3rd world country. I recall clearly sitting on the plane next to a young Irish man, beaming with pride that he had just recieved his European passport, and that now he was a citizen of Europe. And how the changes on the horizon would mean his kids would have a better chance than he did, having grown up in a poverty-filled Dublin. And they do; Ireland looks now more like American University towns did back then, and I'm glad for them.
Sorry for the rant...something about it all just gets in my craw. Price paid; move on, and be grateful you didn't have to come up from under the burdens they did.
) She traveled all over Europe the US and Canada and she did not have any thing bad to say about anyone but she refused to comment on Parisians. She had been to Paris and she loved the French countryside and thought French Canadian were great people but would not comment on Parisians. 
I didn't know whether to swing or dive under the seat. Before I could decide, he continued, I was 17 years old, but before they could send me out the war ended. We then had a nice chat -- in English. Taught me something about how much I didn't know about the experience of others.
