Who Paid for WWII?

After completing William Manchester's masterly 2 volume treatment of Winston Churchill from 1874-1940, I wanted to read something on Churchill's war years. Accordingly I'm currently working through Sir Max Hastings' recent book Winston's War.

One point Hastings make is the vast difference between the experience of the Soviet Union and the United States and Great Britain through the war.

World War II is generally considered to have begun on 1 Sept 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. After initially combining with Germany as an ally, the Soviet Union was thrust out of the Axis powers when Hitler turned on Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Hitler here sowed the seed of his own destruction by guaranteeing a tw- front war. Though the United States has been supplying Great Britain since the Lend-Lease Act was signed on 11 March 1941, she entered the war in earnest after the Japenese attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Hastings points out that while millions of Russians and Germans were dying on the eastern front, Churchill and Roosevelt and the Allied Powers could cherry pick low-hanging fruit throughout various theaters of war and plan exactly the best time to start a second front in earnest in Europe when they had maximum material and men. The Soviet Union did not have this luxury; they were fighting for their own national survival against the invading Nazis.

As a consequence, the Soviet Union's losses through the war were dramatic. Here's the number of war military and civilian dead for some of the Allies through World War II

• The Soviet Union - 23,400,000
• The United Kingdom - 450,900
• The United States - 418,500

As Hastings puts it, it was the Soviet Union that did most of the actual dying for the Allies in WWII.