On the Mother Jones site today, there’s a mini-essay that makes the point about the Soviet role in defeating Hitler much more clearly and completely (if also more shrilly) than I did (it’s the part titled “Remembering Bill and Ivan, about halfway down the page):
“… It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried on the Russian steppes not in French fields. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately forty ‘Ivans’ died for every ‘Private Ryan.'”