Get real. We lather up in our role in WWII all the time. We call those people the “Greatest Generation”, and we never bring up Stalingrad when we talk about freedom.
Without the battle of Stalingrad, Normandy might still be a part of Germany. Russia should get just as much credit for our freedom as we do, but we always give ourselves the credit.
And to us, bombing Japan represented our technological advantage over the rest of the world. It was done, in part, to display that advantage to Russia.
All of it fed our hype, made us the strongest world power, put Russia in their place (instead of honoring them) and was essentially an aphrodisiac that produced the largest (to that point) generation of Americans. There is apparently nothing like a couple hundred thousand Japanese deaths as an exclamation point to get the juice flowing in America.
