Indeed. Probably better to say that the USSR and the western nations hated each other’s guts.
The soviets were shipping war materials to the Nazis right up until the point Hitler attacked them. Communist agitators spent two years plastering walls with slogans like 'Stop this Imperialist War now!".
At one in point in 1939 Britain was seriously planning bombing raids on the Baku oil fields in order to ‘persuade’ Stalin to stop shipping supplies to Hitler and to lay off the Finns :eek:
Then eventually Hitler headed east and within a day or two Stalin was howling in outrage that he wasn’t getting enough help/supplies, the agitators were painting “Second Front Now!” on every wall they could find, and the British Government was banging on about the need to support ‘Uncle Joe’ and his brave patriots.
Needless to say, once the Nazis were out of the way, normal service was resumed.
I had a history professor who told us that at the outbreak of WWII, America’s armed forces were on par with those of Portugal, manpower-wise (I’m not sure if that included aviators and sailors, or if it was only ground troops). At the time, the US military doctrine was based around a very small standing army (called the Regular Army), which would be used to form a cadre of trained and experienced personnel when it came time to build the wartime army (called the Army of the United States).
So basically, our enemies might be forgiven for thinking we’d be pushovers, looking at what small armed forces our country produced. They might be less forgiven for failing to realize the ridiculously deep resources the US had access to in terms of potential manpower, industrial capacity, and agricultural capability. Not to mention the fact that we had a couple bodies of water which gave us some breathing room between us and our enemies. A side effect of basing our doctrine on ballooning our forces at the start of the fight was that we’d end up with a lot of really inexperienced troops early on.
Even so, Europe, Africa, and Asia are all a really long hike from the US, and troops need supplies to fight. The farther the troops fight from their home, the longer the train of supplies you need to support them. The train of supplies also needs supplies to support itself, so your demand for supplies and support troops expands increasingly the longer the supply train gets. The US had a relatively small fighting force; per-capita, it was one of the smallest of the war. They also had the largest supply force, feeding armies and fleets fighting on the far side of the world on four continents and in three oceans.
And all that takes time to set up, even before you consider that the country’s pre-war industrial and agricultural base was presumably not primed for building tanks and planes and ships and packing up food to ship to the fighting men deployed overseas. Hence why, in 1942, we were only up to invading North Africa rather than rolling our tanks up to the steps of the Reichstag. We hadn’t had time to build our forces up to their full potential.