Having studied World War II in great detail over the course of my entire lifetime, I have discovered that there is no other war in recent military history which is so little understood and about which there are so many major myths and misconceptions. As an avid historian, this is frustrating because if our policymakers fail to learn from history they are much more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. What follows are more than a dozen of the biggest and most easily disprovable myths about World War II, the greatest and most horrific war in world history. The origin of many, if not most of these myths, lies in the attempts by liberal historians to paint the war as a “Good War” fought against tyranny and in defense of freedom, democracy and Western Civilization.

The truth is that, arguably taken as a whole, no war did more to reverse the cause of world freedom and Western Civilization than did World War II given the fact that we allied with the Soviet Union and during the war and its aftermath, assisted them directly or indirectly in the Communization of half of Europe and most of Asia. During the war, Allied leaders including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman went out of their way to portray Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his Evil Soviet Empire as noble allies in a grand crusade to advance democracy in Europe.