It is commendable that the Russians did the bulk of the fighting in WWII. Without the American supplying Russia with food, transport and arms, victory would have been inconceivable.

http://www.russiablog.org/2008/05/victory_day_2008_tanks_on_tver.php

"For Westerners who still view Russia as an implacable foe of the West, today is a good day to remember those dark years from mid-1941 to early 1943, when the Russians by and large fought alone against the full brunt of the Nazi war machine. As for Russians who still view America as their adversary, perhaps they should visit the Lend-Lease section of the Memorial museum in Moscow (which reveals facts long omitted from Soviet textbooks) and look at photographs of their fathers and grandfathers riding into Berlin on thousands of American trucks."

300,000 American trucks to be exact, without which the troika of Marshals Red Blitzkrieg in Ukraine and Western Russia would have proven impossible...plus thousands of locomotives, Bell Aerocobra fighter planes (some of which were flown by female Soviet aces), and dozens of bombers and ships.

The Allied combined bomber offensive, while not as effective as it could have been had it focused solely on the German fuel-making facilities (beyond Pleosti, focusing on the German coal to liquids plants), did pull off the Luftwaffe from the Eastern Front to the defense of the German homeland, clearing the skies for the Red Air Force. So it was a truly combined victory, even if the bulk of the bloodshed fighting against the Germans was suffered by Poles, Russians and Ukrainians...

The SS Panzer divisions the Germans had to pull from the East for the defense of the Western Front were the best "fire brigade" divisions the Germans had left in the spring/summer of 1944 (i.e. SS Das Reich, Hitlerjugend), even if the infantry facing the Allies were mostly cobbled together from previously beaten down units. The Atlantic Wall troops consisted of large numbers of conscripts forcibly recruited from occupied nations (this is alluded to in the opening 24 minutes of Saving Private Ryan when two Wehrmacht men are trying to surrender by hollering in Czech to the American GIs) with German guns at their backs. Not surprisingly, they deserted as quickly as they possibly could once the Allies landed...just as in the East, the Italians and Romanians were routed in early 1943 to complete the encirclement of Hoth's army at Stalingrad.

At any rate, by August 1944 both the Western Allies (Falaise pocket battle) and the Russians (eastern Poland) were within 750 miles of Berlin.

It is reasonable to speculate that Russia could have won the war without U.S. and British help, but only at an even greater cost in loss of life and probably only by 1946-47...and at the price of leaving almost all of Germany and perhaps Italy and France Communist, and possibly wracked by anti-Soviet insurgencies from former fascists and democrats alike...imagine the Cold War with the English Channel as the Iron Curtain rather than the Elbe. That would have been very bad for America and Britain. And without the side by side comparison of West and East Germany and their different states of growth and freedom with the same people, how would the Soviet empire have cracked? The answers are all shrouded in mystery.

"It is commendable that the Russians did the bulk of the fighting in WWII. Without the American supplying Russia with food, transport and arms, victory would have been inconceivable."

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More diffficult: yes.

Inconceivable: no.

For accuracy sake: it was the Soviets as opposed to Russians. The country in question was called the Soviet Union and not Russia. The Red Army makeup included a good number of non-Russians.

"The Red Army makeup included a good number of non-Russians."

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Yes, that's absolutely true. In fact, in the iconic photo of two Red Army soldiers hoisting the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, only the soldier near the bottom of the photo is Russian. The one actually affixing the flag, Meliton Kantaria, is Georgian.