Churchill, the French, and the Americans all hated the Soviets and wished them no good at all....UNTIL the Germans attacked Russia. Then, all of a sudden, the Russians became "our friends and allies". Amusing, isn't it? More cynical Realpolitik. But the Allies did not "send" the Russians to do any fighting for them...Hitler delivered that situation on a silver platter, doing the Allies the biggest favour he could have done short of an immediate surrender! What a fool.

Churchill's hatred for Soviet Russia was positively visceral, both before the war and very soon after it was over. He detested them, and they detested him. He simply rescinded that hatred for the duration of combat against Germany. More Realpolitik.

It's all so predictable.

I think that if Hitler had left Poland alone, gone around them to the south (with alliances in Hungary, Rumania to provide access to the Russian border), and simply attacked Russia in 1939 or 1940, the rest of the west would have stood back and cheered the Germans on, and waited with great enthusiasm for Moscow and Russia to fall. They trusted the communists far less than they did the Nazis, truth be told.

Hitler's grave error in '39 was this: He simply did not believe Britain and France would declare war over Poland. He thought they were bluffing. It was a tremendous failure of diplomacy and strategy on his part, but his military was innovative enough to turn that error into a spectacular victory in France the following year anyway...against all expectations. The French Army was generally assumed to be the most powerful in Europe at that time, and they did have darned good tanks...better than the German tanks, in fact. They just didn't use them very effectively, because they scattered them around piecemeal for the most part in a defensive posture. Their air force was also very poorly organized. That was not the way to go if you wanted to win.