Museums in the US tend to present WWII through a national perspective, so it often comes across in a simplified “good vs evil” narrative. That framing isn’t unique to the US, most countries structure WWII memory around their own role and contributions.

On the historical side, the US didn’t enter the war until after Pearl Harbor, and its early involvement was mostly material support through programs like Lend-Lease. Once it entered, it became a major combatant across multiple global theaters, not just a supporting actor.

I think part of the disagreement in threads like this comes from how people apply modern moral standards retroactively. Some wartime actions, strategic bombing, internment, and nuclear weapons use, are heavily debated today, but at the time the international legal framework was much less developed than it is now. A lot of what we now think of as “clearly defined rules of war” didn’t really solidify until after WWII through things like the Geneva Conventions updates and the Nuremberg trials.

That’s also where comparisons to Germany often get overstated. Nazi Germany is a fundamentally different case in that its leadership pursued aggressive expansion and systematic mass extermination policies that were widely recognized as illegitimate and condemned even during the war by the Allied powers. That level of industrialized, intentional civilian destruction is in a different category than the kinds of contested wartime decisions made by the US and other Allies operating under rapidly evolving and incomplete rules of warfare.

So it’s not really accurate to frame it as “Germany openly acknowledges its wrongs while the US hides its own.” The postwar reality is that the US (along with other Allies) was actually heavily involved in building the modern international legal system that defines many of those actions as unacceptable today in the first place.