re: Russia and China were big allies with USA during World War II.

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ChewyDante

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nailed it.

Occasionally popular culture, especially Hollywood, provides insight into the mindset of the US government towards its allies and adversaries. There are two movies, ironically both screwball comedies made just 3 years apart, which demonstrated the dramatic shift in US-Soviet relations.

The first, Comrade X, made in 1940 and actually released just as WWII began in earnest in Europe, portrays the USSR as a brutal, ugly, hopelessly corrupt regime, capable of senseless slaughter of their own citizens (and even the murder of their own government officials) just to maintain control - pretty dark stuff for a comic farce, but it works.



Then, in 1943 with the US fully involved, came this Warner Bros adaptation of a successful Broadway comedy, The Doughgirls, which is as close as they ever came to making a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. In it Eve Arden (who is also featured in Comrade X) plays a Soviet sniper who befriends the title characters, and is praised for “killing Nyatzis” and extols the virtues of “Uncle Joe”.



There are countless other examples of prewar ethnic stereotypes of Germans, Italians and Japanese shown in positive lights, before they became either incompetent fools or bloodthirsty monsters after Pearl Harbor.

But make no mistake - we were full on allies with the USSR for the duration. Truman even notified Stalin of the existence of the A-Bomb at Potsdam, before the American people found out about it.