Its laughable when you imply that Canadians "were there to help" the Soviets (Canada lacked the military strength to provide anything other than token assistance to the US and Great Britain). The fact is that the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941. The Western Allies waited three years, until June 1944, when the war was almost over, to enter the ground war against the Germans. Why did they wait so long?
The only help received from the Western Allies during that period was under the US Lend Lease program, where they shipped Spam to the Soviet Union in mass quantities. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens had already starved to death, and the Spam kept many more alive.
In 1943, the German invasion was broken at Stalingrad, and the Germans launched a hasty retreat, being decimated by Soviet forces along the way. By Spring of 1944, all of the Soviet Union had been recaptured, and the Red Army controlled all of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Eastern Germany, standing at the gates of Berlin. Roosevelt and Churchill were candid about the fact that they couldn't sit on the sidelines any longer. Failure to join in on the ground war would risk, in their minds, the threat that the Red Army would roll unimpeded throughout all of Continental Europe, and that the Western Allies would be locked out of the peace table. The Red Army had destroyed enough of the German war machine by then that destruction of the Third Reich was already a fait accompli. The Western Allies launched an urgent invasion of Normandy to attack the now-decimated German war machine, and were able to race through sparse German forces to meet the Soviets at the Elbe dividing Eastern and Western Germany. I've never seen any mention of Canada in historical acccounts of the war.
