I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
fwiw we do make a lot of jokes about getting rejected from art school