Born in 77 - a bit later than most people in this thread. My grandparents were only children during WW2. But, on topic, I opted to study the 20th century in history classes at school, and although the two-year course did cover several major events in America (prohibition, the wall street crash, etc.) when it came to the wars the focus was heavily on Europe. We learned about about the "neutral" things America did before Pearl Harbor, and of course the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, and briefly about some supposedly important battle at somewhere called Midway

, and then the US nuked Japan twice, and that was game over. And that was about all I learned on that side of things. But the wars in Europe were covered extensively, and that's definitely one reason why SH3 is interesting to me.
Also, with regards to ETO vs PTO... I knew before buying SH3 that the war had gotten harder and harder for RL U-boat crews, and that the game modelled this to some extent. This I saw (and still see) as "2 birds for 1 stone" for SH3: historical accuracy and a gradual increase in game difficulty! Those are both good things in any war simulation, and in SH3 they complement each other perfectly.
In contrast to that, my (limited) understanding of the PTO is that life got easier and easier for the US subs, and I've often wondered how SH4 gets around this problem without sacrificing historical accuracy or gameplay.