Say Patton was given all the gas, food, ammunition and other sundries he needed.  There is no Market-Garden and all effort was into the enciclement and isolation of German armies (Hitler hated yielding ground).  Could Patton have ended the war earlier?  I'm still on Farago's book about Patton.

I know that Hitler would have told his generals (particularly Model) to flank and cut off Patton from his supply line.  First Army would play a crucial role in protecting that.  I can't seen any threat from the south where the Seventh Army was.

this thread has promise of having legs.

Welp if Operation Market Garden had been completely successful instead of the "bridge too far," maybe! It really would be determined on how much German cooperation (read that as surrendering) there would be. (Far more preferable for the Germans to surrender to Americans and British than Russians.)

But if Market Garden had been entirely successful, the Allies could've taken the shorter Northerly route to Berlin which was the original concept. With how it ended, and with the politicians negotiating Berlin to the Russians at Yalta, this allows the premise of could the Americans go the longer Southerly route get to Berlin before the Yalta Agreement is signed? Also, the "Battle of the Bulge" would still occur as the German plan was to take back Antwerp and screw up Allied logistics. They would have to draw up a different plan for now Antwerp and then cutting the tail off of Patton's 3rd Army.

I have to say, "no, it wouldn't have mattered" militarily as the Politicians were probably always going to give the Russians some part of Germany, and what ever success is achieved through speed would have halted to allow the Russians on the East to "catch up," so they would be in the territory they successfully negotiated for. (How come we can't end sentences with prepositions? They work great at it!!)

IIRC, even the decisions to start the Second Front in the North of France instead of the practically unoccupied Vichy France in the South was a political decision instead of a Military decision. Sure there was "Cobra," but that didn't make enough of an impact to actually draw more German forces out of Northern France. (The Germans in Italy were isolated with the better escape routes into Austria and Yugoslavia making these German forces fighting in the "East.")

I could imagine that if the Second Front was an actual two pronged attack (Overlord and Cobra,) the Germans might have cleared out of the bulk of France faster in order to start making defensive lines like they did in Italy.

I thought this thread was going to go somewhere. In hindsight letting the Russians bleed themselves dry was perhaps a good plan. Not saying that letting them control eastern Europe was but letting them kill a whole shit ton of their own was a pretty good thing.

I think the big problem with coming up with an alternative history is this:

There were a lot of choices that were made with consequential actions taking place with various degrees of "success" comparing results to achievements. This also means that other choices were not accepted and those consequential actions never took place. That's a lot of "forks in the road" to take into account. Which ones do you now give more importance to and which ones do you ignore? That's always going to be subject to individual biases and prejudices.

Mental exercises like this are actually really a good idea to engage in because it makes one have to understand what actually happened in able to make a guess what could've happened.

Currently I'm reading Col. Robert S. Allen's Lucky Forward.  Lucky was the name for the Third Army and Allen was its G-2.  Naturally he is biased towards Patton.  He complains about SHAEF leaving Falaise for Monty to capture which he didn't until many Germans escaped; supplies being cut off in Sept in favor of Monty (and Market Garden), again after it failed; how Monty wanted the Allied lines tightened up by withdrawing the Third Army from the Collmar Pocket.  

BTW, I like Allen's book more than Patton's.

"Monty" is one of those characters in History who got lucky, IMHO. If the Allies hadn't broken the code and been able to interdict supplies to Rommel as well as they did, how successful would the "Hero of Tobruk" been? I'm thinking not very. Sure the Allies hitting Rommel out in the West with Operation Torch also helped by forcing Rommel to expend resources both to the East and West thus helping Montgomery again. Toe to toe, I don't think Montgomery would do well if you had him and Rommel playing a simulation.

Here's what impressed me more about Rommel than anything else:

I don't remember which battle it was, but one of the Afrika Korps divisions was performing poorly, so Rommel ordered it to withdraw, and that division spent a week and a half doing war game exercises and then were returned to the fight. That says a lot.