Patton actually listened to the intel reports, and wasn’t worried about pussyfooting around British fee-wings or intimidated by their claims of strategic genius. He had to. He let the Bastogne garrison know the 3rd would be there for drinks on Christmas Day, turned out it was early in the morning on the 26th. :^)
The Germans had to use crossroads of the better roads to move effectively, so knotting up and holding crossroads at great cost stymied the German offensive. Somewhere around here there’s a book about a group of US military engineers who were in the right place at the wrong time, were told to trench and sandbag, resist at all costs, and stoppered ‘em up in that area.
The Germans had conjured 26 divisions seemingly out of thin air, but had to prevail in a pretty short time frame because such a large op couldn’t be sustained.
Here a good brief of the US Engineers role in the Battle of the Bulge
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26304241?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
“The Germans had conjured 26 divisions seemingly out of thin air,”
Patton’s own intel guys kept seeing some of the best Panser divisions getting pulled out of action and suspected they were doing that to amass them for a secret attack. They even correctly guessed the staging area from air recon tells.