> if Patton doesn’t relieve Bastogne on Christmas in 1944, could the war have dragged on another couple of years <
From what I’ve read, the Germans were finished not when Bastogne was relieved, but when the weather cleared. Then the overwhelmingly superior Allied air force could do its thing.
And since the weather was going to clear sooner or later, the whole German plan was doomed from the start.
Interesting.
So it was the air/armor/infantry combo that made it inevitable. Would that be generally correct?