Yet, how would that logistics have taken place — Patton was racing ahead of his logistics line.
I agree the decision was made, but by 1944 july the russians were going to take Berlin — heck they were already in Warsaw then
The Rick Atkinson Liberation Trilogy makes the point that by the end, the US Army was running on fumes. The draft was scraping the bottom of the barrel, lowering standards to bring in more men. The Germans had done a typically thorough job of destroying the ports in Europe that they couldn't hold. And they managed to hold some ports in France, like St. Nazaire (home of the U-Boat pens) until the end of the war. That meant that all the American supply had to come a long way by truck, after coming a longer way by ship and facing a complicated process to get it to shore. A single gasoline tanker truck carrying 750 gallons would use 150 gallons of gas just to get to the front and back. Roads were jammed with trucks going back and forth longer and longer distances. The idea that we were going to defeat the Russians in the summer of 1945 is a fantasy.