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Old September 29th, 2007, 05:59 PM
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Default Re: US on the left and Brits on the right

I can see several major and positive differences:

The US would have moved more quickly to open various ports and ease their supply situation than Monty and the British did. One good reason for this is the US has far more engineering capacity to perform this work than the British army did. This would likely have made the fall supply crisis a non starter and both armies could have maintained their advance longer.

A second difference has to do with how certain units were used in the two armies. The US allowed its mechanized cavalry a far more free wheeling degree of operational latitude than the British had with any of their units. Most British armored car regiments were tied to specific divisions and could not go off on a "romp" across the countryside. The result of this is that often in the period where the Germans were in full retreat the US was actually ahead of many units or at least knew well in advance alternate routes and where things like bridges were still standing.
This would make the frequent German "last stand" by some small unit along the route of advance more difficult to pull off.

Getting back to engineering: This is one area the US would have had a huge advantage in. They could throw a bridge across any river in as little as half a day....including the Rhine (the 291st Engineers threw three roadway pontoon bridges across in less than 48 hours under fire. That is why they had to do three. The Germans kept hitting them with artillery fire).

Another aspect was that the British, for whatever reason, had far less confidence in and trust of local resistance groups than the US did. If you remember during Market-Garden the Dutch resistance had near complete control of the telephone system. The US made excellent use of this resource and quickly knew what was going on all the way to Arnheim. The British basically threw the Dutch out of their headquarters and ignored them. Turns out their intelligence was right on and better than that the British or Americans could have produced themselves.
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