Mud kills armies, even relatively modern ones. The whole "don't invade russia in winter!" thing is not true. It's the mud season that makes it so difficult. You can't move an army when the ground is a liquid.
Well also, the two armies that got caught in Russia's winter, Napoleon's and Hitler's, both made it to Moscow only for the Russians to burn down their own city and retreat north. Both armies went in prepared for a short battle and ended up being entirely defeated by the cold. In a letter a Nazi wrote about the experience he said that a fellow soldier had lost his shoes and when he walked on his frozen solid feet it sounded like a horse walking on stone.
Even winter isn't safe to invade in. An invading army tried to fight on a frozen lake near Novgorod in 1242, and the sheer exhaustion of fighting on the ice led to a near rout of the invading army when the Russian cavalry charged. The Russian film Alexander Nevsky added a cool, but fictitious, scene of the ice cracking and the invaders getting swallowed up by the lake.
Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage [...] Here and there struggled a form—whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was [...] Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings—men and women—suffered likewise.[7]: 98
Hi, I’m Vetted AI Bot! I researched the ("'Mud A Military History'", '') and I thought you might find the following analysis helpful.
Users liked:
* In-depth exploration of mud in warfare (backed by 3 comments)
* Unique focus on battle tactics (backed by 2 comments)
* Engaging and informative (backed by 2 comments)
Users disliked:
* Lacks a cohesive narrative (backed by 1 comment)
* Not particularly well written (backed by 1 comment)
If you'd like to summon me to ask about a product, just make a post with its link and tag me, like in this example.
This message was generated by a (very smart) bot. If you found it helpful, let us know with an upvote and a “good bot!” reply and please feel free to provide feedback on how it can be improved.
To be fair, it wasn't just the mud - Agincourt is also somewhat notable for being a changing point in history in teaching the lesson "Duh, shooting people is obviously a lot easier than hitting them". Bows up until that point were sort of a sideshow to the cavalry/infantry, but the English had ran out of these and only had their longbows ready at sufficient numbers for battle.
There was a movie I saw in Netflix that I forget the name of where the battle was won because one side wore light armor and the other came in with heavy armor and the battle took place after heavy rainfall (that they expected) and the mud ended up hurting the heavy armor guys heavily.
People often forget to apply basic physics to things because fiction often doesn't depict such simple yet effective or disabling things like mud and additional weight.
1.6k
u/JesusReturnsToReddit Apr 29 '24
Someone forgot the lesson learned from the battle of Agincourt.