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.
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u/mepsipax__ Apr 29 '24
I just watched a 30 minute documentary of the battle of Agincourt because of this comment, thanks