26. The Rasputitsa, Russia’s Mud Season
If the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union in April of 1941, its advance would have churned to a standstill after only a few weeks because of the Eastern European mud season. Caused by snow melt in the spring and rainfall in autumn, the mud season, known as the Rasputitsa, was a time when unpaved roads – nearly all of the USSR’s roads – became useless.
The Rasputitsa would have brought an early Operation Barbarossa to a stop or crawl as attackers and their supply chain struggled to move through a sea of mud, while the Luftwaffe was grounded by the transformation of its dirt airfields into fields of mire. That would have given the Soviets time to regroup while waiting for the roads to dry and the German offensive to resume. The need to account for the Rasputitsa dictated the invasion’s start date, not Hitler’s Balkans entanglement.