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Fabricated Stories About World War II Still Known by Many

Khalid Elhassan November 15, 2019 35 min

A German supply column during the Rasputitsa. Quora

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.