7. The German Invasion of the USSR Would Have Fared Worse if it Had Been Launched Earlier
The main flaw with the myth that Operation Barbarossa would have succeeded if it had been launched two months earlier – in April 1941, instead of June – is that an earlier invasion would have been even worse for the Germans. It would have been even less successful and ground to a halt earlier, after it had advanced a shorter distance than the actual June invasion. The Germans advanced as rapidly and plunged as deeply into the USSR in the summer of 1941 because of the weather. The months-long dry summer stretch perfectly suited their Blitzkrieg style of maneuver warfare. Breakthroughs were followed by aggressive exploitation via deep armored thrusts, supplies hurried forward to maintain the advance, and infantry rapidly followed to consolidate the gains.
If the Germans had invaded in April 1941, their advance would have churned to a standstill after only a few weeks. That is because of the Rasputitsa, the Eastern European mud season when unpaved roads – nearly all Soviet roads at the time – became useless. Caused by rain in the fall and snow melt in the spring, the Rasputitsa would have brought an early Barbarossa to a stop or crawl. The attackers and their supply chain would have 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 they waited for the roads to dry and the German offense to resume. The need to account for the Rasputitsa dictated the invasion’s start date, not Hitler’s Balkans entanglement.
