Hitler’s Invasion of Russia Was Delayed by Weather
The main flaw of the Balkans invasion myth is that, if the invasion of the USSR had been launched two months earlier, in April instead of June, it would have been even less successful. It would have ground to a halt earlier, after it advanced a shorter distance. The Germans advanced as rapidly and plunged as deeply into the USSR in the summer of 1941 because the months-long dry weather perfectly suited their Blitzkrieg style of maneuver warfare. It permitted breakthroughs followed by aggressive exploitation via deep armored thrusts, as 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 because of the Rasputitsa, the Eastern European mud season. In that stretch, unpaved roads – nearly all of the USSR’s roads – become 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 as attackers and their supply chain struggled to move through a sea of mud. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe would have been 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 German invasion’s start date, not Hitler’s Balkans entanglement.
