They are breaking the second rule of war," declared Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery when asked to comment on the American military involvement in Vietnam: "Don't fight with your land army on the mainland of Asia."
Naturally someone had to ask the obvious, and the first rule of war turned out to be laconic, terse, and to judge by modern history, irrefutable: "Don't march on Moscow!" Napoleon came to grief in this respect in 1812 when, as his own Marshal Ney put it: "General Famine and General Winter, rather than the Russian bullets, conquered the Grand Army."
And Adolf Hitler had the same experience 60 years ago, when in the early days of December 1941 he was obliged to turn his back on Moscow and begin a prolonged and ignominious retreat from the Soviet Union.
Hitler's campaign against the Soviets had begun in June that year, and for a time the German army seemed invincible. The optimism of the High Command was reinforced by the advice of the climatologists of the Reichswetterdienst, the weather service of the Third Reich, who concluded on somewhat meagre evidence that no more than two severe European winters ever followed one another in succession; since those of 1939-40 and 1940-41 had been severe, they felt that a third must be pretty well impossible. The Russian winter of 1941-42, they said, would be a mild one.
The problems encountered by the invading army in the autumn were not all that unusual. For the greater part of October the German army was immobilised by what they called the Schlammperiode, the "mud spell" known to the Soviets as rasputiza and a regular feature of Russian autumns and springs. Nonetheless, the thrust on Moscow was moderately successful, and by the beginning of December, German Panzer units stood only 20 miles from the Soviet capital.
But then the cold! In the first seven days of December, the temperature in Moscow fell an unbelievable 28 degrees Celsius, from -1 degrees to -29 degrees.Coincidentally or otherwise, the Soviets began their counteroffensive on December 5th, and were in a much better position to cope with the harsh conditions than their ill-prepared opponents.
Many of the German weapons, tanks and mechanised vehicles ceased to function in the bitter cold. In addition, the German army lacked the essential warm clothing, since the Fⁿhrer had believed that the offensive would be over long before the onset of the Russian winter.
And thus, 60 years ago today, began the German retreat and the slow but steady Russian advance westwards.