Looking back through the history of warfare, it’s evident that weather has played no small part in effecting both victories and defeats. The winter of 1777–1778 was no exception, and General George Washington’s Continental Army learned that the weather can be more deadly than any mortal enemy.
After being defeated by the British Army in two major conflicts, Washington’s troops marched to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 25 miles northwest of Philadelphia, in December 1777. The army of about 11,000 men had little to eat and inadequate clothing, and lived in tents while they set to work building huts in which to weather the coming winter.
By all accounts, that winter was unusually severe. Conditions got so bad that Washington wrote at one point, “For some days past there has been little less than a famine in the camp. . . . Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been, ere this, excited by their suffering to a general mutiny and desertion.”
Although a few soldiers did desert, the ones who stayed were fiercely loyal to Washington. By the spring of 1778, nearly a fourth of the soldiers had died of smallpox, typhoid fever, malnutrition, and exposure to the severe cold, but the remaining troops were hardened by the experience. In May 1778 word came of the new alliance between France and the United States, and the worst was over. Valley Forge marked the turning point in the war, and soon Washington and his men were chasing the British from Philadelphia.
The winter of 1780 was one of the worst on record. On the coast of Delaware’s Delmarva Peninsula, ice formations towered 20 feet high, and the Potomac River froze over so solidly that it was possible to walk across it.
The French helped save the day at Valley Forge, but ended up with problems of their own years later during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and one of the largest weather-assisted routs in history.
In 1812, Napoleon controlled nearly all of Europe and had set his sights on Russia as his next conquest. In June of that year he crossed the Russian border with 600,000 troops and more than 50,000 horses, planning to march all the way to Moscow, living off the land along the way. The Russians had other ideas: as they retreated before the advancing French horde, they burned fields and destroyed houses, leaving little for the French to eat. Dry, hot conditions prevailed all the way to Moscow, and upon arriving there on September 14, the exhausted French troops found the city all but abandoned, its supplies depleted and much of its shelter destroyed. More than 20,000 troops had died of disease and exhaustion on the way, but the worst still lay ahead: winter was coming.
In the middle of October, with no offer of surrender from the tsar, Napoleon finally ordered a retreat. He had waited too long. As the weary troops turned toward home, an early and unusually cold air mass descended over them, and the weakest soldiers began to die.
The weather has been Russia’s ally in repelling foreign invaders throughout recorded history. In 1242 the pope sent German Teutonic Knights to take control of Russia and convert its people to Roman Catholicism. But Russian troops were more accustomed to the severe winter conditions and defeated the Germans on the frozen channel between the Peipus and Pskov Lakes in what became known as the “massacre on the ice.”
Suddenly the weather turned warmer again, and roads that had been frozen solid turned into muddy quagmires. Streams and rivers that had been solid ice were now raging torrents, slowing the retreating troops even more. Then as quickly as the warm weather had arrived, it was replaced by an even colder air mass, and thousands more died in the driving snow and subzero temperatures.
In early December, Napoleon’s troops finally crossed back over the border into Poland, but of the 600,000 fighting men who had invaded Russia just six months earlier, fewer than 100,000 remained. Half a million people had died in the Russian winter’s icy embrace.