Even when at the mercy of winter’s icy fangs, warriors have always served. From antiquity, the campaigning season traditionally ended in October, when troops headed for end-of-year quarters containing food, fodder for animals, warmth, and shelter. Even then, they typically jousted, exercised and drilled, repaired equipment, and made future plans. In the days when the northern hemisphere was mostly afforested, its populations were barely connected by a poor road network interspersed with settlements. The larger were protected by stone or timber ramparts, and contained granaries stocked with food. Armies therefore tried to stay put when faced with the icy veil, for the season of hoary-headed frosts degraded roads, froze grain, men and horses, and brought illnesses associated with cold. Snow and mire, the curse of angry weather gods, played havoc equally with wheels, hooves and boots.

The month of March was when troops traditionally emerged from winter lairs and headed out for a new season of dragon-slaying and derring-do, and, for millennia, this was considered as the start of the year. The French named this month Mars, after the Roman god of war, a tradition borrowed from Ancient Greece and their equivalent, Ares. In pre-history, the disappearance of the seven-star cluster of the Pleiades around 20 March each year, visible throughout the winter months in the northern hemisphere, marked the vernal equinox, and acted as a celestial warning for the ancients to start sowing – and sharpening their weapons. Although much fighting took place in spring and summer, big campaigns looked to autumn, when the men and horses that were needed earlier in the year for sowing and reaping had gathered in their harvests, and could thus be released for war.

In Norse mythology, a Fimbulwinter (mighty winter) preceded the innumerable wars that would herald the end of the world. To prepare, each wintertide young warriors would embark on great expeditions to hunt down elk or boar. The animals would be sacrificed to the gods Freyja, Odin, or Thor, their blood sprinkled on warriors’ shields and swords, and their meat cooked and shared in a communal feast at Yule, the shortest day. This marked the peak of annual celebrations, when another ceremony, the lighting of logs, was seen as a symbol of the sun’s return, and a plea for divine help in enduring the rest of the hostile season. During the long nights, sustained (and probably stoned) on spiced and honied mead, communities listened to recitations of poetry and storytelling. These tales dwelt on the warlike quests, adventures, and exploits of their gods, and their happy afterlife with those killed in combat in a majestic hall hung with shields, coats of mail, and spears, known as Valhalla. Collectively these have come to us as the Norse Sagas.

Similar tales of medieval derring-do spread across Europe, mostly for narrative entertainment during the long, dark nights. Analysis reveals that the stories are almost exclusively associated with war and winter rather than peace and summer. They contain Christian overtones of chivalric grail-quests and redemption through suffering. They are infused with tropes of wolves in frosty forests, great battles, wizardry, resistance against occupiers, and monster-slaying. These ideas were periodically revived through the centuries by romantic writers such as Sir Walter Scott, the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, artist Caspar David Friedrich, composer Richard Wagner’s operatic Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the more recent worlds crafted by J.R.R. Tolkien, Warhammer games, Michael Moorcock, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, which permeate our cultural lives today.

As the winter of 1914 loomed, commanders in the Great War realised they would have to dig in to protect their gains, defend their homelands, and shelter men from artillery, machine-guns, and hostile weather. Already extensively used with barbed wire in the American Civil War, and first dug in France and Belgium during late September 1914, all sides used trenches not only to garrison the front but also to husband reserves to counter inevitable breakthroughs.

Winter trench life also advanced the popularity of cigarettes, which had first appeared in military life in the Crimea, and contemporary brands were mostly adorned with the images of servicemen. Nicotine generally relieved tension, and acted as a hunger suppressant in cold weather. Smoking gave bored sentries something to do, the glow of a cheroot, pipe or cigarette was cheery on a frosty night, and the act of lighting the tobacco brought soldiers closer together in a physical and spiritual sense. The ‘respectability’ of smoking was confirmed when King George V’s daughter, Princess Mary, initiated the despatch of a little brass Christmas gift box to every serviceman at the front in 1914, containing cigarettes or a pipe and tobacco. Trench tours of duty rarely lasted more than two weeks, though German troops tended to tour for longer. The French and British frequently rotated entrenched units with those training behind the lines. Launching even a minor skirmish from these muddy ditches, which many trenches became in mid-winter, was rare.

One of the most enduring images of winter war from this era was the Christmas Truce of 1914, when a grassroots initiative sought to suspend the fighting, sing carols, and – in very limited areas only – actually meet. It succeeded for a couple of days before being suppressed by senior commanders, who feared such expressions of humanity would rob the men of their killer instincts. More claimed to have been present at such truces or the many alleged football matches than can possibly have been the case, but the war on the Western Front soon became as winter campaigns had always been: one of endurance, and attacking in spring, summer and autumn.

Sir Douglas Haig’s armies were particularly aware of the drawbacks of fighting in winter, as both their Somme and Passchendaele campaigns, launched in the summer, had slithered to a frozen halt in mud, slush and snow on 18 November 1916 and 10 November 1917 respectively, whilst the German assault on Verdun terminated in similar fashion on 18 December 1916. Yet in late 1917, the British launched an attack using a device specifically designed to counter poor terrain and rough weather – the tank. On 20 November, 476 armoured vehicles, along with 15 divisions and 1,000 guns, assaulted and broke through the appalling mud and the powerful German Hindenburg Line at Cambrai. The attacking force was the most winter-proofed army to date and would have prevailed, if not for a lack of reserves; the British had been exhausted by Passchendaele earlier. However, the armoured force demonstrated that technology could overcome terrain and climate in certain circumstances.

With so many warnings from history on the inadvisability of fighting at wintertide, inter-war staff college handbooks offered little advice except not to do it. One might have thought the supreme leaders of 1939-45 would have heeded them. Not so. Much of our understanding of cold weather war today comes from eye witness interviews, official reports and film footage garnered during the Second World War, where each of the main protagonists was obliged to fight major year-end campaigns. The Soviet Union invaded Finland on 30 November 1939 with disastrous results. After Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941, German activities in Russia encompassed two particularly vile winters, the debacle of Stalingrad and a siege of Leningrad through the ice of four Decembers. In that city, the Soviets stretched the notion of a winter warrior to include Dmitri Shostakovich, who partly composed his strident Symphony No. 7 (‘Leningrad’) in the first winter of the siege, then relayed it by loudspeaker to the surrounding Germans as an act of defiance.

Elsewhere, the wider allied coalition suffered greatly when assaulting the heights associated with the Gustav Line in Italy, on the approaches to Monte Cassino, during October 1943-March 1944. In September 1944, the US Army charged into the humbling Hürtgen Forest campaign, and on 16 December, was caught by surprise in the Ardennes during the vicious winter of 1944-45. More Americans and their Free French companions had to slither through the Colmar Pocket during the same winter, whilst Canuck, Yank, and Tommy found themselves wading along the waterways and forests of the German Rhineland in Operations Blackcock, Veritable and Grenade, over January-March 1945.

Apart from the Finns being trained and equipped for winter operations in their natural habitat, and allied Commandos and Rangers exercising in the hardest, most remote regions of Scotland, this was the last era before specifically-designed winter clothing, equipment, weapons, rations, and even vehicles. Conventional armies simply supplied extra layers with the onset of cold weather, or painted existing equipment white, as winter needs overtook skimpy summer wear. Many soldiers issued with greatcoats in hotter climes had thrown them away, but better-quality replacements were hogged by rear echelon troops. The US Army found their M41 field jacket inadequate for winter, and replaced it with a heavier garment.

Each nation played to its strength: the Germans turned their world-beating civilian textile printing presses to producing endless metres of seasonal camouflage material, for uniforms, headgear and ponchos. The Americans issued rubber overboots (which still litter the Ardennes), an innovation the Germans couldn’t follow, having no spare rubber. The British, Canadians and Americans used canvas webbing equipment, which was easier to manipulate in sub-zero temperatures than German leather belts and strapping.

In the absence of specialised equipment, the key to success is flexibility and innovation, which the Finn citizen-army well expressed in 1939-40 with the development of small-unit tactics, hit and run guerilla-type attacks and above all, the mass production of petrol-based anti-tank grenades which we now know as Molotov Cocktails.

Napoleon once observed that morale in war was three times more important than the physical numbers of guns, personnel and resources. Troops will fight if they know what they’re battling for, if they’re well led, if they can see a point to it all and an end-state. In 1939-40, Finland achieved very creditable tallies of killing six times more Russians in the Winter War than they lost of their own (150,000 to 25,000), wounding 200,000 to 40,000, despatching 2,000 tanks whilst losing twenty, and at least 300 Russian aircraft to 60. This would have been impossible had Finland not been unified, with a self-confidence to stand up to even the vastness of Stalin’s Soviet Union. When eventually forced to the conference table in March 1940, Finland retained its independence. The parallels with Ukraine and Putin’s Russia resonate today.

The knowledge that one person can make a difference in an extreme weather battlefield was what motivated Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper known as the ‘White Death,’ who went on to be credited with over 500 kills of Russians during his 5-month career. A similarly accomplished former sniper was Audie Murphy, who later became a US platoon leader and Hollywood film star. Recalling his efforts to work his way through the grizzly Colmar Pocket in early 1945, he later noted how he had to dig deep mentally to continue. In his memoir To Hell And Back (1949) he wrote of those dark days,

The night is filled with the clump of pick and shovel gnawing at the rock-hard earth. The efforts are futile, but the exercise keeps us from freezing. When we finally give up trying to chew holes in the ground, we stamp up and down to stir up heat in our bodies. We take turns at staying on watch. I fall asleep. My hair freezes on the ground. A gun cracks. I jerk awake leaving patches of my hair in the ice.

Several veterans remarked that the Russian steppe in winter was as disorienting as the Sahara. With no landmarks to guide them, all sense of distance and perspective was skewed. Frozen carcasses of horses were sometimes placed in drifts to guide the way. The Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, in Kaputt (1944), wrote of frozen-solid prisoners, arms outstretched, being used as winter signposts. The German High Command found it less easy to motivate the Wehrmacht, especially during periods of ‘No Retreat’ orders issued by Hitler. As the Stalingrad pocket crumbled on 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Führer’s accession of power, Göring advocated the concept of noble sacrifice by comparing the situation of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad to that of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae – hardly inspiring stuff to feed the surrounded troops in their hour of need. In fact, the Nazis’ true motivation to fight rested on fear of what would happen if caught or captured, given the atrocities committed by the Reich against Stalin’s Soviet people.

Hubris has been responsible for leading many armies astray at wintertide, from Hannibal directing his 70,000-strong Carthaginian army of elephants, warriors and cavalry across the Italian Alps in 218 BC, and losing half of them; to Napoleon’s abortive 1812 Russian campaign, which also cost him half his 600,000-strong force, some 200,000 to malnourishment and disease, and a further 100,000 in combat. We then come to the wisdom of the Allies sending their Anglo-US-Franco-Canadian-led force into Italy in the late autumn of 1943, or of Hitler ordering Operation Herbstnebel, his Ardennes offensive of December 1944. Schooled in classical studies, most Allied commanders would have been aware of Rome’s reluctance to engage in winter, and should have been cognisant of the dangers of rain, snow and ice in the hills that make up the spine of the Italian mainland.

Yet, flushed with the success of besting the Germans across the sands of North Africa and olive groves of Sicily, the Allies invaded in the autumn and were soon caught out, choosing to battle three enemies – the weather, the terrain and the Germans. They found out, belatedly, that temperatures plunged so low in the higher Apennines that the molecular structure of metals changed, causing motor engines to fracture. New Zealander tank crews noted to their horror that armoured vehicles cursed for being ovens in summer, were equally blamed for acting as refrigerators in mid-winter. Such was the ferocity of the weather around the heights of Monte Cassino, where even mountain-trained French North Africans failed to make headway, that the first three battles for that feature had to be called off. Victory was attained by launching a fourth attack in May, a solution obvious all along.

The Battle of the Bulge was Eisenhower’s greatest trial of the Second World War, involving more troops than any other encounter, and one in which his men turned the tables in the depths of winter, and grew in confidence as an army. Hitler’s ‘last throw’ against the West was a fantasy and, never having the remotest chance of success, used up the troops and panzer forces with which he might have defended the Fatherland for a month or two longer in 1945. Already short of gasoline, his generals overlooked that the fuel consumption of their panzers trebled when operating in deep snow. Yet, the final blitzkrieg discombobulated the Americans in several local sectors for about a week, before allied commanders threw their entire arsenal at the bulge, which they severed and destroyed within a month. Though much photographed, analysed, wargamed and modelled for its armoured thrusts, what is often overlooked is that most German logistics and artillery units charged into the snow drifts of the Ardennes still drawn by horses, when the allies had not a single equine in their inventory. When the skies cleared, allied airpower lacerated the Germans, who were clearly visible across the white sheets covering the region.

In Europe, the Cold War absorbed many of the lessons of 1939-45. For the Warsaw Pact, created in 1955 under Soviet leadership, came the doctrine that overwhelming numbers (mass), enabled by deception (maskirovka) and the Red God of War (artillery), would prevail. For NATO, formed in 1949, there was a recognition that multinational unity was vital, as was specialist training with appropriate equipment, which were seen as force multipliers. For the next four decades, NATO forces practised for a war they would never fight, save for a few selected battalions and the Royal Marines Arctic Warfare Cadre deploying to the Falklands War in 1982. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the world’s tensions held in check by the Cold War erupted in places like Iraq and Kuwait, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Georgia, and eventually between Russia and Ukraine. After a creeping Russian occupation of the Donbass and Crimea in 2014, Eastern Europe again awoke to a winter war erupting on 24 February 2022.

The hubris that has dictated the ongoing war is tied to the desires and daydreams of one man, but additionally contains echoes and rhymes of many distant martial adventures. It began with three sudden, but ill-advised thrusts towards Kyiv, supported by airpower and airborne troops, which were beaten off. This was in no part due to the time of year and state of the ground. Good strategic intelligence and warnings from Washington and London had alerted Ukraine to the possibility. Many of us sensed Russia’s direction of travel was unhealthy, if not after its president’s 2007 Munich Security Conference speech, a verbal equivalent of Mein Kampf in its threats and warnings, then certainly after its land-grabs in Georgia the following year, and in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Eight years later, Putin seems to have shared many of the obsessions and delusions as to the swiftness of his pending victory, as Stalin before the Finnish Winter War and Hitler prior to the Ardennes offensive.

In modern conflict, where there are fewer front lines and more battlespace, civilians have become as much targets as their military counterparts, though rarely so blatantly as now. This has been accelerated by developments in drone warfare, which have advanced by several decades in skill and technology, during the last four calendar years. This is not just a matter of technique; it also involves multi-domain learning. In early December 2024, a combined Ukrainian force of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and first-person view (FPV) aerial drones attacked and destroyed Russian positions at Lyptsi, a village near Kharkiv. The wintry weather was challenging, as was the terrain, but the mission, operated by drone pilots many miles distant, apparently terrified Russian troops, who fled when they could see no human agency involved. The nightmare of Hollywood’s Skynet seemed to have arrived.

In another instance, the first Ukrainian casualty was recovered by UGV, from behind Russian lines. These were tests, significantly made in combat, in winter, and we shall see many more like them. The pace of change is not unlike the speed of innovation of the platforms that became available during the First World War. Russia has been slower to integrate new technologies, perhaps because of its rigid hierarchy, but has been observing. Kyiv’s innovation and resourcefulness in terms of repurposing captured Russian armour and integrating western weapons systems has come to the fore; winter medical facilities are adequate, but never enough.

When blitzkrieg fails and the opponent wakes up to the nasty surprise that has befallen them – a process that can take between three days and three weeks – the fighting can ossify into front lines. In the winter months, this means Great War-style dugouts, bunkers, barbed wire, obstacles, and above all, trenches. Such has happened in eastern Ukraine. There had already been a front line of sorts from 2014, but it had been allowed to ‘breathe’, with refugees moving back and forth. Vicious battles have congealed around several points, with exactly the same effects on human morale as in past centuries. Moscow has not proved strong enough to break through, whatever the force ratios employed, whilst Kyiv is strong enough to block, but not yet to push their invaders back, without substantial external assistance. Recent peace proposals urged by the United States (since rejected) revolve around Ukraine surrendering its eastern anti-tank obstacle lines and bunker networks to Russia, rather in the manner that Britain and France forced the Czechs to relinquish their western defences to Nazi Germany in 1938.

Ukrainian discipline has been tough but necessary in terms of forcible conscription and the arrest of spies: these are the needs of the total war Ukraine is fighting, if unpopular. However, Ukraine is not fighting the uncertain, lumbering war of a mass conscript army, as are the Russians. Trained by NATO partners, Kyiv’s braves have become amongst the most proficient and motivated soldiers in the world. In many ways, this is the clash NATO prepared for throughout the Cold War, but never fought. As the Finns found in 1940 and the American Colonists discovered in the 1770s, both tiny citizen-armies who outperformed their larger professional rivals, there is always more moral courage and determination to be found when defending one’s homeland, especially in winter, when the going is toughest.

History is littered with surprising outcomes of such Clausewitzian clashes of wills, and suggests the same may be true for Ukraine, even if the future is as yet unclear to us. Russia’s centre of gravity, which drives its core purpose, is currently Putin, just as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler drove their expansionist regimes in days of old. Should he be removed by whatever means, then the course of history will change. Meanwhile, the past hints that Napoleon’s maxim, of morale trumping physical resources by three to one, is still likely to hold good, even in the worst of weather, though in modern war extensive outside help is also vital. Armed with these, Zelensky’s lions can yet prevail in this bleakest of winter wars.