[jltsiren]

> Napoleon actually successfully invaded Russia, and he took the seasons into account. What he didn’t count on was the Russians deliberately going scorched earth on their own territory and even setting fire to their own capital.

In other words, your explanation is that Napoleon failed because he assumed that his enemies were idiots.

Usually, when a dictator or wannabe-dictator overextends their forces and fails, it's because they didn't know what they were doing. But Napoleon was an experienced military commander. He understood the importance of logistics, and he should have assumed that his enemies understood it as well. He knew Russians had resorted to scorched earth defense before, and his forces had already faced it in Portugal earlier.

Also, Napoleon didn't reach the capital. At that point, Moscow was just a major city with symbolic importance. The capital had been moved to St. Petersburg about a century earlier.

[ekianjo]

> he assumed that his enemies were idiots.

Where do you get that notion? Hindsight much?

Not every enemy burns their own capital out of spite because they can't fight back. Actually, this almost never happens, so if you were following the typical scenario based on prior history, this would be very unlikely to happen.

[jltsiren]

That was my interpretation of the explanation in the comment I replied to.

Scorched earth is what Russia does. Peter the Great had used it to repel the Swedish invasion during the Great Northern War. Napoleon himself had studied that invasion and tried to learn from it. Instead, he repeated the failure of Charles XII on a larger scale.

Napoleon himself had faced scorched earth in Portugal during the Peninsular War a couple of years earlier. It was effective.

In other words, Napoleon knew that Russia had a habit of using scorched earth, and he knew that it was effective against his forces. The reasonable assumption was that Russia would use it again.

Also, Moscow was not the capital, and Napoleon had already lost the majority of his army before reaching it.

[ulizzle]

In that case the Russians would have scorched Stalingrad, which they didn’t. They didn’t because of the symbolism behind it

[jltsiren]

Scorched earth had lost most of its military significance by WW2. The USSR tried it in 1941, but it failed, because trucks had revolutionized warfare. They could transport food over long distances, allowing armies go to places where they previously couldn't and stay there.

In 1812, Napoleon suffered huge losses in the first weeks of the invasion, before fighting a single major battle. His army could not find enough food in Russia. In 1941, the total number of Axis military deaths during Operation Barbarossa was comparable to what Napoleon suffered in those first weeks, despite many battles and much larger scale. When the invasion failed, the troops mostly just stayed there and tried again next year.

[jjtheblunt]

Stalingrad the name wouldn’t exist for another century. Was the location with former name as symbolic?

[jjtheblunt]

too late to edit the above, realizing i left the name Volgograd (city on the Volga river) out.

[throehtjr]

Read about Avar, Mongol, Tatar, Turkish... invasions. This is very common tactic, going all the way back to Alexander the Great.

They were not burning capital "out of spite". Not everyone is like French who surrender Paris to protect art.

[hef19898]

Nothing about your last your last sentence is corewct, actually. And partially about ypur first one as well.