D&D General How the heck do you fight a medieval war in winter?

[Shades of Eternity]

Let's figure out what can be done without magic as a baseline.

Then, add the standard stuff and see how it develops.

 

[GreatestHonor]

I would assume that combat would basically be halted during winter and its more about taking each other’s supplies. Typical fighting would resume around late winter/early spring

 

[mellored]

Your army goes village to village of your enemy, killing and taking their food, and burning their stuff for warmth.

 

[aco175]

There would likely need to be a Valley Forge place where you can winter camp if you still wanted to wage war, otherwise most armies went home in the fall to bring in harvest and wait until next year's was planted before starting again.

A good supply train would help depending on how far from home you are. It would be easier to be the defender and have to keep pulling back with your supplies.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Fiest you need to define the kind of winter the territory experiences. The war you can wage will vary.

Is this kind of winter where

• the mountain passes are closed because it snows every day, until the snow is 15ft deep.
• cold wind freezes every river solid but rarely brings precipitation
• frozen fog coats everything, every blade of grass, rock, stone and guard standing watch, in a film of ice
• freezing rain falls every few days and the roads vacillates between ankle deep mud just above freezing and wheel-breaking ruts frozen hard as stone
• gentle snow that falls in loose powder every few days, and the temperature never returns above freezing until spring.
• sporadic bouts of white out snow storms that drop 3 feet of snow each time they pass.
• the best time of year because it isn't raining every day nor is the temperature well above body temp

The last one is the ideal time to wage war. Enjoy not being knee deep in mud or dying of heat prostration.

In other cases sleds, skis, and ice boats can be used to supply or transport a campaigning army.

The rest are the kinds of winter that eat mundane armies with anything less than 21st century tech, a robust supply chain, detailed maps and an well thought out campaign full of redundancies and room for the unexpected.

 

[humble minion]

Historically I don’t think it was generally done, with the exception being the maintenance of sieges. You read about the 'campaigning season' and 'winter quarters' a lot for a reason. The weather is only part of it, the need to release your men to go home and help with the harvest is the big deal that made continuing war into winter a very rare thing. In a seige situation you had the chance to prepare in place, to build accomodation for your soldiers, to lay in supplies etc. But marching an open-field army around in deep snow? Very hard, and will desroy your army fast. Also a factor is that in winter you need MORE supplies than in summer. Your winter clothes are heavier and will be wet all the time, you need to carry or find firewood just for routine warmth for every single soldier rather than just for cooking (which can be centralised for fuel saving), and you're burning more energy pushing through snow or slogging through bogs, and keeping your body temperature up, so you need more food and you're more likely to get sick (trenchfoot, pneumonia, frostbite) so there'll be more invalids. All this means you need to transport more, and that puts greater energy demands on your troops. It's a problem that gets exponentially worse the colder it gets. Oh, and this is also an era when metalwork is hard specialised timeconsuming manual labor - so exposing all your weapons and armour to conditions in which they'll rust at the drop of a hat is problematic too. Sure, you can alleviate that somewhat through oiling and careful packing when not in use and continual maintenence - but all that requires yet more weight, equipment and time.

Of course all this presuppose a northern-Europe type climate where snow and below-freezing temperatures etc are routine in winter. But even in a more temperate/Mediterranean/Californian type climate, the harvest is still an imperative, and it's easy to underestimate how difficult travel becomes after significant rain in a time without paved roads or widespread artificial drainage (seriously, most of the modern world is built on drained swamp. Marshes, bogs, fen, and other swampy land were EVERYWHERE in pre-modern times, especially after rain). It's less impossible to wage war in a dreary morass of bog than it is in 8 ft of snow, but it's still not fun for anyone.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Historically you generally didn’t.

 

[Clint_L]

Really depends on how magic heavy your world is, because as others have noted, places with serious winters generally avoided large scale warfare during those months. But if lots of low level clerics and wizards are available, not to mention even just common magic items, a lot of new opportunities arise.

 

[Reynard]

Historically you generally didn’t.

One of the most terrifying aspect of the Vikings for central Europeans was that they sometimes would.

 

[LordEntrails]

Everyone but @kigmatzomat @humble minion is stuck in thinking a northern European or Northern US climate.
Where I live you would fight a medieval war in winter, because in summer you would die without magic if you were wearing platemail. And any heavy armor would make you damned near useless after a few minutes.

So, it's really not about "winter" its about climate or maybe weather. And it depends upon economics, societal needs and farming as well.

So, in what climate and social setting are you interest in?