My ex-father-in-law served in the British army all through WWII and was at Dunkirk. Still, he used to say that the greatest human calamity he ever witnessed was a quarter inch of snow in Atlanta.
Your ex-father-in-law was obviously talking about Atlanta’s “Snowjam 1982”. It was a quarter inch of snow, but it included almost an inch of ice. I was downtown in the middle of it, stuck on the freeway with a couple of hundred thousand of my closest friends and their cars.
No food, no water but even worse... no bathrooms! That became an issue after enterprising Ga Tech students walked among the cars selling cans of beer. I bought 3. This was at 4 pm. Fortunately, night fell and there were many furtive movements in the shadows as people, myself included, relieved themselves of the beer that seemed like a good idea at the time.
At 9 pm, we were still in the same place, bumper to bumper, frozen on the freeway. Things started moving about midnight and I finished a normal 2 hour drive after 16 hours.
Don’t think it equals ‘Nam or Dunkirk but it was memorable in its own way.