Western Europeans seem to have great difficulty in envisioning the scale of some of the rest of the world. Rolling through Belgium and France just doesn’t compare to trying to tank across hundreds of miles of steppes, or, over here, land on a continent and then make there way across it’s 3000 some odd miles of just about every topography known to earth.
Good point. There isn’t a single country in Europe that’s even as large as the state of Texas, so the whole nature of a military campaign would be very different here.
That point reminds me of a story from the early days of WWII when Britain was evacuating children to Canada. A London woman whose children were being sent over wired relatives in Vancouver asking them to meet her kids when their ship landed in Halifax. The Vancouver relatives wired back, “You meet them- you’re closer than we are.”