War and Military Atlas

How Battles Were Fought
Atlas Trail

Two Thousand Years of Siege and Envelopment

3 stops

Two operational lessons, two thousand years apart: Caesar's double-walled siege at Alesia in 52 BC and the Red Army's deep encirclements at Stalingrad and Berlin both trapped a dangerous enemy between two lines the attacker itself built.

Stop 1 of 3.
Battles and Campaigns

52 BC: Caesar traps Vercingetorix's Gauls between an inner blockade wall and an outer wall built to hold off their relief army.

Stop 2 of 3.
Battles and Campaigns

1942-1943: Soviet forces encircle and destroy the German Sixth Army inside the city, deep operation doctrine applied at enormous scale.

Stop 3 of 3.
Battles and Campaigns

1945: Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front closes in on the German capital, the war in Europe's final encirclement.

Download Card

Create an account to keep this trail. Saving copies its stops into a collection of your own, which you can add to, reorder and share.

Where you have got to in this trail is kept by your own browser and is never sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears it. All trails.