Curated playlist
Encirclements in World War II
- Battle of UmanThe Battle of Uman began on the 15th of July 1941 and lasted just over three weeks, yet in that time the Wehrmacht encircled and destroyed two entire Soviet armies. The 6th and 12th Soviet Armies, caught in a pocket near the Ukrainian city…
- Ruhr pocketThe Ruhr pocket ended with a field marshal shooting himself in a forest rather than face Allied captivity. In April 1945, some 317,000 German soldiers were encircled in the Ruhr Area of Germany, trapped alongside millions of civilians in…
- Battle of Smolensk (1941)The Battle of Smolensk began on the 10th of July 1941, roughly 400 kilometers west of Moscow, and what unfolded over the next two months would alter the course of the entire Eastern Front. The German Army had already driven 500 kilometers…
- Falaise pocketAt the Falaise pocket, forty-eight hours after the guns fell silent, General Dwight D. Eisenhower walked the ground on foot. He later recorded encountering scenes that could only be described by Dante. Pilots flying overhead reported…
- Battle of Białystok–MinskThe Battle of Białystok-Minsk began on the 22nd of June 1941, the moment Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Within eighteen days, the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center had torn apart the Red Army's entire Western…
- Operation UranusOperation Uranus began at 07:20 Moscow time on the 19th of November 1942, when Soviet artillery commanders received a single codeword: "Siren". What followed was an 80-minute bombardment from 3,500 guns and mortars, directed almost…
- Battle of Kiev (1941)The Battle of Kiev produced what historians have called the largest encirclement in the history of warfare by number of troops. In the summer and autumn of 1941, a vast ring of German steel closed around the Soviet Southwestern Front in…
- Battle of BerlinAt 8:30 in the morning on the 22nd of April 1945, ninety-six shells fell on the centre of Berlin in the space of a few minutes. A Soviet war correspondent watching the batteries open fire recorded what he heard the battery commander say…
- Battle of the Kerch PeninsulaOn the evening of the 25th of December 1941, Soviet forces packed into small fishing trawlers and began crossing the Kerch Strait from the Taman Peninsula. The plan to liberate Crimea relied on five transport groups from Rear-Admiral…
- Second Battle of KharkovThe Second Battle of Kharkov began at 6:30 in the morning on the 12th of May 1942, with a concentrated hour-long artillery bombardment crashing into German positions east of the Ukrainian city. What followed was one of the most…
- Siege of BudapestThe Siege of Budapest lasted exactly fifty days. When it ended on the 13th of February 1945, more than eighty percent of the city's buildings had been destroyed or damaged, all seven bridges spanning the Danube had been blown apart, and…
- Third Battle of KharkovThe Third Battle of Kharkov began on the 19th of February 1943, when Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a counterstrike that few in the Red Army expected. Soviet forces had swept through German lines for weeks. They had retaken…