Well then, that lets out the 10-year plus siege of Troy, since it didn’t take place in Troy proper, but in the suburbs.
I don’t know if I’m being whooshed, but if the Trojan War is to be taken more as historical fact than Epic poetry, the siege took place at the very walls of the city of Troy itself for 10 years, and the city was sacked in a day of ‘urban warfare’ when the Greeks opened the gates by trickery and
The Achaeans entered the city and killed the sleeping population. A great massacre followed which continued into the day.
Blood ran in torrents, drenched was all the earth,
As Trojans and their alien helpers died.
Here were men lying quelled by bitter death
All up and down the city in their blood.[164]The Trojans, fuelled with desperation, fought back fiercely, despite being disorganised and leaderless. With the fighting at its height, some donned fallen enemies’ attire and launched surprise counterattacks in the chaotic street fighting. Other defenders hurled down roof tiles and anything else heavy down on the rampaging attackers. The outlook was grim though, and eventually the remaining defenders were destroyed along with the whole city.
The Battle of Verdun is named after the city, but fighting never reached the city, and there was no urban battle for control of the city. Verdun laid on a traditional invasion route into France from the east, and the Battle of Verdun in 1916 took place in the fortifications that had been built miles outside the city both in the 17th century and much more recently from 1880-1913, Région Fortifiée de Verdun:
For centuries, Verdun, on the Meuse river, had played an important role in the defence of the French hinterland. Attila the Hun failed to seize the town in the fifth century and when the empire of Charlemagne was divided under the Treaty of Verdun (843), the town became part of the Holy Roman Empire; the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 awarded Verdun to France. At the heart of the city was a citadel built by Vauban in the 17th century.[7] A double ring of 28 forts and smaller works (ouvrages) had been built around Verdun on commanding ground, at least 490 ft (150 m) above the river valley, 1.6–5.0 mi (2.5–8 km) from the citadel. A programme had been devised by Séré de Rivières in the 1870s to build two lines of fortresses from Belfort to Épinal and from Verdun to Toul as defensive screens and to enclose towns intended to be the bases for counter-attacks.[8][b]
Many of the Verdun forts had been modernised and made more resistant to artillery, with a reconstruction programme begun at Douaumont in the 1880s. A sand cushion and thick, steel-reinforced concrete tops up to 8 ft 2 in (2.5 m) thick, buried under 3 ft 3 in – 13 ft 1 in (1–4 m) of earth, were added. The forts and ouvrages were sited to overlook each other for mutual support and the outer ring had a circumference of 28 mi (45 km). The outer forts had 79 guns in shellproof turrets and more than 200 light guns and machine-guns to protect the ditches around the forts. Six forts had 155 mm guns in retractable turrets and fourteen had retractable twin 75 mm turrets.[10]
In 1903, Douaumont was equipped with a new concrete bunker (Casemate de Bourges), containing two 75 mm field guns to cover the south-western approach and the defensive works along the ridge to Ouvrage de Froideterre. More guns were added from 1903 to 1913 in four retractable steel turrets. The guns could rotate for all-round defence and two smaller versions, at the north-eastern and north-western corners of the fort, housed twin Hotchkiss machine-guns. On the east side of the fort, an armoured turret with a 155 mm short-barrelled gun faced north and north-east and another housed twin 75 mm guns at the north end, to cover the intervals between the neighbouring forts. The fort at Douaumont formed part of a complex of the village, fort, six ouvrages, five shelters, six concrete batteries, an underground infantry shelter, two ammunition depots and several concrete infantry trenches.[11] The Verdun forts had a network of concrete infantry shelters, armoured observation posts, batteries, concrete trenches, command posts and underground shelters between the forts. The artillery comprised c. 1,000 guns, with 250 in reserve; the forts and ouvrages were linked by telephone and telegraph, a narrow-gauge railway system and a road network; on mobilisation, the RFV had a garrison of 66,000 men and rations for six months.
Relatively few of these forts located miles outside of Verdun were even taken as can be seen in the map in my prior post. This is a panorama of what the battlefield of Verdun looked like, taken from Fort de la Chaume, looking north–east, 1917, after the conclusion of the Battle of Verdun:
