[Raellus]

I'm not sure we're speaking the same language here. Encirclement battles don't have to be lightening fast or bag thousands of prisoners and thousands of tons of intact enemy hardware. We're not talking a single operation with Bagration-like results. Instead, we're talking about a half-dozen (if not more), large corps-level encirclement battles, each lasting several weeks (if not months).

Pretty much every major land battle you can think of in WWII either started out or ended up as an encirclement battle.

For example, the hard-fought, rather lengthy Normany campaign ended up with most of a German army nearly encircled. The Allies failed to adequately close the trap around Falaise but the destruction, especially of material, was pretty spectacular. Allied failure to aggressively press the German army meant the war lasted nearly a year longer.

One tends to think of Stalingrad as a purely urban battle but it only became a massive German defeat/turning point when the entire German 6th army was encircled in a double envelopment and could not be rescued.

Kursk, still considered by some military historians to be the biggest tank battle of all time, was a failed attempt at a double envelopment.

Hitler's Ardennes offensive(Battle of the Bulge), likewise was an attempt to drive a wedge between two armies and seize Antwerp, in effect cutting off an Allied army in northern Belgium. It resulted in the smaller encirclement/siege of Bastogne. There are dozens of photos of Panthers and Tiger IIs either abandoned or knocked out without having been destroyed by fires and/or catastrophic internal explosions.

I just finished reading a massive book about the Korsun-Cherkassy pocket battles in February of '44. From the first phases of the Soviet encirclement operations to the German break-out, was about four weeks. Most of the two German corps encircled around Korsun were able to escape after over two weeks of encirclement but nearly all of their vehicles and artillery had to be left behind (albeit in very bad condition).

In that book, there are several accounts of Soviet tank crews bailing out after seeing neighboring tanks hit by enemy fire. One crew even bailed out when they heard what they thought was a shell hitting their tank. It wasn't even damaged. When German tank crews had time, they destroyed their tanks if they had to be adandoned to the enemy. However, when in combat, this was not always possible and intact tanks were abandoned.

So yes, it is entirely plausible that the NATO campaign in the DDR and Poland consisted of several large encirclement battles.