the ajc had a blurb about all of the battles that happened around the city and a link to a nice overview w/interactive map that was done for the sesquicentennial. i run a lot in the woods near the area of the battle of utoy creek and you can still see many of the trenches, and the area around one of the old hospitals in that area is now a nature preserve with some nice trails.
Experience the Battle of Atlanta for its 154th anniversary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Atlanta History Center present
WAR IN OUR BACKYARDS
Sherman fought a very good campaign (the one big exception being his frontal assault on Kennesaw Mountain ("Hey, look, there's the enemy on the biggest mountain for 60 miles in any direction. Let's do a frontal assault there!").
Joe Johnston, the alleged defensive genius, lost more troops, man-for-man, in defending northern Georgia than Sherman did in attacking. You cannot trade casualties one-for-one with a guy who outnumbers you 2-1. Hood was hyperaggressive and tried to pull of a Chancellorsville-like flanking maneuver and his army was just not up to it and the Union army-group was better than the Army of the Potomac had been at Chancellorsville.
The true policy for Johnston/Hood was to cut Sherman's rail supply lined. The Army of the Cumberland required 60 train cars of supplies (mostly food and ammo) each day. Then there was the Army of Ohio and the Army of Tennessee (another 40,000 troops, so probably another 40 rail cars per day). And all of that had to be brought forward along a single railroad (with some rail sidings) from Louisville through Nashville, Chattanooga to Sherman's field army. Cut that railroad and keep it cut, and Sherman's 105,000 troops would consume the available food scrounged from the Georgia countryside within a few days. With no food, Sherman would have had two choices: retreat back to Chattanooga or launch a do-or-die frontal assault on the Atlanta fortifications.
