On 24 November 1863 Union troops under Major General Joseph Hooker drove the Confederates from the slopes of Lookout Mountain above Chattanooga, Tennessee, in fighting half hidden by mist and low cloud, remembered as the Battle Above the Clouds. On the same date in 1643 Franz von Mercy's Bavarians surprised a French army at Tuttlingen.
The Battle Above the Clouds, 1863
After the Union defeat at Chickamauga in September 1863 the Army of the Cumberland fell back into Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Braxton Bragg's Confederate army besieged it from Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. In October Ulysses S. Grant took command of the Union armies in the West, opened a new supply line into the town and prepared to break the siege.1
On 24 November Grant sent Major General Joseph Hooker with three divisions, under John W. Geary, Charles Cruft and Peter J. Osterhaus, against the Confederate left on Lookout Mountain, where Carter Stevenson commanded. Geary's men crossed Lookout Creek in the morning mist and worked along the steep, wooded western slope; at about 10:30 a.m. they struck Edward Walthall's Mississippi brigade a mile southwest of the point of the mountain and broke it.2
The Federals swept around the point toward the Cravens House, on a bench below the summit cliffs, and a counterattack by John C. Moore's brigade around 1:00 p.m. was outflanked and pushed back. Fog and low cloud hid much of the fighting from the valley; Grant, watching from Orchard Knob, could see Hooker's troops only when the clouds lifted. The fight came to be called the Battle Above the Clouds, or Among the Clouds.3
That night Bragg pulled his troops off the mountain to strengthen Missionary Ridge. The next day Grant's armies stormed Missionary Ridge and drove Bragg's army away from Chattanooga.4
Also on 24 November: the surprise at Tuttlingen, 1643
In 1643, a quarter of a century into the Thirty Years' War, the Bavarian and imperial army under Franz von Mercy, with Johann von Werth as his cavalry general, held the right bank of the Rhine in southwestern Germany, while the French-Weimar army stood across the river in Alsace. Late in the year the French crossed the Rhine again and, under Josias Rantzau, settled into quarters around the small town of Tuttlingen on the upper Danube.5
After hard marches Mercy's army fell on the French quarters by surprise on 24 November and took Tuttlingen, Rantzau's headquarters. It was a crushing French defeat: much of the army was taken prisoner, and its scattered remnants fell back to the Rhine.6 › Battle of Freiburg, 1644
The historian Helmut Neuhaus, in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, calls Tuttlingen Mercy's first really great victory. Mercy fought on: in 1644 he met the Duke of Enghien in the long and costly battle of Freiburg, in May 1645 he beat Turenne at Herbsthausen, and in August 1645 he fought the battle of Alerheim near Nördlingen.7
Also on this day
Battle of Tuttlingen
24 November 1643 · 382 years ago
Imperial and Bavarian forces led by Franz von Mercy surprised a French army under Josias Rantzau in its winter quarters at Tuttlingen in the Thirty Years' War. Caught off guard in heavy snow, the French army was destroyed, and the French court hushed the defeat up.
Battle of Castelfranco Veneto
24 November 1805 · 220 years ago
An Austrian brigade under Prince Rohan, after a long march out of the Alps, ran into French divisions near Castelfranco Veneto in the War of the Third Coalition. Caught between Reynier and Gouvion Saint-Cyr and unable to break out, Rohan surrendered his whole command.
