Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan Page B

Sheridan’s and Wood’s men seized Orchard Knob and an adjacent hill. 29
    The next day, November 24, Sherman reached the north side of Missionary Ridge with his four divisions from Mississippi and attacked Bragg’s right flank. A single stubborn division commanded by Patrick Cleburne threw back Sherman’s divisions twice.

    Hooker’s three divisions simultaneously assaulted Lookout Mountain, fighting the “Battle above the Clouds.” The 12,000 men crept up the craggy, steep-sided mountain against a Rebel force of 2,400. That night, Bragg, conceding that the mountain was lost, pulled back its defenders and sent them to fortify Missionary Ridge against the Union attack on the center that he expected the next day.
    During the morning and the afternoon of November 25, Sherman had resumed his attack on the north side of Missionary Ridge at Tunnel Hill. Major General Oliver O. Howard’s two reserve divisions reinforced Sherman. But the result was the same as on the previous day.
    When Grant’s staff officers, whose field glasses had been trained on the ridge crest, reported seeing Rebels shifting to the north side of the ridge, they feared that a major counterattack was about to be launched against Sherman. Hooker’s three divisions were now behind Missionary Ridge, advancing toward Rossville to cut the Rebel supply line. Grant realized that they would not be able to reach Sherman’s lines until that night—far too late. To stop the further reinforcement of Sherman’s adversary, Grant ordered Thomas to attack the center of Missionary Ridge with his 25,000-man Army of the Cumberland.
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    IT WAS CONCEIVED AS a limited attack, ending with the capture of the Rebel rifle pits at the base of the ridge—and no more. Its purpose was to freeze the Confederates on the ridgetop until Sherman broke through. Sheridan’s and Wood’s IV Corps divisions would execute the feint, along with XIV Corps, whose two divisions were led by Brigadier Generals Absalom Baird and Richard Johnson. Six guns fired in quick succession would signal the opening of the assault. 30
    At 3:40 p.m., the high-strung Granger, standing beside Grant and Thomas on Orchard Knob, raised and lowered his arm six times, shouting, “Fire!” each time. The four divisions surged toward Missionary Ridge, ranked north to south: Baird, Wood, Sheridan, and Johnson, with Wood and Sheridan leading. Beside himself with excitement, Granger leaped into a gun emplacement, personally sighted a field piece, and shouted, “Fire!” Visibly irritated, Grant told Granger to concentrate on commanding his troops and let the captain run his battery.
    It was the sort of stirring scene that one might read about in accounts of the Napoleonic wars but that was rarely seen during the Civil War, when most battles were either fought in dense woods or spread over many miles. Twenty-five thousand Union troops marched across the floor of a natural amphitheater, watched by tens of thousands of troops from both armies. “With bands playing, flags flying, soldiers cheering and yelling, our men three lines deep in perfect alignment, poured out through the young cottonwood timber,” wrote Sylvanus Cadwallader of the New
York Herald . Heavy artillery from the Union forts in Chattanooga joined the batteries blazing away from Fort Wood. 31
    Beyond the thin woods, an open plain of four to nine hundred yards, covered with felled trees, stretched to the foot of Missionary Ridge and the first line of Rebel rifle pits. Thomas’s four divisions, advancing along a two-mile front, ran through “a most terrible tornado of shot and shell” toward the first line.
    Sheridan never doubted that his men would capture the rifle pits, but he was unsure whether they could then hold them; with Rebels pouring down murderous fire from a second line of pits and the ridge crest, they might die there. He sent a staff officer, Captain J. S.