In October 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland was besieged at Chattanooga, virtually surrounded by familiar opponents: the Confederate Army of Tennessee. The Federals survived by razor-thin margins, thanks only to a trickle of supplies painfully transported over the most rudimentary mountain roads. Soon, even these quarter rations will no longer be enough. Disaster was imminent.
Yet these Confederates, once jubilant over having routed the Federals at Chickamauga and driving them back into the apparent trap of the Chattanooga trenches, found their own situation increasingly difficult to bear. Immediately after their victory, the South rejoiced; The Confederacy's disasters of the previous summer—Vicksburg and Gettysburg—appear to have been reversed. Then came the impasse in front of these same trenches. The Confederates held the high ground, Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, but they could not completely isolate Chattanooga from the north.
The union responded. Reinforcements were on the way. A new man arrives to take command: Ulysses S. Grant. Confederate General Braxton Bragg, reluctant to launch a frontal attack against Chattanooga's defenses, sought victory elsewhere, diverting his troops to eastern Tennessee.
David Powell's Battle Above the Clouds chronicles the first half of the campaign to lift the siege of Chattanooga, including the opening of the "Cracker Line," the unusual nighttime Battle of Wauhatchie, and one of the most dramas of the entire war: Observation Mountain.
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