November 24 in Military History

King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem led a dramatically outnumbered Crusader force to a decisive victory over Saladin's Ayyubid army at Montgisard in Palestine. The battle preserved the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem for another decade and demonstrated the tactical effectiveness of heavy cavalry when committed at the decisive moment.

British General John Forbes's expedition, including a young Colonel George Washington, reached the forks of the Ohio River to find that the French had burned and abandoned Fort Duquesne rather than face the overwhelming British force. Forbes rebuilt the position as Fort Pitt, the future city of Pittsburgh, securing British control of the Ohio Valley and eliminating the French threat to the American frontier.

Union forces under Major General Joseph Hooker stormed the slopes of Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga in the famous "Battle Above the Clouds." Heavy fog obscured the fighting, creating an eerie spectacle visible only by the flashes of musketry through the mist. By the next morning, the American flag flew from the summit, and Confederate forces had been driven from the mountain.

American farmer Joseph Glidden received U.S. patent 157,124 for a design of twisted double-strand barbed wire that could be mass-produced cheaply. Within two decades, barbed wire reshaped both agricultural land enclosure and military defensive doctrine, becoming a defining feature of the trench systems of World War I.

The Battle of Cambrai entered its fifth day as British forces consolidated gains achieved in the first massed tank assault in history. On November 20, nearly 400 Mark IV tanks had breached the Hindenburg Line, advancing up to five miles in hours, a distance that had previously cost months and hundreds of thousands of casualties. But German counterattacks were eroding the gains, foreshadowing the battle's ultimately inconclusive result.

One hundred and eleven B-29 Superfortress bombers struck Tokyo from Saipan in the first bombing of the Japanese capital since the Doolittle Raid. The mission inaugurated the devastating strategic bombing campaign that would destroy 67 Japanese cities and culminate in the atomic bombings.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the former Marine accused of assassinating President Kennedy two days earlier, was shot and killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters while being transferred to county jail. The killing, broadcast live on national television, eliminated the only suspect in the presidential assassination and spawned conspiracy theories that persist to this day.

A passenger using the alias Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Boeing 727-100 between Portland and Seattle, extorted $200,000 and four parachutes, then released the passengers and ordered the aircraft flown toward Mexico before parachuting from the rear airstair somewhere over southwest Washington.

The Taliban stronghold of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan fell to Northern Alliance forces supported by U.S. Special Forces and air power. The city was the last major Taliban position in northern Afghanistan, and its capture, after a two-week siege, marked the effective end of Taliban control in the north. Thousands of Taliban and foreign fighters surrendered, though many al-Qaeda operatives escaped.

A Turkish Air Force F-16C fired an AIM-120 AMRAAM missile and downed a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M tactical bomber near the Syrian-Turkish border, the first NATO member air-to-air kill of a Russian aircraft since the Korean War. The engagement triggered a severe diplomatic crisis and reshaped Russian and Turkish air operations over Syria.