Monday: Day Two

On Monday Baghdad Radio reported that the allied offensive “has utterly failed.”  Coalition “scoundrels are crying for help and swimming in their own blood.”  Both on the ground and on television things looked different from that description.

CNN’s Brian Jenkins described the burned out hulks of enemy tanks around him, ten miles north of the Kuwaiti border, the craters in the highway. The trenches, he told us, weren’t as wide or as impressive as had been shown previously. He could hear the Missouri and the Wisconsin, firing their big guns at targets on shore.

The allied forces were moving deeper into Iraq and Kuwait. Bombs and electronic jamming had knocked out most of the Iraqis’ communications, leaving them with no idea of what was actually happening on the battlefield. Tactical radio intercepts indicated that they still had not figured that VII Corps’ attack in the west was actually the main thrust; they believed that 1st Cavalry Division’s move up Wadi al-Batin and the Marine-Arab attacks in southeastern Kuwait were the main attacks. The Republican Guards were trying to dig out, but they still did not quite know what to do. CNN showed us footage of long lines of Iraqis, “surrendering by the thousands.”  The reports of the number of prisoners climbed hourly—10,000, then 14,000, then 20,000... The numbers were staggering, especially when taken with the number of friendly casualties.

An “armada” was reported in the Gulf, with Marine amphibious assault units in position to storm the beaches of Kuwait.

The Arab units were still driving to take Kuwait City, with relatively little difficulty, not with the grand, sweeping movements of VII and XVIII Corps, but methodically and without grandstanding. The Saudi brief that day, by Lt. Gen. Khalid bin Sultan, reported five Arab KIA and twenty wounded. Saudi and Kuwaiti troops reached Al Zour, 15 miles north of the Saudi border. Saudi artillery pounded Iraqi positions to the north and west of the main highway, and Marines were calling in F/A-18 Hornets to suppress any Iraqi response. The 16-inch guns of the battleships supported the operations along the coast, firing one-ton high-explosive shells wherever needed.

The Marines and the Tiger Brigade were beginning to fight one of the largest tank battles of the war. Most of the Iraqis were located around the al-Burgan and al-Maqwa oil fields, between the U.S. force and the Kuwait  airport. When the armor at Burgan came out, the Americans called in a division-sized “Time on Target.”  Every gun in three or four battalions fires at the same target at the same time. One moment the enemy is maneuvering and the next fifty or seventy artillery rounds are exploding around him, followed by another volley and another... As the Iraqis at the edges of the impact area were trying to get away, they were hit by more artillery, by missile-firing attack helicopters and by the U.S. tanks. At least fifty to sixty enemy tanks were destroyed, with no friendly losses.

As 2nd Marine Division’s infantry neared the airport around 7 a.m., the Tiger Brigade was ordered forward to spearhead the attack. In a two-mile wedge, the tanks charged into an Iraqi armored division. Twenty enemy tanks were knocked out almost immediately, and eight others surrendered. 2,200 prisoners were taken in a half hour. Several times, when the hulking M1s took out one tank in a formation, the crews of the others would leap out, hands over their heads. As the battle continued, handling EPWs became almost as much work as the fighting.

CNN’s Greg Lamotte showed us footage of a Marine wounded by a booby trap. “Were you scared?” he asked. The reply was polite. Not once he realized he wasn’t dead, the Marine told him.

“We keep waiting for the other shoe to fall,” said Maj. Robert Schoenwetter, among the first allied troops across the border, told Army Times. It just seemed too easy. The Iraqis had to be tougher than that, after the way they had been built up. What about “swimming in blood?”  Instead, on day two of the operation, the Marines took thousands of Iraqi surrenders, enough to actually slow the advance. Some Iraqis were simply pointed toward the rear and told to walk; there weren’t enough trucks to carry them all.

Far to the west, the French 6th Light Armored Division, the Legion and the 82nd Airborne’s 2nd Brigade were moving deeper. The only thing that was slowing them down was the danger of outrunning their supply lines. They were busy securing the only hard-surface road in the area, continuing to sweep the desert, killing eight tanks and calling in Air Force A-10 strikes to supplement their TOW missiles. 2nd Brigade didn’t even have a man scratched that day, nor did it lose a single piece of equipment. Positions were prepped with artillery fire and aircraft cannons, then the infantry would move in and roll over them. It was almost mathematically precise.

Paratroopers of the 82nd’s 307th Engineer Battalion did much of the dirty work of clearing bunkers, using grappling hooks to open doors that might have been booby trapped. “It’s as exciting as sex because you don’t know what’s in the bunker until you get there,” said Specialist Scott Key. “Then I love to blow it up. Where in civilian life could I get a job where I could go up and down the highway blowing things up?”

Combat engineers are very strange people.

During the night, the 101st Airborne Division had air-assaulted large numbers of troops north of Forward Base Cobra and blocked Highway 8 in the Euphrates River valley, cutting the main highway between Baghdad and Basra. By morning, scores of Iraqi soldiers were being rounded up.

In the afternoon, after the first wave was on the ground, Black Hawk helicopters began air assaulting the 2nd Brigade to seize another objective along the river, the airport between as-Samawah and Nasiriya. Hundreds of Iraqi troops soon filled makeshift POW camps on the access road leading to the base.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” Lt. Col. Bob Perrich told Army Times. “I expected to see soldiers who had been defeated, drawn and gaunt looks on their faces. I did not see that. I saw a group of people who did not want to be soldiers.” 

There were hundreds of helicopters ferrying in more troops and equipment. As the Cobra base had been more than just a FARP, so the position on Highway 8 was more than just a fire base. Black Hawks made 815 runs to drop the troops and their equipment, including artillery pieces, and Chinooks were dropping two more batteries of artillery, explosives, and even truck-mounted antitank weapons. The 101st was leapfrogging from one newly-established operating base to the next, tightening the noose around the Republican Guard before it knew it was there.

The 24th Infantry Division’s axis of attack was taking it just to the west of the main concentration of Iraqi forces. The division and the 197th Mech Infantry Brigade were encountering almost no opposition. They had pushed more than 100 miles into enemy territory and were still going, closing on the Euphrates. During one ten-minute break on the drive north, Sergeant Ralph Vore stood atop his APC and hollered: “Saddam Hussein!  Where are all your damn soldiers?”  By the end of the day they were near the Euphrates and preparing to wheel to the east.

In the VII Corps sector, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment resumed its attack at 6:40 a.m. Intelligence said there were two brigades from Iraq’s 12th Armored Division on the move, and A-10s had attacked two of the battalions. Another was located near Objective May. 3rd Squadron engaged the force, a mechanized infantry battalion in prepared defensive positions reinforced by tanks. The Iraqis were expecting a small French force, rather than 120 tanks and 120 Bradleys, with the entire VII Corps behind them. Nearby, I Troop found another force, still in the process of digging revetments. “They were still in the process of digging in when we got there,” troop commander Captain Dan Miller told Army Times. “Some of the initial Bradleys that rolled up, they saw guys digging who looked up at the Bradleys, looked down and started digging again... They said later they thought we were part of their army until we started shooting at them.”

1st Infantry Division had the previous day pushed some 28 kilometers into Iraq, to a position designated Phase Line Colorado. On Monday, they advanced another 14 kilometers, to Phase Line New Jersey. 600 prisoners were taken the first day, 700 the second; one soldier was wounded when he stepped on a dud round. The division was forced to slow its advance to deal with the number of bunkers and positions it had overrun.

The heavy tanks of  2nd Armored Division Forward were brought forward to lead an attack in the center against the main body of the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division. While most enemy soldiers chose to surrender, those who did not were either killed with direct fire or buried alive in their trenches and bunkers. M1A1 tanks equipped with plows ran along the sides of trenches, filling them in. Once 3rd Brigade had passed through, the engineers began searching dozens of bunkers, some interlocking. Few of the Iraqis remaining chose to fight. Probably with good reason: two enemy soldiers emerged from one bunker and surrendered even as Specialist Kevin Keller, 9th Combat Engineers, was wiring charges to their home away from home.

The troops were surprised at one thing. The heavy pounding of the air war had produced few dead or wounded for them to find. Trucks, artillery, anything that was above ground, had been destroyed; the bunkers had withstood the pounding without collapsing. This a lesson we relearn each war.

3rd Brigade encountered light resistance as it moved north, shooting a few T-55s and BMPs and trucks, mostly units that were trying to get out of the way, moving from phase line to phase line. By noon, Phase Line New Jersey had been secured and the Americans stood aside as the 36,000-man 1st Armoured Division task force passed through, attacking to the east, along VII Corps’ flank.

The British, with 2,500 armored vehicles and 5,000 wheeled vehicles, were three hours ahead of schedule as they began the 14-hour passage of lines. They began the process of outflanking a 10,000-strong Iraqi mechanized division. The 16th/5th Queen’s Royal Lancers, the division’s reconnaisance regiment,^[17] probed the defenses, identifying targets for Lynx attack helicopters. The helicopters destroyed four tanks and seven armored vehicles with TOWs. The division overran its first objective before nightfall, then kept going, using its superior night-vision ability to destroy two companies of tanks, two artillery batteries, and a communications site.

In the early afternoon 7th Armoured Brigade—the “Desert Rats”—moved up onto the northern half of the Iraqi position. They engaged the Iraqis after sundown. The Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, riding Challenger tanks, supported the infantry of 1st Battalion, Staffordshire Regiment. 4th Brigade followed up the 7th’s attack and captured the Iraqi brigade commander, then moved back south, hitting a smaller enemy position. 4th’s tank regiment, 14th/20th King’s Hussars, dug out a dug-in infantry unit, while the 1st Battalion, Royal Scots, overran an artillery battery.

3rd Armored Division hadn’t yet been engaged. 1st U.S. Armored Division was. The division had moved out at 6:30 a.m., continuing its attack. Around noon, Gen. Griffith stopped in at his 4th Brigade’s forward refuelling point. Could the Apaches attack Iraqi positions near al-Busayyah?  The town was a supply and logistics center for the westernmost Republican Guards units. Capturing it would cut off movement of any units pulling back toward Baghdad. It was defended by elements of the 26th Infantry Division, one end of which was already in the process of being chewed up by 1st ID. The brigade commander, Col. Dan Petrosky, thought it could be done.

On the way, the helicopters were delayed when 100 Iraqi infantry surrendered and had to be herded in. Then they went on to attack logistics sites around the town, destroying a dozen vehicles.

Meanwhile, 3rd Brigade launched an attack against elements of the 26th Division near where the helicopters had taken their prisoners. The lead tank company destroyed four BRDM scout cars in 18 seconds. Fourteen air defense guns and a T-55 were also destroyed. The troops were awestruck by the firepower their Bradleys possessed. Eight shots of 25mm high explosive on a truck would leave no truck, a different reality from that of shooting targets at Grafewehr range in Germany. The other side of the reality is cleaning up the mess; the targets in Germany were not occupied. In Iraq there was blood and human limbs to deal with.

45 prisoners were taken, and they provided information on which of the positions at al-Busayyah were occupied. 2nd Brigade pulled up close to the town that night, ready to attack the division’s first major objective the next morning. To help the Iraqis sleep better, 346 MLRS rockets and 1,441 155mm howitzer rounds were fired at them during the night, accompanied by thunder and lightning and winds of 50 knots. The storm, however, also grounded the division’s air support.

Around 4 p.m., Lt. Gen. Franks was at Col. Holder’s command post, near Objective May. Holder told him that they were in contact with the Republican Guard, within artillery range. Franks needed to know when and where to commit his heavy armored divisions. 2nd Cav was to lock horns with the Iraqis to locate them and hold them, then Franks would pass his divisions through to destroy them.

The regiment was arrayed in a horseshoe-shaped defense to provide better security for the support squadron and artillery. 1st Squadron was along Phase Line Lonestar, with 1st ID behind it. An attack was expected by the Iraqi 12th Armored Division along that flank, and 1st Squadron was ordered into a heavy defensive position.

1st Cavalry Division attacked into Kuwait  along several different routes, behind a rolling barrage of heavy artillery. The Cav encountered only sporadic artillery fire and scores of prisoners. “This is more like an exercise than a war,” Captain Dave Francavilla, commander of C Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, part of 1st Cav’s 2nd Brigade told Army Times. Still, he was worrying about plunging into an Iraqi kill sack. The Iraqis had been fond of suckering the Iranians during their war, pretending to retreat, then turning around and pounding hell out of them. For that matter, the Parthians had been fond of doing the same to the Romans a couple thousand years before, on the same real estate.

General Schwarzkopf was asked at that day’s CENTCOM briefing if the number of casualties was so low because the allies were going around the Iraqis and avoiding “confrontation” with them. Schwarzkopf didn’t—quite—wince at the term. “Confrontation” is what happens when “activists” occupy their dormitories until they can have their way; the offensive, no matter how well it might be going, was something of an entirely different order. “We’re going to go around, over, through, on top, underneath, and any other way,” Schwarzkopf told him with evident satisfaction.

By Monday evening the last lingering doubts about the ground offensive had faded. When they fought, most Iraqi units fought badly. Counterattacks had been only company- or battalion-sized, not very coordinated. Seven divisions had been destroyed and more than 25,000 prisoners had been taken. Friendly battlefield losses had been astonishingly light.

Baghdad Radio broadcast an offer to withdraw from Kuwait, but Saddam remained defiant on the other UN resolutions. It was too late anyway, especially when taken with the fact that, as Baghdad Radio put it, “Iraq’s heroic missile corps continues to pound the coward traitors.”  Wreckage of a SCUD, hit by a Patriot, destroyed a makeshift barracks near Dhahran, producing the heaviest allied casualties of the war, 28 American reservists including three women.