CNN’s Brian Jenkins reported on his drive through Kuwait City in the very early morning hours of Wednesday. There was no one to be seen. There was an orange glow in the sky from the International Airport, the sound of a few explosions. And signs: “Free Kuwait!” said one. Another said, “Bush Did It!” And finally, “I Love CNN.” There were still firefights going on elsewhere, but all enemy divisions in Kuwait had now been declared “combat ineffective.”
Charles Jaco reported a little later, at 4 a.m. Kuwait time, but the report didn’t last long. Jaco was huddled up against a wall, with members of the Kuwaiti resistance. They had heard small arms fire by the airport, and there was a tank up the street, believed to be Iraqi. (It turned out to be a Saudi.)
1st Armored and 1st Infantry Divisions of VII Corps were reported engaging the Republican Guard in the driving rain, with support from Apache helicopters. Only a little later, Headline News told us that the Guard had been defeated. They were about all the Iraqis had left by that time, except for isolated pockets of men who hadn’t gotten the word. President Bush expressed contempt for Saddam Hussein’s claims of withdrawal. To end the fighting, the Iraqi forces should lay down their arms, he said.
“Right now, it’s just like the Super Bowl,” one exultant soldier stated on CNN. “We came in and we kicked some butt. So far we’ve taken some prisoners, and all I can say is ‘No Slack for Iraq.’”
There were those who disagreed. CNN showed us the daily footage of antiwar protests. There were the usual “No Blood for Oil” signs, and one saying “He’s Not My President.” Religious leaders in Los Angeles called for negotiations. “The United States should use its military supremacy now in magnanimity and... we should find a diplomatic way to stop the killing,” one stated.
There were similar demonstrations, only larger, in front of the U.S. embassy in Amman, similar calls for a cease-fire. “We see what is a determined attack against a strong, young Arab country,” Mohammed Kamal, former Jordanian ambassador to the U.S. told us, using the identical phrasing he had used in a previous interview, “to weaken it, to make it powerless, to satisfy international demands, especially those of the Israelis.”
San Francisco’s business community bought ads in several newspapers, protesting the Board of Supervisors’ earlier declaration of the city as a sanctuary for deserters from the war. It only took them forty days and a military victory to reach that decision.
Jaco got in another report from Kuwait City. Reporting from in front of a disabled tank, he discussed the severe physical damage the city had sustained. There had been slaps on the back for the first newsmen into the city, many shaken hands. They were now waiting for the allied troops to enter. The resistance was hunting down stragglers to be handed over. Nine bodies had been found in a vacant lot, young men executed by the proud and valorous Iraqis.
Jaco interviewed Lt. Deshti, of the Kuwaiti Navy, who arrived by jeep with the first Kuwaiti soldiers, of the al-Tatra Brigade. They had come up the coast and their mission now was to raise the Kuwaiti flag.
On Wednesday the troops entered Kuwait City in triumph. The Kuwaitis poured into the streets to greet them. Schwarzkopf was a hero and Bush was a hero. The 10-mile-long convoy was led by Saudi M60 tanks and included forces from all five other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Kuwaiti troops raised their flag in Safat Square, celebrating coincidentally their independence day.
ABC’s Forrest Sawyer reported the city dark from the smoke of many oil fires. The U.S. flag was flying over the embassy by the time he got there, and there was dancing in the streets, people firing weapons into the air. The Iraqis had picked up and left overnight, many of them in stolen Kuwaiti cars.
The Kuwaitis were aware that recovery was not going to be easy, that the country would have to be rebuilt practically from the ground up. But they were happy at that moment.
Richard Threlkeld and his CBS News crew had taken six prisoners on the way into the city.
There was footage of the Marines at the airport, picking up dropped weapons. There was an Iraqi helicopters sitting on the tarmac, apparently unharmed through it all.
The 3rd of the 67th reached its objective, the al-Mutlaa police station, west of Kuwait City on the 6th Ring Motorway, by Wednesday afternoon. Staff Sgt. Harold Witzke, the battalion’s master gunner, and a group of other men set up the battalion’s Tactical Operations Center. As he was inspecting the perimeter, a sniper shot him dead from an adjoining junkyard. He was 28 years old, with a wife and two children in Copperas Grove, Texas.
Witzke died honorably. Many of the Iraqis at the police station died dishonorably, running away while carrying everything they could steal. There was more than a mile of vehicles, 2,000 or more. The next day the men of the 3rd of the 67th walked through a scene that made slasher movies seem tame. Some of the Iraqi dead lay without a mark on them; others were in pieces, some of them separated by 50 yards. Four men had died under a truck where they had sought protection.
“The vehicles that you see out here,” an Army captain described it to CNN, standing on Ring Road #4, “that are civilian vehicles are obviously all stolen from the Kuwaitis or taken from them. You look in the back of them, the kind of stuff that’s in the backs of the vehicles, yeah, there’s military gear, and there’s rifles and weapons and caches, but there’s—it looks like they looted the city. It looks like they just stole things and put ‘em all in the vehicles.”
There were police cars, school buses, trucks and ambulances. Many had been hot-wired. Nearly all were filled with loot—carpets, furniture, VCRs, televisions, radios, jewelry, kids’ toys, even a rosary. Many of the dead were in civvies, their uniforms put away or abandoned. Greg Lamotte said that it could “only be described as a massacre,” and estimated that thousands had died in that long line.
Since the end of the war, the further left reaches of the press have latched onto Mutlaa as the cause to nurse when criticizing the war. For instance, Christopher Hitchens wrote in The Nation:
[F]or public and historical purposes, no memory or consciousness of the incident exists. And Saudi ‘mortuary platoons’ made haste to inter the evidence, so we have no clear idea of how many bodies were Iraqi and how many were Asian guest-workers joining the rout. (On this unexamined question, Stephen Sackut of BBC radio reported grimly that the charred bodies were often to be found holding suitcases with pathetic labels from the Indian subcontinent.)
The implication is, of course, that there was a senseless slaughter of—whom? Hindus and Sri Lankans? Those who weren’t charred beyond recognition seemed to be Iraqis. If they had stolen much else, it would seem logical to swipe a few suitcases, too. And the mortuary platoons “made haste to inter the evidence” because Muslims don’t embalm their dead and the evidence was starting to get ripe.
Was the slaughter, even assuming the column was full of Iraqis, a senseless and brutal thing? Why not destroy the first few vehicles and then round up everyone caught in the traffic jam? There were more than just stolen cars in the jam; there were also tanks and APCs, and the Iraqis, even the ones in the cars, were armed. The imperative was not to sacrifice friendly lives needlessly. The Iraqis weren’t in a mood to fight for Saddam Hussein, but any policeman will affirm that a thief will fight to keep his loot. The left’s indignation at the “massacre” at Mutlaa strikes us as being affected.
Besides the slaughter of the thieves, there was other dishonor for the Iraqis, too. Many of the EPWs were telling their captors that they had been abandoned by their commanders, who had run away “to get help,” to fight another day.
Bill Blakemore, in Baghdad, told us that the Iraqis still supported Saddam Hussein, and that the extent of the defeat confirmed their suspicions that the allies wanted more than just the liberation of Kuwait.
An Iraqi tank crewman’s charred corpse, the arms stretched upward in supplication, lay just a few yards from a grandiose monument to Saddam Hussein. Col. John Sylvester, the Tiger Brigade’s commander, promised to take 50 pounds of plastic explosive as an offering at the shrine to Saddam: “I’m going to blow the goddam thing sky high,” he promised.
The 101st was still moving east, along both sides of the Euphrates, cutting the Iraqis’ supply lines and their escape route.
Three battalions of the 24th Infantry Division attacked and secured the airfield at Jalibah, north of Kuwait, in a 50-minute dawn raid. They destroyed eight helicopters, ten MiG fighters, and two cargo planes on the ground. The troops set about blowing bunkers and destroying anti-aircraft artillery. They had been moving and fighting all night.
CNN reported that the Republican Guard was destroyed in “the largest armored attack since WWII.” VII Corps had taken another 10,000 prisoners and 1,200 pieces of equipment. The commander of VII Corps had taken four prisoners himself, and had commented that the were so many EPWs “you almost need a ticket with a number on it to become a prisoner.”
Baghdad Radio finally acknowledged to the Iraqis that allied ground forces were attacking inside their country, claiming paratroops were in Nasiriyah. At the UN, al-Anbari allowed that Iraq would accept some of the other resolutions subsequent to 660, but rejected three of them specifically. Charles Jaco was back with us, looking tired, showing tapes of the celebration in Kuwait City, part of which involved setting fire to a defaced monumental portrait of Saddam Hussein.
The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had linked up with VII Corps. The Republican Guards, reduced from eight to two divisions, were trying to consolidate the Basra pocket. A driving rainstorm was flooding their foxholes as they dug them. The citizens of Basra were fleeing across makeshift pontoon bridges. In the middle of the night, 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions fell upon the Medina Division. Simultaneously, the corps’ Apache helicopters fell on the Hamurabi Division. The Guard fought for 16 hours as tanks, artillery, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft pounded them.
The Iraqi ambassador to the UN finally acknowledged that his country would accept all resolutions if a cease-fire was declared. The allies stated they wanted to hear it from Baghdad. The British ambassador was on his way back to Kuwait, and the American and French ambassadors were only awaiting the arrival of the Emir before joining him.
1st Brigade of 3rd Armored Division had been in contact with the Guard for the past 42 hours, fighting a series of running battles that made the rout complete as the Bad Guys finally threw down their arms and abandoned their tanks. The brigade’s M1A1s simply outclassed the Iraqis’ T-72s. In the miserable weather, they were no match for the thermal sights of the Americans.
1st Infantry Division was moving into what the division history will call the Battle of Norfolk, named after the phase line designator. The troops called it “Fright Night.” The division was deployed in a classic two-up, one-back formation, with 1st and 3rd Brigades forward and 2nd Brigade as the reserve. As they passed through 2nd Cav’s lines, 1st ID troops could see firing, could see vehicles blowing up and burning, but they had no idea if they were friendly or enemy. Because of the large number of friendly forces to its front, Task Force 5/16 Infantry had put a hold on the use of tank and Bradley main gun systems. Even given this restriction, the unit destroyed two BMPs, 11 BRDMs and 16 MT-LBs, one T-55 and 11 trucks. There were 144 prisoners. Two enemy brigades were destroyed.
3rd Brigade moved forward with each of its three battalions covering four kilometers of front. Some units began firing as soon as they passed through 2nd Cav, in a battle that lasted until 4 a.m. The primary foe was 12th Armored Division’s 37th Armored Brigade, equipped mostly with T-62s and T-55s, with some T-72s. Intelligence on the enemy situation was vague; the unit commanders weren’t sure what to expect.
3rd Battalion, 66th Armor, ran through three Iraqi armored companies, shooting at target after target. Tanks that were “hot” to the thermal sights were quickly dispatched. Others had been shut down, eliminating the heat the thermals used to pick them up. Most of these were by-passed; the crews later emerged from bunkers and the Americans had Bad Guys behind them. Some of the Iraqi crews turned their turrets by hand to keep their engines off and the tanks cool, trying to shoot the M1A1s from the rear, the only angle from which a T-55 or T-62 can hurt an M1. The U.S. tanks’ crews turned their 7.62mm coaxial machine guns on dismounted Iraqi infantry using the tanks as cover. The net result was to inextricably mix the two forces in a 360 degree fight in pitch blackness, a hundred individual firefights.
Command Sergeant Major Vince Conway’s station was riding behind the troops in a Hummer to ensure the combat trains were intact and keeping pace with the fighting forces. When 3rd Brigade had passed through 2nd ACR, the distance between the two bodies had been closed up to 300 meters, and then when the combat units found the enemy they closed up further, to 150 meters. With Conway was Sgt. John Rowler, a public affairs NCO—basically an Army photographer. Conway and his driver, Specialist James Delargy, saw a group of Iraqis firing RPGs at Bradleys on the battalion’s left rear flank.
“We need to go take that RPG team out,” Conway told Delargy. He was concerned they would go after the supply trains—unarmored trucks that would fall apart under their fire. The fuelers and ammunition trucks would have gone up like matchsticks. Armed with .45 caliber handguns and a single M16 rifle, they sneaked up on the team 400 meters away and wiped it out.
Conway then heard an explosion and saw an Iraqi tank burning. In front of it was another T-55, its turret moving slowly, ever so slowly. It was swinging toward the rear of 2nd Battalion, 66th Armor. Conway and Delargy moved up on the tank while Rowler shot at a bunker to suppress enemy machinegun fire. As Conway and Delargy approached the tank, they ran into two enemy soldiers. “I don’t know if we surprised them or they surprised us,” Conway described it. Whatever the case, Conway shot them dead with his .45, one so close he could feel the man’s chest as he pulled the trigger.
Conway climbed up the tank, managing to bark his shins in the process, wondering what his wife would say if she could see him. He dropped a couple incendiary grenades into the tank and they blew before he could hop off; he was thrown to the ground, injuring his shoulder and hip. He was feeling his years as he and Delargy went back to pick up Rowler, who was still exchanging fire with the Iraqis in the bunker. Conway crawled up to the bunker and threw two more grenades inside, then they shot four Iraqis who were hustling out the back way.
Back at their Hummer, the crew found three Iraqis waiting to surrender rather than face Conway. It was only then that what they had done began to sink in. Conway claimed that Delargy wouldn’t say a word for the next three days. Rowler sat in the back of the vehicle shaking his head and saying, “God! I was only here to take pictures!” He swore he would never ride with Conway again.
CSM Conway was awarded the Silver Star for that night. Rowler and Delargy both received the Army Commendation Medal with “V” devices, denoting valor.
In 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry’s sector, a half dozen tanks fell into an antitank ditch sprinkled with mines, an unmanned machinegun and antitank guided missiles. Whoever was supposed to be working them was dead. They got out without further mishap.
Another M1A1 suddenly sank in the desert. The 67-tone behemoth drove over the roof of a bunker holding an antitank position, destroying it without even realizing it had been there. In 3rd Battalion, 66th Armor’s sector, a tank stopped momentarily on a ridge to scout the terrain when the left side tipped alarmingly. The tank’s commander looked down and saw that the tank was on top of a slightly squashed BMP dug into a trench.
As 2nd Battalion, 66th Armor moved forward its lead tanks went by dug-in infantry. Staff Sgt. Mathhew Sheets watched as RPG teams emerged from holes and set up for grill-door shots at the passing tanks—the tank’s single point of vulnerability. As the Iraqis jumped up to fire on the rear of the tanks, Sheets machinegunned them. He destroyed six RPG teams.
Six Americans were killed from 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade during Fright Night, and 30 were wounded. Four Bradleys and five M1s were lost. More than 60 Iraqi tanks were destroyed, most of them from 37th Armored Brigade.
Around 4:30 a.m., 3rd Brigade got further orders from Maj. Gen. Rhame, to push for an Iraqi military camp on the Kuwait-Basra highway. The brigade moved out at dawn, and almost immediately gunners from 2/66 Armor and 1/41 Infantry detected Iraqi armor at long distances. They destroyed them at long range, rather than waiting to get closer. They had had enough of close quarters during the night.
The shots triggered an enormous wave of surrenders across the front. It was at that point that Tawakalna threw in the towel. With two hours, 2/66 took 426 prisoners — not shoeless, shell-shocked draftees, but healthy, good soldiers who had simply been outfought.
Shortly after 8 a.m. 1st and 2nd Brigades of 1st Armored Division made contact with forward security elements of the Medinah Division, with 3rd Brigade joining the fight at 8:35. 4th Battalion, 70th Armor, 2nd Brigade’s northern flank unit, destroyed several T-72s in a skirmish with remnants of the Adnan Infantry Division, and battalion soldiers destroyed a truck whose occupants were machine-gunning Iraqi soldiers in the back as they tried to surrender.
At 9:30 a.m. Iraqi artillery opened up in a ferocious barrage that dropped 200 rounds of artillery onto an unoccupied piece of desert in 20 minutes. While the attack was ineffectual, quite by chance it came as the division artillery headquarters was in the middle of a jump — a movement from one location to another. Equipment was down and off the air as it moved; there was only one counterbattery radar operating. There was a mad scramble to find the source of the fire before the Iraqi battalion was finally pinpointed — in XVIII Airborne Corps’ zone. A request for fire went back to the divsiion, to VII Corps, then to XVIII Corps, which had to clear elements of 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment out of the zone. The clearance took 39 minutes. At last, 6th Battalion, 27th Field Artillery dropped 36 rockets on the Bad Guys, ruining their day. The incoming fire stopped short.
With 2nd ACR going into corps reserve, 2nd Battalion, 1st Aviation was returned to 1st AD. Col. Petrosky put 3/1 to bed —they had been flying missions for 39 hours straight — and sent 2/1 out on an armed reconnaissance mission at 10 a.m. The Apaches destroyed a number of withdrawing vehicles from Tawakalna, 17th and 52nd Armored Divisions.
At 11 a.m. the division launched an attack with three brigades abreast against Medinah. They made contact shortly after noon. T-72s, T-55s and APCs were dug in for six miles along a ridge. 2nd Brigade struck Medinah’s 2nd Brigade and destroyed it in the space of about forty minutes, destroying 60 T-72s and nine T-55s with no losses.
The Iraqis were trying to fight hard, but they were outclassed, their sights useless at the ranges they were being engaged and their command and control shredded. The tankers engaged at 2,800 meters; the turrets from the Iraqis flipped 40 meters into the air. Unable to see the U.S. tankers because of the overcast, the Iraqis could only fire at muzzle blasts, their rounds often dropping 1,000 meters short.
Accompanied by flashes of natural thunder and lightning, as the tanks and Bradleys engaged, Apaches and MLRSs were interdicting those trying to escape 15 to 20 kilometers behind the line. Deeper into the zone, air strikes were flattening known positions. 137 enemy vehicles were destroyed in less than an hour; 187 tanks and 127 APCs were destroyed that day. As the fight raged, the 1AD units became more concerned about running out of fuel than resistance from the enemy.
Fuel was transferred from 3rd Armored Division and from corps. Forty tankers, carrying 100,000 gallons of fuel, were guided into position by helicopters.
The division received word from corps at 5 p.m. that a theaterwide cease-fire was imminent. As far as Gen. Griffith was concerned, the destruction of the Republican Guard was still not finished. There were still significant elements of Medinah at Objective Bonn, and behind them was Hammurabi. “We knew the cease-fire was coming,” Col. V.V. Corn, 1st AD’s division artillery commander told Army Times, “and we wanted to make damned sure that we used our combat power to the max — destroy everything in zone.”
Griffith ordered a tremendous artillery attack for the next morning, a full 45-minute prep, “the most massive prep ever fired,” Col. Corn described it.
As 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade pushed east during the afternoon of the 27th, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 66th Armor encountered an odd-looking berm. Lt. Kent Phillips spotted a communications cable running through the sand. He sent two tanks to check an opening in the berm, while he and his wingman, Staff Sgt. Wayne Williams, moved down the berm’s right side. Suddenly Phillips’ loader, Specialist Chris Renick, hit him on the arm. “Tank!” he yelled. There was a T-55 about 300 meters away from them, part of a well-concealed ambush consisting of three T-55s and a BRDM fitted with an antitank missile launcher. It was part of the rear guard of 10th Armored Division. As the first U.S. tanks went through the berm, their grill doors were exposed.
After the numerous friendly fire incidents of the past few days, tankers were under strict orders to clear all firing op the chain of command. Phillips tried briefly to get to his commander, then decided to hell with it. There wasn’t a lot of time to waste with the chain of command at that moment.
One of the T-55s was apparently trying to decide whether to fire at the grill door of a tank that had just passed it or at Phillips. Phillips decided not to wait to see what decision he made; he fire and destroyed the tank. At the same time, a second T-55 got off two rounds, one of them narrowly missing Phillips. Williams hammered the second tank, and then Phillips dealt with the third. The BRDM had misfired and was lining up another ATGM shot when Phillips took it out as well.
“What the hell did you just shoot?” Phillips’ commander demanded hotly over the radio. Phillips’ response was just as hot, but he didn’t use any bad words.
The 1st of the 41st Infantry task force crossed Wadi al-Batin into Kuwait around 3 p.m., just as Iraqi armored vehicles were pulling into position. A Company knocked out five tanks at 800 meters range and knocked them out. For the next 40 minutes the battalion identified and destroyed isolated enemy vehicles.
Lead elements of the brigade had closed to within 11 kilometers of the military camp on the Basra highway that was their objective when Maj. Gen. Rhame called a halt. The division was now too far in front of the corps. Many of the soldiers used the pause to get out of their filthy chemical protection suits.
That night, 3rd Battalion, 17th Field Artillery, which had reinforced the 2nd AD Forward’s 4th Battalion, 3rd Artillery, took fire from two T-55s. One soldier was wounded and an ammunition carrier was lost. The unit returned fire with .50 caliber machine guns and the tanks backed out of range. A company of tanks from 3/66 Armor was assigned to screen the artillery, and when two T-55s approached to within 300 meters of the battalion perimeter.
Staff Sgt. Hollis Stringer saw tanks to his left and ten armed Iraqi soldiers walking single file toward it. The company fired a warning burst, and the enemy soldiers dived for cover. Eventually, one of the Iraqis approached and acted like he wanted to surrender. While the Americans’ attention was supposedly diverted, the rest of them made a break for the tank. The surrender ruse had been used once too many times, however, and no one was relaxed. The two tanks were destroyed.
2/66 Armor sent out scouts at 5 a.m., and half an hour later the rest of the force moved, headed for the Basra highway, which had to be closed to trap the Iraqi forces from the north. They made their objective, trading fire with a few Iraqi tanks that were trying to escape.
The road itself was a horror. War movies never show the grisliest part of combat, cleaning up the mess. Troops from 3/66 Armor set about collecting bodies strewn across the highway and the surrounding area. No one liked doing, but they could understand why it had to be done. One poor fellow was picked up and covered with a blanket along with the rest. A few hours later he started moving. He was hungry and dehydrated and scared hell out of some of those lugging bodies.
In 1st Armored Division’s sector at 5:30 a.m. six battalions fired, launching 186 MLRS cokets, 336 8-inch rounds and almost 4,000 howitzer shells, all targeted on a road complex through which the Iraqis were attempting to flee. At 5:15 a.m., 2/1 Aviation launched a massed attack of Apache helicopters. The MLRS fire light the sky so brightly the pilots turned off their night vision goggles. With three companies on line, the battalions raced over mostly abandoned and destroyed equipment, taking out some BMPs, tanks and artillery, rushing the 20 kilometers from Phase Line Italy to Phase Line Kiwi, then to Phase Line Monaco. But there was little there. 1st AD had broken through and from dawn until the cease-fire took effect at 8 a.m. there was nothing left to fight.
Some of the soldiers said the cease-fire had come too soon. Griffith was apprehensive at the thought of Hammurabi, which was supposed to be behind Medinah, geting away. Only later did he learn that 24th ID had fallen upon it when it withdrew from the 1st AD zone.
The division had destroyed two brigades of Medinah, one of Tawakalna, two of the 52nd Armored Division and elements of many other Iraqi divisions.
1st Infantry Division was credited with destroying 558 tanks, 468 armored personnel carriers, 212 artillery pieces and 268 air defense systems. They took 11,425 prisoners. The cost: five Abrams tanks, five Bradleys, and one Black Hawk helicopter. 21 soldiers were killed and 67 were wounded.