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I rv • I i- , British troops. “We now have a solid wall across the north.|.-at'
L I David tvans, USMC (RET) tackin8 straight to the east,” Schwarzkopf said in a 27 February
Ultimately, the stunning U.S. military success against Iraq was reflected in the body count—our own. There were more deaths from accidents than from enemy fire. The final toll, according to Pentagon figures: 207 accidental deaths and 124 killed in action. Even the most optimistic of pre-war experts predicted thousands of American casualties. The U.S. Army certainly hedged its preparations.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander, was clearly relieved. Perhaps the absence of death in a desert war that yielded such visible and triumphant victory somehow compensated for the loss of more than 50,000 Americans for little more than a frustrating and indeterminate stand-off in the jungles of Vietnam 20 years ago.
In a war couched in terms of a campaign against Saddam Hussein, not against the Iraqi people, the magnitude of the Iraqi losses was nevertheless something of an embarrassment.
These Ml tanks from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored Division, key players in Desert Storm’s sweeping turning movement, were moving to their forward assembly point when this picture was taken on 15 February 1991.
Schwarzkopf would say only “...a very, very large number of dead.” Saudi sources spoke of Iraqi military casualties in the range of 80,000 to 100,000. Other estimates vary from a low of
- to as many as 150,000 enemy dead. It is unlikely that even the Iraqis know.
Their retreat from Kuwait City turned into a bloody rout on 26 February when allied aircraft pounced on the columns of tanks, trucks, and busses jamming the highway leading north.
They were making a futile journey to nowhere. Days before, the bridges north of Basra had been bombed, cutting their avenue of retreat. Between the retreating columns at Mutlaa and those broken bridges were fully eight divisions of U.S., French, and
The whole notion of a veteran Iraqi military fighting neophyie Americans was backwards, said U.S. Army Major Martin Stanton, an adviser to the Saudi military who was caught on leave in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded. Until he was captured, Stanton was one of the few Western military officers to get a close-up look at Saddam Hussein’s feared host before the war. Commercial busses, loaded with Iraqi troops, rode right down the middin of the streets of Kuwait City.
“An infantry company defending in sector would have tom them up,” Stanton said. A unit of T-72 tanks followed. They parked in front of the hotel in which Stanton was hiding. “The crews didn’t check their track tension. There was no bore sighting of the guns. Not a single engine compartment was opened if three days,” he recalled.
An Iraqi artillery unit appeared little better, the crews evidencing a distinct preference for comfort over gunnery. The Iraqi battery took up position in a park close to a high-rise hotel- which forced the gunners to super-elevate their guns and restricted their firing options. A parking lot was nearby, where the battery could have emplaced without having to super-elevate the guns, Stanton noted, but the park was shady.
“They set out their aiming stakes and just sat,” he said- “They were vastly overconfident. The attitude seemed to be that, after all, they beat the Iranians,” he concluded. “That does not translate into their ability to stand up to a Western army,” he predicted. “We are going to fight the kind of war at which we excel: massive firepower, hi-tech, over open ground. In fact, we’ve been practicing it for a decade at Ft. Irwin,” he said- referring to the Army’s National Training Center in the California desert. The veteran army is ours. Theirs is the green army- which made its reputation fighting an inept mass of Iranian light infantry,” he said.
Major General James Starling, U.S. Army, was Schwarzkopf s chief logistician and the man responsible for coordinating the massive airlift and sealift of heavy forces to Saudi Arabia. In an interview on 11 February, he said, “As of today, we have unloaded 380 ships from the U.S. and Europe [andj we’re running, on average, about 100 flights a day.”
Lieutenant General William G. Pagonis, U.S. Army, one of the architects of that airlift, later described the amount of gear flown in as the equivalent of a line of mid-size automobiles, ten abreast, stretching all the way from St. Louis to Atlanta.
A U.S. pilot flying for Saudi Aramco, the giant oil firm, said. “The Saudis were stunned by what they saw: huge airplanes arriving when the Americans said they would, and hundreds of troops marching out of them that looked like real soldiers.’
It all happened with extraordinary speed. “The Vietnam buildup was over a five-year period. It built up to about 550,000 people. We’re now over 500,000, and we’ve done that over about six months,” Starling recalled.
The units assembled into convoys, which rolled north along the main highway from Dhahran. Under the heavy pounding, the right lane turned into a rippled washboard. At the tap-line road, the convoys turned and headed for assembly areas far to the west of the Kuwaiti border.
The meaning of the deployment was clear—a direct U.S.-led
Desert Storm
thrust into Iraq to sever the logistical aorta sustaining the Iraqi army in the so-called Kuwait theater of operations.
The XVIII Airborne Corps, the Army’s premier reaction •wee, deployed as far west as Rafha. The VII Corps from Germany took up position between the XVIII Airborne Corps and foe 1st and 2d Marine Divisions, which were poised to strike just south of the Kuwaiti border. The VII Corps was positioned to r°H across the great stony desert just west of Kuwait. It was a massive concentration of fighting power in one corps: about
- tanks and 4,000 armored fighting vehicles.
. The Army and Marine ground forces totalled about ten divi- s,°ns. By way of comparison, five American divisions were assembled for the D-Day landing in Normandy in 1944. In terms
firepower, the difference was even more significant than the number of divisions engaged. The M-4 Sherman tank of 1944 mounted a 75-mm. gun. The M1A1 Abrams tank of 1991 is °utfitted with a monster 120-mm. gun and a thermal sight for spotting enemy targets at night and through smoke.
As these forces were moving into position, and training against replicas of Iraqi defenses, the air campaign began on 17 fonuary, less than two days after the U.N. deadline expired for foe Iraqis to quit Kuwait.
“It was one massive, coordinated strike. At the start of the 'var they had a time-on-target window of 30 minutes,” said Captain Alan Miller, who led a flight of four F-15C fighters over haq that first night. “It was really very similar to Red Flag,” he said, referring to the regularly scheduled training exercises fought in the skies near Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. “It’s just °fiented north instead of west.... You have a line. Prior to the dme-on-target window, none of the offensive forces cross that [foe. We got our gas, came off the tanker, and everybody’s wait- fog,” he said.
As he taxied to the end of the runway at A1 Kharj, where the Air Force deployed more than 130 tactical jets, Miller saw the foil panoply of the deadly air show about to begin.
“The arming area was full. The taxi ways were full. The trail °f airplanes back to their parking areas was all lined up with a>rplanes with their lights on. It was like a flush [ed. note: maximum effort launch]. It was [F-15C] Eagle after Eagle after Ifogle...between us and the F-15E Strike Eagles that were launching at the same time,” he said.
I was a member of the small press pool there that night, and it "ms an awesome sight. The thunder of afterburners rolled across foe desert stillness continuously for a good 30 minutes as the Planes took off at 20 second intervals. As I stood near the end of foe runway, the sound waves slapped against my chest and the ground shook. There was a feeling of immense physical power as those heavily laden planes labored into the night sky.
Miller described his mission: “We were supposed to be the tip °f the spear. Our tasking was ... right at the beginning of the war to sweep with 16 other F-15Cs in pretty much a wall across the border and up to Baghdad and back out. It was to provide air superiority from the very beginning so that all the strikers could go in—the strikers that did not have the benefit of stealth.”
He was referring to about two-dozen F-l 17 stealth fighters that Hew in just ahead of the main strike forces. Also making the first Penetrations into Iraqi airspace that night were other stealth Weapons—scores of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The Tomahawk is not generally regarded as invisible to enemy radars, but from the head-on aspect it has the radar cross-section of a basketball. The F-l 17s and Tomahawks were targeted against high-priority Iraqi communications facilities.
The second wave was the main punch—hundreds of aircraft from carriers at sea and from bases across Saudi Arabia.
Captain Mark Aired, U.S. Air Force, led a group of six F-15E fighter bombers. “It had been planned that, to get under the
These U.S. Air Force F-I5Es carrying laser-guided bombs for point targets, also carried Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defense. The lead is in afterburner as his wingman waits to roll.
EW/GCI net [early warning and ground control intercept radars], we would start out at 17,000 feet and start descending down to what would be below their coverage some distance out. The last refueling we did was at 5,000 feet, about 150 miles south of the border,” he said. Armed helicopters from the U.S. Army were assigned the task of knocking out Iraqi early-warning radars on the border. “As we approached this one radar, about 25 miles from it, I watched this thing blow up in front of me,” Aired said.
Major Bill Polowitzer was the weapons officer in the back seat. “Up to that time, I was convinced, ‘Are we the only ones who know this? Have we got the right day?’ ” They watched the radar burning furiously as they roared past at 500 feet.
Aired recalled, “We could see cars driving down the highways and thinking that guy could stop and telephone somebody 150 miles away,” alerting Iraqi defenses. Speed, darkness, and a radio blackout were their best protection. “Obviously, we’re doing this with every light off the airplane so...anybody along that road.. .they just hear a noise and have no idea where it came from and where it’s going,” Aired said.
Their target was a Scud missile launching site. “Our objective was to keep Iraq from launching Scuds at Israel,” Aired said. “Three bombs hit the ground before mine did. And those were from the stealth fighters. They went in five minutes before we did,” he said. The first bomb hit a key communications facility in downtown Baghdad.
Lieutenant General Charles Homer, U.S. Air Force, the Joint Force Air Component Commander, was in his Riyadh operations center that night. “When Bernard Shaw went off the air for CNN [Cable News Network], the whole room exploded in cheers. That was the most direct feedback we ever heard. It was right on the minute the bomb was supposed to hit,” he said.
Aired said the surprise was complete. “Bill and I felt like they didn't know we were there until our bombs hit the target,” he said. The Iraqi reaction, however, was dramatic. The antiaircraft fire, he recalled, was like huge “...fourth of July waterfalls, where sparklers are coming off in a great display, except this stuff is going up 6,000 feet and then coming down.”
The air war was waged with unrelenting intensity. Over the next 42 days, allied air forces flew more than 109,000 sorties and
Iraqi troops experienced more than a rain of bombs during Desert Storm—leaflets urging surrender rained down from the skies over Kuwait and southern Iraq.
dropped 88,500 tons of bombs, of which only 6,500 tons—a mere 7%—were precision-guided munitions.
The rain of bombs was matched by a snowstorm of leaflets (see above) that were part of an ongoing psychological warfare campaign. The leaflet campaign was equal part soft sell and hard sell. The soft sell came as an invitation date lined Allied Forces Theater of Operation, with a text that read:
“You are invited to join the allied forces with the full advantage of obligatory Arab hospitality, security, safety and good medical care, and the return to the family as soon as the situation is over which Saddam Hussein created for us.”
“My Iraqi soldier brother, this is an open invitation to you and your fighting brothers. We wish for you to comply when you have the chance.”
The reverse showed an Iraqi soldier, with his rifle slung upside down, displaying the invitation to a welcoming Saudi soldier. The left-side picture (Arabic is read from right to left) showed three other Iraqi soldiers, as shown by the flags on their shoulder patches, enjoying a welcoming feast.
The hard-sell message featured a B-52 bomber as the messenger. The front of the leaflet showed a B-52 dropping a string of bombs and the warning: “We presented to you proof of our allied superiority. For the second time, we give you another chance to stay alive.” The reverse, printed in red, contained a more explicit warning: “Two days ago we notified you that we will bomb the 20th Infantry Division. We’ve kept our promise and we bombed it yesterday. We will repeat this bombing tomorrow. You have a choice, either to stay and face death or accept the allied forces invitation and save your lives.”
Hundreds of Iraqis surrendered before the ground war was launched, but it is more likely that entire units were shattered by the bombing. Miller flew escort for some of the B-52 strikes. “Up to Basra and carpet-bomb,” he said. “And the first thing I thought as I started to see the lights explode on the ground is ‘Good Lord, think of those soldiers and what they’re experiencing,’ ” he said.
Major Bobby Jemigan, an F-16 pilot, flew low over the battlefield in Kuwait and described a landscape more like the surface of the moon. “A long swath of craters” from B-52 strikes, he recalled. “There are areas of the earth that are just blackened circles....probably where some cluster bombs went off,” he said. Describing the explosion of one cluster bomb, where hundreds of bomblets spatter and sparkle across the ground like a rolling artillery barrage, Jemigan said, “It looked like there was not a piece of the earth as big as this table that there was not something hitting it.” Jernigan was sitting at a three-by-four foot table. Asked how badly he thought the Republican Guards were holding up, he replied, “Badly, badly.”
Indeed, after the war it became apparent that many Iraqi units still in the Kuwait theater of operations were badly under strength. It wasn't just the dead and wounded from the bombing, but from desertions.
Schwarzkopf capitalized on the Iraqis’ utter lack of air power. By deploying two corps to the west, he was able to go around the bulk of the enemy forces pinned down in Kuwait and just north, around Basra. Was the ground campaign even necessary? According to the ground troops, it was. In the inevitable postmortem, the men of the ’Gator Navy [the amphibious forces] and the Marines are clearly frustrated by the lack of opportunity to conduct an amphibious operation. In an interview on board his flagship, the USS Nassau (LHA-4), on 24 February, Rear Admiral John LaPlante, the amphibious task force commander, said, “I don’t have a tasking, and frankly I don’t expect one.”
A landing, he said, was expected, but any prospect of the
- embarked Marines storming ashore probably evaporated on 18 February, when mines disabled the Aegis cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59) and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LPH-10). The Princeton's, keel was split by the force of a mine thought to be a bottom-dweller. "We know that because the hull wasn’t breached,” said LaPlante.
Ironically, the Tripoli was launching mine-clearing helicopters when a moored mine struck her bow, blowing a 20 by 30 foot hole in her side.
‘Mined water not only slows you up, it brings you to a dead stop, said LaPlante. Indeed, reports of a few dozen mines quickly escalated to 150 or more, many of them the hard-to-find bottom mines. “You can’t go fast with them [in clearing operations], said LaPlante. In any event, a risky amphibious operation may not have been necessary.
Ashore, the 1st and 2d Marine Divisions found the Iraqi mine fields and barriers far less formidable than expected. Instead of finding belts of mines a mile or more deep, they found a single belt only about 150 yards deep. They probed at many points, and poured through where resistance was weakest to exploit the opportunity to get behind the Iraqis. They took their main objective, the international airport near Kuwait City, from the north.
Although resistance was stout in isolated instances, both Marine and Army units easily overran their objectives. The surprisingly easy victory is being cited as a failure of U.S. intelligence. The official estimates of Iraqi strength gave considerable weight to the sheer size of Iraq’s million-strong army and the amount of high-technology hardware acquired from Soviet and Western arms suppliers.
Colonel Evans is the military affairs editor for the Chicago Tribune. He was a career Marine Corps officer who saw combat service in Vietnam. He wrote “From the Gulf,” in the January 1991 Proceedings.