America at War: Concise Histories of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexingtonto Afghanistan

Home > Other > America at War: Concise Histories of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexingtonto Afghanistan > Page 35
America at War: Concise Histories of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexingtonto Afghanistan Page 35

by Terence T. Finn


  The sandstorm coincided with a pause in the American advance. After several days of hard fighting, little sleep, and a trek of many miles, McKiernan’s soldiers, principally the 3rd Infantry Division, were in need of rest. Moreover, they were running short of supplies. So the general ordered a pause in the action.

  The time was well spent. Recognizing the requirement for his now lengthy supply lines to be secure, McKiernan directed two of the U.S. Army’s most elite units, the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Air Assault Division, to relieve the 3rd Infantry at As Samawah and Najaf. Their task was to ensure the flow of supplies north and to seize control of both towns. This they did, though not without a fight.

  No longer tied down at As Samawah and Najaf, the 3rd Infantry Division was now at full strength. It would spearhead the army’s drive into Baghdad. The question was how best to have it move on the Iraqi capital. Once again, the pause was useful. McKiernan and his senior commanders used the time to fix on a plan for the attack. For America’s army, this meant a series of feints to confuse the Iraqis and then a Patton-like push through a slice of Iraq’s territory known as the Karbala Gap.

  ***

  America was not the only country to invade Iraq. The United Kingdom also participated in the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein. The British contribution was substantial. It numbered forty-six thousand service personnel. Among these were sailors who manned thirty-three warships the Royal Navy deployed to the Persian Gulf. The ships included HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s largest warship, and six small mine-clearing vessels. The latter performed the essential task of clearing the narrow waterways to Basra and Umm Qasr, Iraq’s two ports.

  Another British warship deserves mention by name. This is HMS Turbulent, a nuclear attack submarine. When sent to the Gulf, she had not seen England for more than ten months, having traveled fifty thousand miles, forty thousand of them underwater. Turbulent’s contribution to the campaign was a salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from beneath the sea, that hit their targets in Iraq miles and miles away.

  On March 20, 2003, British land forces took part in the opening assault of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their objectives were the Rumaila oil fields and the oil terminals of the Al-Faw Peninsula. American and British commanders feared the Iraqis would torch the former and open the spigots of the latter, thereby causing environmental harm and economic loss. With assistance from U.S. marines both objectives were met. But the effort was not easy. The British troops encountered considerable opposition, especially from Iraqi tanks and artillery.

  We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag which will be flown is their own.

  So spoke a British army officer to his troops prior to the start of the war. Having secured the oil fields and occupied the Al-Faw Peninsula, the twenty thousand soldiers comprising Britain’s assault force advanced on Basra. With a population of 1.5 million people, this was Iraq’s second largest city and key to the southern region of the country. British troops reached the outskirts of Basra on Day Two of the war. But they made no attempt to enter. Instead, they cordoned off Basra, and conducted raids into the city. In turn, Iraqi forces more than once attempted to break out, often employing T-55 tanks. The British were equipped with their own tanks, the first-rate Challenger 2, and beat back the Iraqi forces.

  On March 30 the British staged an attack of their own, at a suburb of Basra called Abu al-Khasib. In a nineteen-hour firefight against numerous Iraqis, they carried the day, killing seventy of the enemy and taking three hundred Iraqis prisoner. The next day, in another fight, twenty-five Iraqi tanks were put out of commission, as were two hundred Iraqi soldiers. Soon thereafter resistance in the city melted away, and the British occupied Basra.

  What they found was a city whose population was in dire straits. Food was scarce, medicines were in short supply, and city services were in need of fixing. Moreover, Saddam’s men, many of them fedayeen, had exercised a firm control, killing those Iraqis they deemed insufficiently loyal.

  Responding to the challenges, the British shipped humanitarian aid to the Iraqis. This had to be delivered by sea, which is why Umm Qasr had been seized. British troops had captured the port at the end of March, though not without a fight. During the battle the British defense minister described the Iraqi port as similar to Southampton. To which a British commando replied, “It’s not at all like Southampton: there’s no beer . . . and they’re shooting at us.”

  ***

  The United States Marine Corps is rightly proud of its capability to conduct amphibious operations. In the war to remove Saddam Hussein, the Corps would play an important role, but its role was similar to that of the army’s 3rd Infantry Division. The marines would conduct a land campaign. There would be no assault from the sea.

  For the campaign, the American marines deployed a substantial portion of their overall strength. Slightly more than sixty thousand marines took part in Operation Iraqi Freedom. At 8:30 P.M. local time on March 20, 2003, pursuant to David McKiernan’s plan, the marines drove through the sand berms and entered Iraq.

  Initial resistance was light, although the first American to be killed in combat was a marine. Along with the British, the marines’ initial task was to secure the Rumaila oil fields, and then they were to proceed northwest to An Nasiriyah. Once there, they were to relieve the army’s 3rd Infantry Division and take control of the town. The latter task was necessary because at An Nasiriyah, as noted above, the marines were to cross the Euphrates River and then advance along Highways 1 and 7 to the Tigris. All this they accomplished. But it was at An Nasiriyah that the fedayeen made their debut. Looking like civilians (because they were civilians), these irregulars were Islamic fundamentalists eager to kill Americans. In combat with the marines and McKiernan’s soldiers, the fedayeen posed a serious threat. Moreover, they seemed willing, even anxious, to die.

  There were three bridges at An Nasiriyah that the American marines needed to control. Because the city was largely Shiite, the U.S. forces expected only minor resistance. But the presence of the fedayeen along with Iraqi army troops turned An Nasiriyah from the anticipated cakewalk into a bloody brawl that lasted for more than a week. When the battle concluded, the bridges, and the city, belonged to the Americans. But the cost was high: nineteen U.S. marines were dead and fifty-seven were wounded. Their opponents, however, suffered far greater losses. The marines believe they killed two thousand of their enemy.

  The marines fighting at An Nasiriyah were a unit independent of the main marine strike force that eventually would reach Baghdad. With some five thousand men, the unit was called Task Force Tarawa. The name came from one of the Corps’s more brutal (though successful) battles of the Second World War, Tarawa being a once-obscure island in the Pacific. The fight for the bridges at An Nasiriyah was not equal in scale to that of Tarawa, but like the 1943 fight, it has earned a place of honor in the history of the Corps.

  Unfortunately for the Americans, the first U.S. troops to enter An Nasiriyah were neither the marines of Task Force Tarawa nor the 3rd Infantry soldiers they had relieved. The first troops in the city belonged to the U.S. Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. These were support soldiers, driving supply trucks to combat forces farther north. Their convoy had split into sections, one of which, with sixteen vehicles and thirty-three soldiers, arrived at An Nasiriyah on the morning of March 23, 2003. There, they were to turn left and proceed northwest. Instead, they continued straight and drove into the Iraqi city. After crossing several bridges they realized their mistake, turned around, and retraced their steps. This took them down a two-mile road later dubbed “Ambush Alley.” The first time through, the Iraqis had just stared, surprised by the absence of American weaponry. The second time, when the Americans returned, the Iraqis and their fedayeen allies opened fire. The result was a mini-massacre. Eleven soldiers of the 507th were killed. Six became prisoners of war (one of them
a woman, Private First Class Jessica Lynch, who later was rescued).

  March 23 was a day the Americans would like to forget. That day the 507th Maintenance Company was hammered along Ambush Alley. Then several marines were killed in an effort to secure An Nasiriyah. That same morning, the army’s vaunted Apache helicopters failed to perform as advertised in a strike against an Iraqi army division. On March 23, in executing the attack, an Apache crashed on takeoff, one was shot down, and the remaining thirty-two machines were heavily damaged. Compounding the failure, very little harm was done to the Iraqi unit.

  The Americans experienced one further setback on March 23. Using the Patriot air defense missile system, they inadvertently shot down a British warplane, killing both crew members. So, most appropriately, the U.S. Army’s account of Operation Iraqi Freedom calls March 23, 2003, “the darkest day.”

  Once An Nasiriyah was under control, the marines were in position to start their drive to the Iraqi capital. One force of marines drove north along Highway 7. Another advanced to Ad Diwaniyah along Highway 1. They met at An Numaniyah, crossing the Tigris at that point. Task Force Tarawa was given the job of securing the ever-lengthening supply lines. This was no easy task as its area of responsibility equaled the size of America’s South Carolina. Supplies, of course, were vital to the advancing attack force. Marine requirements for food, ammunition, and fuel were high. Each day, supply trucks needed to deliver 250,000 gallons of gas to keep the combat vehicles moving. As the marines advanced, these trucks, starting their journey in Kuwait, had to travel some three hundred miles.

  The terrain that the marines traversed was one of agricultural lands, laced with small rivers and canals. Unlike the army troops, the marines had little desert to deal with, for they fought largely on lands between Iraq’s two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris.

  They reached the latter, at An Numaniyah, on April 2. But it had not been an easy journey. Iraqi troops fought hard and the fedayeen were out in force. The marines moved forward in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and the ubiquitous Humvees. Artillery and Apaches provided protection. Nonetheless, ambushes were many and the marines took casualties.

  As the marines got close to Baghdad, Iraqi resistance stiffened. Tanks and artillery were employed to stop the Americans. Near Al Aziziyah, forty miles south of the capital, an eight-hour battle took place, which Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr., in their book The Iraq War: A Military History, described as “the most significant battle against enemy conventional forces during the war.” Once again the Americans won the day. It seemed like nothing could stop the marines; at least the Iraqis couldn’t. But as the army’s history of the campaign states, “getting to Baghdad looked easier on the map than it was in practice.”

  The marines arrived in the environs of Baghdad on April 6.. The next day, under fire, they crossed the Diyala River, a small waterway that flows into the Tigris River just east of the city. Using tanks, amphibious vehicles, helicopters, and artillery, the American force moved into the Iraqi capital, staying east of the Tigris. By then, many in the Iraqi military had taken off their uniforms and, to employ a phrase a number of observers later used, “melted away.”

  The marines’ campaign had been a success. Starting at the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, America’s maritime soldiers had fought their way to Baghdad. Skeptics would say they had faced a third-rate adversary. Perhaps, but this adversary was well armed and, more than once, fought tenaciously.

  The campaign was not over when the marines crossed the Diyala. There would be several days of combat in the city itself before the marines were able to lay down their weapons. What they had accomplished no longer may be of interest to an American public tired of the quagmire Iraq became. But historians, at least some of them, may take note of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Iraqi campaign. One British observer, as reported by Murray and Scales, called it “one that should be taught in staff colleges for years to come.”

  ***

  The American assault on Iraq in 2003 encompassed six separate military endeavors. These were mutually reinforcing and, in fact, constituted a single, integrated campaign. In no particular order the six were: (1) the U.S. marine advance to Baghdad via An Nasiriyah and the Tigris, (2) the British operations in the south, (3) the naval efforts from warships in the Persian Gulf, (4) the aerial strikes that so greatly aided U.S. and British ground troops, (5) the U.S. Army’s drive to Baghdad along the Euphrates River, and (6) Special Forces operations north and west of the Iraqi capital.

  As noted earlier, Special Forces in Iraq had several tasks. They were to shut down Iraqi Scud missile operations, keep enemy army units in the north from reinforcing the defenses of Baghdad, and both assist and restrain the Iraqi Kurds who inhabited much of Iraq’s northern lands. When the war ended, the Special Forces had successfully carried out all three tasks.

  The Kurds were an Islamic people who, while Iraqis, enjoyed semi-independence from Saddam’s regime. They lived north of what was called the Green Line. This was a one-hundred-mile-long line of demarcation, the south of which was controlled by Saddam. The Kurds had little love for the Iraqi ruler and, thus, welcomed the presence of U.S. Special Forces. Complicating an already complex political situation were the Kurds living in eastern Turkey. They wished, as did many of the Iraqi Kurds, to establish an independent Kurdish nation. This desire greatly upset the Turks. They saw in American support of the Iraqi Kurds the possibility of consequences that would lead to a new country, Kurdistan, part of which would be carved out of their own territory.

  During late March and early April, the American Special Forces, augmented by regular U.S. Army troops and marines, and enjoying firepower delivered by American aircraft, defeated their Iraqi opponents on more than one occasion. At the same time they supported the Iraqi Kurds, providing weapons, medicines, and tactical advice.

  Three specific military operations in the north were particularly noteworthy. The first, which began on March 26 and lasted four days, was a successful attack on an Iranian-backed group of al-Qaeda terrorists known as Ansar al-Islam. The Kurds detested this group and, with 6,500 men, supported by U.S. Special Forces and American airpower, assaulted their mountain strongholds, killing many of the terrorists.

  The second operation was an all-American action. One thousand soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted onto an airfield in the Kurdish-controlled portion of Iraq (this was the forty-fourth combat jump in the history of the U.S. Army). The next day, March 27, additional paratroopers were flown in, as were tanks and supplies, the latter for both the Americans and their Kurdish allies.

  The airborne operation showcased U.S. military strength in northern Iraq. It also bolstered the morale of the Kurds and reinforced the incorrect belief held by the Iraqis that the Americans would employ paratroopers to seize Baghdad. That the brigade’s drop zone already had been secured by Special Forces did not detract from its value.

  The third military operation that deserves mention took place early in April. At that time, U.S. Special Forces and the Kurds were preparing to attack Kirkuk. This city, two hundred miles north of Baghdad, and its environs were rich with oil reserves. Those who controlled the city controlled the oil. The Kurds were eager to seize Kirkuk. However, before the attack occurred, the Iraqi defenders left. The Kurds then occupied the city. For the Americans, this was unacceptable. It constituted a possible prelude to Kurdish independence, which, in addition to bringing about likely action by the Turkish armed forces, jeopardized the territorial integrity of Iraq. The latter possibility concerned the Americans, who, after all, had invaded Iraq to remove Saddam and his regime, not to dismember the country. The U.S. Special Forces acted immediately. Exercising both political skill and military muscle, they persuaded the Kurds to withdraw.

  ***

  Once the great sandstorm—the shamal—had subsided, the U.S. soldiers that had reached Najaf were ready to move on Baghdad. The march “up country” was over. The t
ime had come to first surround and then seize the Iraqi capital.

  One issue Americans had to consider was where to cross the Euphrates River. Their commanders decided to do so in the narrow gap between the town of Karbala and the large lake to its east, Bahr al Milh. With Karbala just fifty miles south of Baghdad, McKiernan expected the Iraqis to put up a stiff resistance. And if Saddam was ever going to employ weapons of mass destruction, the American general assumed he would do so as they approached the Iraqi capital.

  To confuse the Iraqis and to have their focus on somewhere other than the Karbala Gap, the Americans conducted a series of feints. These were five simultaneous attacks each of which McKiernan wanted Saddam to conclude might be the principal attack. One of the feints was at Hindiyah. Another was at Kifl, a town north of Najaf but east of the great river. Kifl was full of fedayeen who used it as a transit point for deployment farther south. The resulting battle in and around Kifl turned out to be more of a fight than the Americans had expected. But the outcome was similar to other battles in Iraq: U.S. troops carried the day.

  The drive through the Gap began at midnight on April 1. Abrams tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers led the way. Their immediate objective was the bridge at Yasir al-Khuder. This spanned the Euphrates and was just twenty miles from Baghdad. The Iraqis, who had repositioned troops away from the Gap in response to the feints, nevertheless fought hard. Using T-72s, Russian-built main battle tanks, and artillery, Saddam’s soldiers made a determined effort to halt the Americans. They failed, but punctured the belief now held by many that the Iraqi army was incapable of striking back.

 

‹ Prev