America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan

by Terence T. Finn

  ***

  As the air strikes continued, Iraqi military assets inside Kuwait increasingly were targeted. The goal was to reduce their combat effectiveness by half, especially the T-72 tanks, which the Iraqis possessed in great number. Whether the air strikes accomplished that goal remains in dispute, although no doubt exists that the Iraqi army’s inventory of fighting vehicles was greatly reduced.

  Pounded from the air, Saddam responded in kind, but with a weapon far different than what Coalition forces were using. This was the Scud, a crude ballistic missile that carried a very small warhead and was not terribly accurate. As a military device the Scud was little more than a nuisance. But when launched at cities, it became a weapon of political terror, with great psychological impact.

  The first Scuds were fired on January 18. They struck the Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv. By targeting the Jewish state, Saddam hoped to have the Israelis retaliate. Were they to do so, Arab nations in the Coalition would be seen as allied with Israel in a war against another Arab state. This would be unacceptable in the Arab world and would necessitate a withdrawal from the Coalition. Egypt and Saudi Arabia especially could not be seen as partnering with Israel.

  Saddam’s strategy was clever, but it did not work. At the urging of President Bush and Secretary Baker, Israeli leaders refrained from responding. This represented a significant change in policy, as the Israeli position was to always strike back when attacked. Helping the Israelis exercise restraint was the immediate deployment of U.S. Army Patriot missiles to Israel. These were intended to shoot down any incoming Scuds. An additional incentive to the Israelis was the promise of additional military aid from the United States.

  In total, Saddam launched eighty-six Scuds during the war. They caused very little physical damage, save for one strike. This took place on February 25, when a Scud hit a U.S. army barracks in Dhahran. Twenty-eight Americans were killed, and almost a hundred were wounded.

  Numerous Patriots were fired in attempts to destroy the incoming Scuds. At the time, the American missiles were seen to be successful. In fact, they were not. Often the Scud broke apart as it nosed down on the target, and the Patriot might hit one of the pieces, with the rest, including the warhead, landing on the city below. The Patriot’s value lay less in its actual ability to intercept the Scud than in the belief, at the time, that it was able to do so.

  The best way to stop the Scuds was to prevent their launch. British and American Special Forces, therefore, operated inside Iraq trying to destroy their launch sites. Stationary Scud batteries were put out of commission. But mobile facilities (essentially trucks with Scuds) proved difficult to locate, so many remained untouched.

  Political pressure to halt the Scud attacks was immense. Coalition aircraft devoted considerable resources to hunting the missiles, with results far from satisfactory. Despite the large number of warplanes allocated to finding them, the Scuds never were put out of action.

  As Coalition planes each day struck targets in Kuwait and Iraq, diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis continued. One last such effort was made by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, who dispatched a special envoy to Baghdad. This, like other diplomatic initiatives, failed. Days later, when Saddam rejected President Bush’s final ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait, the time had arrived for Coalition ground forces to enter the fray. They attacked on February 24, 1991.

  Schwarzkopf had deployed forces along the Saudi border with Kuwait. Adjacent to the Persian Gulf were troops belonging to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Farther west was a second group of Arab soldiers. In between were two divisions of United States marines, supplemented by a U.S. Army armored brigade. Still farther west was Schwarzkopf’s “iron fist,” VII Corps and XVIII Corps, which included the British and French armored units. In its totality, the Coalition’s army—some 620,000 soldiers—was one of the most powerful military forces ever assembled.

  Early on the 24th, across a 270-mile front, Coalition troops went on the offensive. Tanks plowed through sand berms, troops carved pathways through the minefields, helicopters flew low firing rockets, artillery lit up the sky (the U.S. 1st Infantry’s artillery delivered more than six hundred thousand bomblets within a period of thirty minutes). At the receiving end of this massive firepower were the Iraqi defenders. Poor souls, they were overwhelmed. Some chose to fight and they were killed. Many more simply gave up, and lived. On that first day of combat, some thirteen thousand surrendered.

  Along the coast, Egyptian and Saudi troops (and a few Kuwaiti soldiers who had escaped from the Iraqis) made good progress. Supported by naval gunfire, these troops engaged their foe and beat them back. They would be the first Coalition units to enter Kuwait City.

  To their left, the U.S. marines also made good progress. By the second day, after beating off Iraqi counterattacks, they were but ten miles from the Kuwaiti capital. Unusual for the marines, they had fought several tank battles, taking on the Iraqi T-72s. By the time the marines had secured Kuwait’s international airport, more than three hundred enemy tanks no longer were in service.

  To help convince Saddam’s generals that the main thrust of the Coalition forces would be a northward strike into southern Kuwait from Saudi Arabia, Schwarzkopf had directed that those U.S. troops in the west not part of the Left Hook also attack the Iraqis directly opposite them. This took place and was carried out by the American 1st Infantry Division. Its commander, Major General Thomas Rhame, wanted to win quickly and with, he joked, “enough of us left to have a reunion.” The division accomplished the former and no doubt later enjoyed the latter.

  The most striking element of Norman Schwarzkopf’s plan of battle—and the most risky—was the flanking maneuver required of his two most powerful units. They were to charge into the southern Iraqi desert then turn ninety degrees and hit the Republican Guards from the west. The two units, VII Corps and XVIII Corps, were well equipped for the job. As has been noted, they were armed with tanks, helicopters, and artillery, all of which were high-tech and deadly.

  The role of XVIII Corps, and its 118,000 soldiers, was to race north from a point 350 miles inland to the Euphrates River and, once there, to (1) block the retreat of Republican Guard forces from Kuwait, and (2) then alter course and join the assault toward Kuwait City. With considerable skill and speed, the corps did both. One of its component units, the 101st Airborne Division, conducted the largest combat air assault in history when three hundred of its helicopters transported two thousand of its soldiers into battle.

  VII Corps’s role was to smash the Republican Guard units in Kuwait. In February 1991 it fought a series of small but nasty engagements close to the Wadi al-Batin. This is a lengthy dry riverbed that essentially marks Kuwait’s western border with Iraq. Together, these engagements, at 73 Easting, at Medina Ridge, at Norfolk, and at other locations (including one designated Waterloo where British tanks defeated the Iraqis) have been given the name of the Battle of Wadi al-Batin. They were all limited in duration but violent in character.

  Seventy-three Easting was simply a place on U.S. Army maps (initially such was the shortage of maps that the Pentagon’s Defense Mapping Agency had to produce 13.5 million of them). The desert terrain was so featureless that American units depended on artificially drawn grid lines to identify where they were and where they were going. In the Iraqi and Kuwait deserts there were no towns, rivers, or hills to serve as points of reference. Seventy-three Easting was inside Iraq, several miles north of VII Corps’s departure point. Late in the afternoon of February 26, the Corps’s forward reconnaissance unit, the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, did what it was supposed to do. It found the Iraqi Republican Guard armored units. These were dug in, with their tanks half-buried on the downward slope of a rise in the desert, waiting to ambush the Americans. It was a classic defense position, one the Iraqis believed would lead to victory.

  It did not. The Iraqis were too far back and their aim was off. The Abrams fired on the move, making Iraqi artillery fire ineffective, and the tank
s’ lethal shells blasted through the sand barricades, destroying the T-72s.

  Douglas Macgregor, an American officer who fought in the battle, described the action. His account, while referring to the engagement at 73 Easting, applies as well to the other battles along the Wadi al-Batin. Writes Macgregor:

  Metal smashed against metal as killing round after killing round slammed into the Iraqi army’s Soviet-made tanks. A few hours later, the few surviving Republican Guards, exhausted men in dirty green uniforms, huddled together as prisoners of war in the nighttime cold.

  Macgregor also described the violent character of modern combat between tanks:

  Armored warfare is hair-trigger fast, frighteningly lethal, and unforgiving. Men are vaporized, eviscerated, blown apart, asphyxiated, or burned to death when an incoming tank projectile or missile strikes, and the margin between victor and vanquished can be a fraction of a second.

  The speed at which the “frighteningly lethal” combat between American and Iraqi tanks occurred at 73 Easting is illustrated by noting that the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment destroyed thirty-seven T-72s in less than six minutes. A somewhat similar outcome took place at Medina Ridge. There, the Iraqis lost 186 tanks in a matter of hours. The two battles and several others demonstrated the superiority of the Abrams and their crews. In total, during its eighty-nine hours of combat, VII Corps destroyed 1,350 enemy tanks and more than 1,200 armored personnel carriers, against the loss of four tanks and a small number of armored vehicles. Victory belonged to the Americans.

  Schwarzkopf’s plan had worked, and brilliantly. The Republican Guards had been defeated. But they had not been destroyed. The Central Command chief thought he knew why. VII Corps had moved too slowly. During the battle, he had let his impatience be known to the VII Corps commander, Lieutenant General Fred Franks. Franks, a cautious field commander, had wanted to concentrate his assault forces and have them ready logistically. This took time. Moreover, he wanted to be sure that, once his soldiers pulled the trigger, they were not inadvertently aiming at fellow Americans.

  Who was correct? Swiftness in battle is often a virtue. But so is preparation. Significantly, in his memoirs, Schwarzkopf backed off his criticism of Franks, writing:

  I . . . also decided that I had been too harsh in my criticism of VII Corps’ slow progress during the ground battle. . . . Franks was a fine commander who had carried out his assigned mission as he had seen it. . . . What I did know was that we had inflicted a crushing defeat on Saddam’s forces and accomplished every one of our military objectives. That was good enough for me.

  With the Iraqis’ defeat in battle and with their subsequent withdrawal from Kuwait, President Bush directed that a cease-fire be put in place. It took effect in Iraq on February 28. One highly visible event encouraged the American leader to believe the time had come to end the loss of life.

  Highway 6 links Kuwait City and the Iraqi town of Basra. As the Iraqis were fleeing toward Basra on the highway, they were attacked by Coalition aircraft. The planes wreaked havoc on the Iraqis. More than fifteen hundred vehicles were destroyed, and initially the number of people killed, civilians among them, was estimated to be extremely high. Images of this “Highway of Death” were flashed around the world. The gruesome pictures suggested that the Coalition clearly had triumphed and that further killing would be inhumane.

  Despite the cease-fire, one last firefight took place. On the morning of March 2, a Republican Guard unit, seeking to return home, fired on the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division near the Rumaila oil fields. The Americans did more than just return fire. They launched a full-scale counterattack. The result was the same as at 73 Easting and Medina Ridge. The Iraqis suffered heavy losses while the Americans lost only a single tank.

  Formal cease-fire talks took place on March 3, at an Iraqi airfield near the village of Safwan. Conducting the talks inside Iraq, Schwarzkopf believed, would emphasize to the Iraqis that indeed they had lost the war. Representing Saddam’s side was the deputy chief of staff at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, a three-star general. For the Coalition the two senior officials were the Central Command chief and Khalid Bin Sultan al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s counterpart to Schwarzkopf. To further emphasize to the Iraqis their defeat in battle, their delegation had to arrive at the airfield through a cordon of Abrams tanks while Apache helicopters circled in the skies above.

  Discussion at the airfield centered on the return of prisoners, accounting of the dead, the identification of minefields, and the release of Kuwaiti citizens held by the Iraqis. In addition, there were to be restrictions upon the Iraqi air force, although, at the special request of the Iraqi three-star, Iraqi helicopters were given permission to fly. They were allowed to do so in order to be able to move people and supplies throughout the country. That Saddam later would employ these airships to repress groups in Iraq he did not care for was, for the Americans, an unintended result they came to regret.

  U.S. casualties in the Gulf War were light, although sources differ as to the exact number. One reputable publication, produced by the Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, lists the total number of American dead at 304, of which 122 came about from combat. The rest were the result of either accidents or natural causes. Regrettably, of the combat deaths, 35 came from friendly fire.

  The number of Iraqis killed is but an estimate. At least 10,000 soldiers and civilians appear to have lost their lives, although the number might well be greater. What is not uncertain is that in defeat the nation of Iraq saw many, many of its citizens pay dearly for Saddam Hussein’s folly in invading Kuwait.

  Why did Saddam invade Kuwait?

  Saddam believed that the lands comprising Kuwait historically belonged to the empires from which modern-day Iraq emerged. Moreover, he considered Kuwait to be an artificial construct of the British (which it was, although its legitimacy as an independent nation was recognized by most nations in the world). Additionally, Saddam claimed that the Kuwaitis, by drilling at an angle, were stealing petroleum from Iraq’s portion of the Rumaila oil field. This huge oil deposit lay beneath the borders that delineate Kuwait and Iraq. Perhaps equally important, Saddam wanted the access to the Persian Gulf which Kuwait possessed and Iraq did not. Then, of course, there’s the enormous debt Saddam had incurred as a result of his war with Iran. Arab nations, including Kuwait, had loaned Iraq large sums of money. The Iraqi leader argued that he had fought the war on behalf of his Arab brothers and that they, therefore, should reduce the debt, if not forgive it altogether. He particularly wanted Kuwait to forgive its share of the debt. Kuwait offered to reduce the amount owed, but not to eliminate the entire debt. This left Saddam angry with the Kuwaiti leaders, and his country in financial difficulty. What better way to solve the problem and other concerns than to remove Kuwait itself from the scene?

  Why did Saddam believe the United States would not go to war over Kuwait?

  He had good reason to so believe. America had been supportive of Saddam’s war with Iran, and when the United States ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with him prior to the Kuwait invasion, she, following State Department instructions, did not state with specificity what the U.S. response to an invasion would be. She said merely that the United States wished to see a peaceful solution to the dispute.

  Yet Saddam, in his own mind, had a more compelling reason to conclude that the United States would stand idly by as Iraqi forces took control of Kuwait. He believed America and its citizens lacked the stomach for any military action likely to result in heavy loss of life. After all, had not U.S. marines ignominiously left Beirut after losing only two hundred of their men, when Ronald Reagan had deployed troops to the Lebanese capital? If the United States did send troops to aid Kuwait, Saddam foresaw “the mother of all battles” in which America would have thousands of men killed. Iraq, he knew, would accept such losses. He was convinced the United States would not.

  Did the Iraqis have any realistic chance of winning the war?

  No. Coalition forces, particularl
y those of the United States and Great Britain, simply outclassed Saddam’s military. In both equipment and personnel what the Coalition put onto the battlefield was superior to what the Iraqis possessed. American (and British) forces were well trained and well led. And, with their technological edge on the field of battle they crushed their Iraqi opponents.

  Did the Iraqis fight poorly?

  Certainly the Iraqi air force did. That some eighty-six thousand Iraqis were taken prisoner by Coalition forces suggests that Saddam’s army underperformed as well.

  Why did Saddam not employ his chemical weapons?

  Because the Iraqi leader was uncertain how the United States might respond. No doubt, the U.S. government conveyed to the Iraqi leadership that in the event of chemical attacks, America would respond in a manner that would bring enormous harm to Iraq.

  Why did the Coalition forces under General Schwarzkopf, once the Iraqis had left Kuwait, not proceed to Baghdad and finish off Saddam and his regime?

  It’s true that Schwarzkopf’s army could have continued on to Baghdad, destroying both the Republican Guards and Saddam’s regime. But that’s not what President George H. W. Bush had defined as his objective or what the United Nations had authorized. Moreover, most Arab nations, however much they despised Saddam Hussein, were uneasy with the prospect of an American army unseating an Arab government whose legitimacy they accepted. Had the Americans and British made known their intention to march on the Iraqi capital, the Coalition that President Bush and his secretary of state had so skillfully put together, would have splintered, thus jeopardizing the effort to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait.