Some 1,900 of these monsters were dispatched against the Iraqis in Desert Storm. For Desert Storm, I was in one for 100 hours straight-only came out to go to the bathroom, or help fuel, or hold a machine gun while the other guys fueled.” The thing is 32 feet long and weighs nearly 68 tons, but to him it’s one sweet set of wheels. Paul Sousa is gazing at a hulking M1A1 Abrams tank with the affection of a middle-age man reunited with his first car. Commanding General Norman Schwarzkopf had devised a grand scheme he called the “left hook”: Coalition tanks would rush north into Iraq for a set distance, then turn abruptly to the east, pushing toward occupied Kuwait City and destroying all enemy resistance along the way. As warships gathered offshore, the Iraqis became convinced the expected assault would focus on the coastline.īut while the Iraqis were preoccupied with Kuwait’s front porch, the coalition attacked through the back door: On February 24, one of the largest forces of tanks ever assembled-more than 3,000-plus thousands of armored support vehicles and infantry roared across the vast, lightly guarded Saudi-Iraqi border that stretched to the west. In mid-February, coalition forces seemed to be concentrating their attention on Kuwait City, the occupied nation’s seaport capital. Meanwhile, ground troops in Saudi Arabia trained for desert warfare while there were isolated skirmishes between the two sides along the Saudi border. On January 17, 1991, the coalition began air strikes against Iraq, bombing missile bases and other military installations. tanks charging toward the viewer, “the way the Iraqis saw them.” “First of all, don’t ever say it was a hundred-hour war-that’s a disservice to the Air Force and other military personnel who began engaging with the Iraqis in January,” says Fontenot, sitting in the den of his home in Lansing, Kansas. But it was no secret that, if Iraq persisted in occupying Kuwait, the coalition would act to push Iraq’s forces back across their own border. Ostensibly, the military presence was aimed at keeping Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia. Over the next few months, led by the United States, a massive military force from 35 nations was assembled in adjacent Saudi Arabia. Sitting there on our comfy couches, we looked at each other and said, “Well, that was easy.”įrom the moment Iraq invaded its smaller neighbor to the south on August 1, 1990, an array of world nations condemned the action.
#TANK BATTLE HEROES REVIEW TV#
When it was all over, less than a hundred hours after the final offensive started, those of us watching TV heard the casualty reports: 292 coalition troops killed, compared to tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. Grim images of burned Iraqi corpses, their charred hands curled in death, seemed to serve as object lessons in the perils of challenging the might of the world’s “good guys.” Swarms of Iraqi soldiers were reportedly surrendering without a fight.
News reports showed fleets of allied tanks roaring across the desert like a stampede of buffalo, routing Iraq’s Russian-made tanks, blasting them into plumes of fire and smoke. Allied troops were thoroughly trouncing the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, overrunning their positions and chasing them out of Kuwait, the small, oil-rich country Hussein’s army had invaded the previous August. In three epic encounters-dubbed 73 Easting, Medina Ridge, and Fright Night (officially known as the Battle of Norfolk)-armored behemoths from both sides relentlessly went muzzle-to-muzzle, turning the sprawling desert into history’s most concentrated tank shooting gallery.įor the millions of Americans who stayed glued to their TVs in late February 1991, the news coming from Kuwait was unrelentingly triumphant.
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