Authors: John Keegan
Thus far it was the Marines who appeared to have been in the forefront, because they had been reducing resistance in the central valley, taking towns and travelling on paved roads, the modern highways which were Saddam’s contribution to Iraq’s communication network. The 3rd Infantry Division, by contrast, had been pushing northward on the edge of hard desert above the alluvial plain. Because the going was good, it had made excellent progress but the nature of the terrain entailed higher fuel consumption and more vehicle breakdowns. The marines had been able to re-fuel by landing C-130 aircraft, with 5,000-gallon diesel bladders, direct onto the surface of the highways. The 3rd Infantry Division, travelling on surfaces too hazardous for aircraft landings, required refuelling by wheeled tankers and also needed to set up fuel depots from which to refill. Hence, in part, the pause.
Once the pause for resupply had been completed and other stores of food, water and ammunition dumped forward, a miracle of American logistic expertise deeply impressive to attached British officers, and essential repairs and servicing completed, 3rd Infantry Division was ready by 30 March to recommence its drive on Baghdad. At the command conference on 26 March between
Generals McKiernan, Conway and Wallace, directing the operations respectively of the whole ground force, the Marines and V Corps, comprising 3rd Infantry Division and its other attached army units, it had been agreed that the Marines should continue their push up the central valley, sticking to the paved roads, while 3rd Infantry Division, with the brigades of 82nd and 101st clearing up resistance in its rear, should press on to the Karbala Gap. The V Corps operation would have five objectives. An armoured cavalry element of 3rd Infantry Division, 3/7 Cavalry, with two of the division’s brigade combat teams, would lead the drive into the gap itself. The rest of 3rd Infantry Division would advance out of the desert to capture the bridges over the Euphrates south of Karbala. Then the brigades of 101st Air Assault Division would make raids in force farther south on the Euphrates and another part of 101st would mount a probing attack into the desert west of Karbala. Apart from the drive into the Karbala Gap, the subsidiary operations were intended either to capture essential objectives or to mislead the Iraqi high command as to the attackers’ purposes.
The plan also had the purpose of confronting the Republican Guard, deployed outside Baghdad, with a direct military threat. The threat was double-edged. As explained to me by General Franks in the immediate aftermath of the war, the plan was to ‘shape’ the battlefield outside Baghdad, by using the advance of ground forces to hold the Republican Guard in place while heavily bombing its rear as a warning that, if it attempted to retreat into the city, it would suffer an even worse fate than having to engage in combat with the American armoured units. The ‘shaping’ plan was partly material and partly psychological in design. Its object was to deter the Republican Guard from disappearing into the built-up area, where it might indeed have created a ‘Saddamgrad’, by representing inactivity – staying where it was, with the chance of surrendering to the advancing Americans – as preferable to decamping, which would ensure its being carpet bombed, as during the First Gulf War.
The plan was also intended to persuade the Iraqi high command –always
supposing that it remained operational, which seemed increasingly unlikely as the war drew out – that the American attack on Baghdad would come from an unexpected direction, not out of the desert above Karbala, but indeed through the Karbala Gap. The plan also drew attention away from the approach of the Marines on the eastern flank of the city, up the Tigris.
What the Americans were preparing was a classic pincer movement, but baiting the trap so that Saddam and his sons Qusay and Uday, who had apparently supplanted in authority the senior generals as the crisis heightened, would be unable to identify from which direction the disabling blow would come. If they reacted as expected, by failing to move the Republican Guard into the capital, it would not matter what decisions they took thereafter. The fall of the city’s approaches would guarantee the success of a penetrative operation to its heart.
The preliminaries to the advance into Baghdad must be the seizure of the Karbala Gap, whose shoulders were formed by Lake Razzazah and the Euphrates and up which ran Highway 8, the main road into the southwestern suburbs, and the capture of Baghdad (Saddam) International Airport, known to be of the greatest symbolic significance to the régime but which was also of high military value, its runways and facilities providing means for direct airlifted reinforcement and resupply of the forward troops. The attack on the gap was to be led by the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 3rd Infantry Division, which had been relieved by the brigade of 82nd Airborne Division from duty on the lines of communication southward to Kuwait.
The topography of the Karbala Gap had been much studied by the US Army ever since its strategic focus had turned to the Middle East at the beginning of the 1990s. Plans to penetrate it had been practised in war games and tactical exercises without troops at all major army study centres, just as the Fulda Gap had been endlessly studied during the days of the Cold War, when US Seventh Army had stood on the defensive opposite the Group of Soviet Forces Germany in Central Europe. The Fulda Gap is the gateway to the Rhine for any invader coming westward out
of what used to be the People’s Republic of (East) Germany. Now the boot was on the other foot. Seventh Army – to which 3rd Infantry Division and the rest of V Corps in Iraq belonged – had to mount an offensive through a similar gap, and to traverse it at the highest speed, leaving no time for Saddam, Qusay and Uday to reposition forces to oppose it. Speed was of the highest importance because of the danger that the Iraqi engineer corps, the most competent part of Saddam’s armed forces, might blow the Hadithah dam, flooding the plain of the upper Euphrates and turning it into a swamp impenetrable by armoured troops. The terrain was naturally waterlogged and had been improved as an obstacle zone by the Iraqi engineers.
The first task was to take and hold the Hadithah dam, a task assigned to army Ranger units, specialist infantry trained on commando lines. They were initially instructed only to take the dam and then pass on. On reconsideration General Franks decided that the dam had to be held against the danger of counter-attack, in the event proving a sensible precaution. The Iraqis, using troops drawn from the Republican Guard, did counter-attack and the Rangers had to endure two weeks of heavy combat, during which they were severely shelled as well as subjected to repeated attacks. Troops of the 101st Airborne Division eventually relieved them.
The next task was to secure the crossings over the Euphrates east of Karbala, near Hindiyah. There was also a dam on the Euphrates at Hindiyah which it was important to save from destruction. Manoeuvre along this stretch of the Euphrates was difficult. The river banks were high, the surrounding ground marshy, and the defending troops, drawn from the Republican Guard, proved of better than usual quality. During 1–2 April, 3rd Infantry Division was engaged in heavy combat, its helicopters providing continuous close support and the divisional artillery putting down heavy bombardment. On 1 April the division’s 3rd Brigade, with two armoured battalions forward, took control of the eastern outskirts of Karbala, while the 1st Brigade manoeuvred to attack from the other side. The culmination of the
division’s mission was the seizure of the Euphrates dams and bridges but swampy terrain made progress difficult.
By 2 April Iraqi resistance had been sufficiently overcome for the divisional commander, General Buford Blount, to begin planning a crossing of the Euphrates. He hoped that the intensity of his attack thus far had so knocked about the defence that it would be possible to capture a bridge on the run. The Iraqis had, as elsewhere on the great waterways, neglected to blow up the vital spans, perhaps deterred by the coalition special forces which were operating in strength in the area, perhaps because helicopter surveillance threatened demolition parties with attack. On the afternoon of 2 April, a tank unit, 3–69 Armour, reported that it had got three tanks across a bridge prepared for demolition but not yet destroyed.
The defence of river lines is notoriously difficult. Defenders are reluctant to destroy bridges which might leave friendly troops on the wrong side or be needed later for a counter-attack. It is also difficult, in the heat of action, to keep count of which bridges remain under the control of one’s own side. Such failure was largely at the root in May 1940 of the French army’s loss of crossings over the River Meuse, which resulted in the collapse of the Ninth Army and the beginning of the blitzkrieg. Something similar occurred on the Euphrates during March 2003. The Iraqi engineers failed to detonate the charges they had already placed in position. After the appearance of American tanks on their own side of the river, they did detonate the bridge, only for it to survive the explosions. They had miscalculated the solidity of its construction. The attacking Americans cut the wires leading to some unexploded charges and destroyed the positions in which the Iraqi engineers still sheltered. Shortly after the abortive detonations, 3–69 Armour had positioned three companies of armoured vehicles on the Baghdad bank and was ready to advance. Behind the point units, two alternative crossings were quickly thrown across the Euphrates, a medium-girder bridge to reinforce that damaged by the Iraqi engineers and a floating pontoon bridge parallel to it. The ponderous bridging trains, which had trailed
behind the spearheads during the lightning advance, had begun to demonstrate their usefulness.
Once across the Euphrates, the leading tanks and armoured fighting vehicles of 3rd Infantry Division quickly reached the international airport complex. The airport is an example of how in Iraq the ultramodern and the antediluvian intermingle. Outside the airport complex the landscape has scarcely changed since the days of the Kings of Babylon – the site of whose capital lies just beyond it. The countryside presents a spectacle of sluggish irrigation canals, mud houses and palm groves. The airport itself is approached by concrete roads, interchanges and over- and underpasses. As the armoured vanguard approached the airport to take up attacking positions, fighting focused on two concrete intersections to the west, between the runways and the Euphrates. The American armoured units formed a defensive perimeter around the two intersections and awaited attack. It soon came. Saddam and his sons, or whoever was still directing the Iraqi defensive effort, correctly recognized that the appearance of the vanguard of 3rd Infantry Division at the airport presaged the downfall of the régime. Throughout the afternoon and evening of 3 April, successive waves of
fedayeen –
not the Republican Guard, which appears to have been engaged against the Marines farther to the east, certainly not the regular army, which had almost ceased to exist – launched attacks from north, east and west. They appeared in any form of transport to hand, cars, trucks, buses, or mounted on motorcycles. Their attacks were not conventional or co-ordinated military assaults. There was no support by armour or artillery. The
fedayeen
behaved like the martyrs they claimed to be, firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades in unorganized rushes on the American positions, until over 400 of them lay dead on the battleground.
On 4 April
fedayeen
attacks became better organized. Tanks appeared, manned either by the
fedayeen
themselves or by the Republican Guard or remnants of the regular army. The Americans around the Abu Ghraib expressway began to take on Iraqi armour with their vehicle-mounted guns, the 120mm cannon
of their Abrams tanks or the 25mm chain guns of their Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Bradleys had not been built to engage tanks; they were up-gunned and up-armoured versions of the previous generation of armoured personnel carriers, supposed to be protected by their own tanks in manoeuvre engagements. The chain guns, however, proved remarkably effective at engaging T-72 tanks, Soviet-supplied vehicles which were supposed to be the best in the Iraqi army. The Bradleys were also supported by strike aircraft. The Bradley chain guns destroyed five T-72s. Later on 4 April Abrams tanks advanced to engage T-72s reported by the supporting aircraft to be sheltering under the concrete roadways. At ranges of a thousand metres (1,093 yards) or more, the Abrams gunners knocked out sixteen T-72s, completing the destruction of the whole Iraqi tank force that had been sent against them.
Intelligence assessments now persuaded General Blount that he had achieved both his current operational aims, the domination of the international airport and the opening of the approach into Baghdad from the west. He therefore decided to press forward from his positions encircling the airport and take it under control. By the evening of 4 April his 4th Brigade Combat Team was inside the perimeter, probing for resistance. The forward edge of reconnaissance was provided by his units of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments. By early in the morning of 5 April his advanced elements were in control of the runways and the international terminal.
There had been some resistance from men on foot, perfectly pointless against the columns of American armoured vehicles. As soon, however, as the division was securely in place, Iraqi armour appeared on the airport outskirts and began an attack to retake it. It was a futile undertaking. Not only were the remnants of the Republican Guard and regular army outclassed at every organizational level from the top downward by the Americans, the obsolescence of their equipment condemned them to be massacred. During the Iraqi counter-attack on the airport, T-72s and early Cold War vintage T-55s appeared, to oppose not only Bradleys but M1A1 Abrams, the most advanced tanks in the
world, armed with 120mm guns directed by laser range-finders. Twelve T-72s, two T-55s and six other armoured vehicles were knocked out in the course of the fighting, at no cost to the Americans at all.
After the defeat of the Iraqi armoured counter-attack, the American high command deemed a brief pause to consider operational options. Memories of previous bad experiences of city fighting, in Hue in Vietnam and Mogadishu in Somalia, counselled caution to some. Generals Franks and McKiernan took a different view. The campaign thus far had achieved extraordinary results, the farthest advance at speed over distance ever recorded and the disintegration of an army twice the size of the invading force. Superior equipment and organization supplied many of the reasons why such success had been won. Besides material and technical factors, however, moral and psychological dimensions had been at work. Daring and boldness had played parts in the campaign as significant as dominance in the air, greater firepower or higher mobility on the ground. Franks and McKiernan were now convinced that the opposition had lost, if it had ever possessed, the means to organize an effective defence of Baghdad. Permission was given to launch deep reconnaissance probes – ‘thunder runs’ – into the centre of the city.