Authors: Terence T. Finn
Tags: #History, #Asia, #Afghanistan, #Military, #United States, #eBook
Many of the strike aircraft operating over Iraq were deployed not in a strategic sense, but tactically, in missions designed to assist ground forces. These planes alerted McKiernan’s troops to the nearby presence of enemy troops and, more important, pounded Iraqi tanks and bunkers that stood in the way of advancing Americans.
***
Early in the advance north the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, one of General McKiernan’s principal fighting units, took control of an Iraqi airfield southwest of An Nasiriyah. The airfield, Tallil, would become an important logistics base as the Americans continued their drive toward Baghdad. An Nasiriyah, a town of approximately three hundred thousand, stood astride the Euphrates River. For the Iraqis, it could be a place to intercept enemy troops and their supplies. For the Americans, securing An Nasiriyah was essential if the invasion was to proceed as planned. McKiernan wanted his soldiers to seal off the town and avoid a slugfest that would slow the advance. Having done so, his troops were to turn responsibility for An Nasiriyah over to the marines, who, while leaving a sufficient number of troops to control the town, would cross the Euphrates at that point and head north to the Tigris, thus approaching Baghdad from the east.
McKiernan’s plan was executed. The marines took charge of An Nasiriyah and the 3rd Infantry moved north to As Samawah. In both towns, however, U.S. forces received a nasty surprise. They had been told Iraqis in the southern part of the country, being Shiite, would welcome American troops. That turned out not to be the case. Moreover, the soldiers and marines confronted an enemy they had not anticipated. This was the fedayeen. They were fanatical Muslims, full of hatred for America. Many were Syrians, paid by Saddam. Poorly trained and equipped with only light weapons, they made suicide attacks against the American armored vehicles. That they did so demonstrated a certain kind of courage. That they murdered Iraqis they disapproved of, and fired from within mosques and schools, suggested their rules of combat differed from those of their opponents.
The 3rd Infantry soldiers arrived at As Samawah on March 23. They were warmly greeted—by enemy rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and machine gun fire. The result was a two-day-long firefight that left a considerable number of the defenders no longer alive. Among the highlights of the battle was the use by the fedayeen of innocent women and children as human shields.
Next stop for the Americans was the city of Najaf. It sat on Highway 8 and, like An Nasiriyah and As Samawah, had to be contained in order for supplies to reach the advancing combat troops. The fighting at Najaf was brutal. It began on March 24 and lasted for four days. U.S. troops employed the full array of their capabilities—tanks, artillery, and air strikes. The enemy, Iraqis as well as the fedayeen, were outmatched but fought hard. They would fire their weapons and then, more often than not, be killed. When the battle was over, approximately one thousand of them were dead.
About this time Mother Nature intervened. A massive sandstorm struck the entire area. Called a
shamal
, the storm combined high winds, sand, and rain. It blinded soldiers, kept helicopters on the ground, and made difficult simple tasks such as walking, eating, and trying to clean one’s rifle. However, American artillery and the air force’s precision-guided weapons were less affected. Iraqi commanders, believing the invaders were as blinded as they were, decided to reposition their troops, expecting the
shamal
to hide their movements. It did not. American high-tech bombs and artillery shells found the Iraqis and inflicted serious damage.
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.