Word: armorers
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...division's task was to accompany U.S. VII Corps armor in destroying the Republican Guard -- specifically, to form an advancing blockade from the west that bottled up the Iraqi forces. Schwarzkopf said the British units performed the job "absolutely magnificently." In addition to the gutsy, low-flying attacks on Iraqi airfields by British pilots early in the air war, Britain's partnership in the ground campaign proved the forces to have been what the U.S. commander called "absolutely superb members of this coalition from the outset...
Numbering 35,000 troops in all, British regiments bearing such names as the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars sped forward into fire fights and swept through Iraqi armor concentrations without losing a single tank. In the ground war's most tragic incident, however, nine British soldiers lost their lives to friendly fire when an American A-10 tank-killer aircraft hit two armored vehicles by mistake...
Even before the ground campaign began, the war had been won to a greater extent than allied commanders would let themselves hope. It was known that five weeks of bombing had destroyed much of the Iraqis' armor and artillery. But not until coalition soldiers could see the corpses piled in Iraqi trenches and hear surrendering soldiers' tales of starvation and terror did it become obvious how bloodily effective the air campaign had been. One of the key questions about the bombing was how much it had disrupted Iraqi command and communications. The damage turned out to be almost total. Iraqi...
...tanks fitted with earth- , moving blades collapse dirt into the trenches until they were filled. It took only hours for the allied troops to burst through the supposedly impregnable Iraqi defenses and begin a war of maneuvers, sweeping right past some of the heaviest concentrations of troops and armor, and calling in withering air strikes and tank and artillery fire on those that fought. Throughout the 100-hour campaign, the allied soldiers avoided hand-to-hand fighting wherever possible, preferring to stand off and blast away at their foes at more than arm's length...
British troops encountered some Guard units as early as Monday night, destroying a third of their armor at the first blow with long-range artillery fire and aerial attack. Fighting between American troops and Guard units also began Monday and steadily intensified; by nightfall Monday a briefer reported one of the Guard's seven divisions in the area rendered "basically ineffective." The big battle raged all day Wednesday. Some allied officers reported that the Guard fought about as well as could have been expected of troops battling without air cover, with minimal, if any, communications and under relentless allied bombing...