Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 28, 1991 TAG: 9102280352
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WITH U.S. 7TH CORPS, IN IRAQ LENGTH: Medium
In battlefield interviews with troops from three of the four Army divisions involved in the assault on the guards, American soldiers said that the tank clash raged across dozens of miles of the southern Iraqi desert and that the guards were offering fierce resistance despite overwhelming odds.
During a helicopter tour on Wednesday close to the front lines, the devastation wrought by allied forces on the Iraqi military in recent days and weeks was made plain.
The burned-out shells of scores of Iraqi tanks, some still smoldering, some on fire, sat in what had been extensive dug-in fortifications of sand and dirt. All that remained of several Iraqi tanks and artillery installations were charred bits of steel spread across hundreds of square yards of scrub-covered desert floor.
From the air, large bands of captured Iraqi soldiers could be seen in the custody of American soldiers.
The Americans described prisoners captured on Wednesday from other, regular Iraqi units as desperate for food, water and medical attention, after a month-long allied bombing campaign cut them off from supply lines.
Some of the Iraqis said they had not been fed for days. As many as one-third of the Iraqi prisoners were found without shoes and some had to be carried from the battlefield because their feet were so badly blistered, American soldiers reported.
Despite opposition from the guards, officers of the Army's VII Corps, normally based in Germany, which forms the leading edge of the American ground assault, predicted that the land war would soon be largely over - a thorough rout by the allies.
VII Corps has been given the mission of crushing the Republican Guard, Iraq's best-trained, best-equipped military force. The Iraqis have found themselves trapped between the Euphrates River to the north and enormous allied armored forces sweeping in from the west, southwest and south.
"We're engaging the enemy," said Sgt. Franklin Lott of the Army's 3rd Armored Division, which fought on Tuesday in what he described as "a good, heavy-duty battle with the Republican Guards" that had left one Iraqi armored division destroyed.
"We're going to keep pushing until we've eliminated Saddam Hussein's cotton-picking ability to make war," said Lott, a military policeman whose squadron rounded up more than 200 Iraqi prisoners on Tuesday.
On Wednesday afternoon, the squadron was awaiting its first wave of prisoners captured from the Republican Guard.
Sgt. Alfredo Gonzales, a 21-year-old scout with the Army's First Infantry Division, said allied forces were moving so quickly on the battlefield that it was becoming difficult to keep track of the location of allied units hour to hour.
"It's so fast," the sergeant said. "It's moving a lot faster than we planned."
Across the battlefield, helicopter pilots, unable to keep up with the movement of armor and troops, landed at military camps simply to ask directions to the nearest makeshift fuel station.
Some allied troops said they were worried that they may have been endangered because of the rush.
Members of the 13th Signal Battalion of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division said they had expected to remain in Saudi Arabia for the rest of the war. But because of the Army's early success in the land war and its quick thrust into Iraq, the battalion was brought across the border Tuesday night. It ran straight into an Iraqi minefield.
Sgt. William Maggard, a 26-year-old communications specialist from Muncie, Ind., resorted to understatement in describing the incident, which ended without injury.
"It was kind of a mistake," he said. "I kept thinking about my 3-year-old and my 5-year-old and whether I'm going to get to see them again."
Officials of the 7th Corps said its casualties from the ground battle had been remarakably light, considering its scale - nine soldiers killed by Wednesday afternoon. Figures for Iraqi casualties were not made available, as has been the case throughout the war zone.
Operating under the 7th Corps, the 1st Infantry Division and the British 1st Armored Division were reported to have moved through Iraq and swept into eastern Kuwait in blocking positions.
by CNB