Battle Of 73 Easting: The Tank War To Topple Saddam Hussein | Greatest Tank Battles | Timeline

hi everybody welcome to this timeline documentary my name is dan snow and here i am in a lancaster bomber cockpit one of the few remaining lancasters from the second world war to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hit it's like netflix for history hundreds of history documentaries on there and interviews with many of the world's best historians follow the information below this film or just search online for history hit and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show [Music] the bleak and forbidding desert of southern iraq it's a place of sudden and violent sandstorms but today you'll see it torn apart by a different kind of storm they engage them with tight-knit gun rounds you see the explosions going off i dropped down inside i looked through my commander's site i was vitally impressed with the enemy the u.s second armored cavalry is on a collision course with the tawakara division of iraq's republican guard they see themselves being great warriors who are expected to stand and fight and even die so that others may live two tank armies clash on a remote strip of desert this is the battle of 73 eastern armored warfare at its most intense this probably was the last great tank battle of the 20th century [Music] [Music] uh february 24th 1991 american tanks roll across the saudi arabian desert toward the iraq border they're part of a multinational force with a clear and simple mission to drive saddam hussein's iraqi army out of kuwait coming out of the iran iraq war saddam has two problems he has a great big military with nothing really for it to do the other problem he has is that he has devastated iraq's economy as a result of the iran iraq war and so when you saddam hussein and you need money when you need it you do what comes natural you rob the piggy bank next door and in this case that piggy bank was kuwait iraqi armor and infantry overrun the oil-rich emirate in just 36 hours saddam ignores the united nations demand for an immediate withdrawal and the un sends an american-led coalition of 620 000 to show him they mean business saddam realized that he was in a bit over his head but in saddam's mind the great weakness of the united states was their inability to take casualties they assumed that it would be very much like the iran iraq war it would be a slugging fest between these two sides and that in the end the americans would cry uncle first and so the strategy that saddam lays out is designed to cause the most casualties to the united states while absorbing the least damage to his own forces he dug in the biggest chair of the iraqi army 51 of 66 divisions and he dug him in deep [Music] saddam deploys 16 infantry divisions and two armored corps along the saudi border to absorb the brunt of the coalition attack he holds his best fighters in reserve eight divisions of the republican guard 1 000 tanks and 120 000 men are poised to strike a massive counter attack and inflict devastating casualties on the advancing coalition the scheme for defending kuwait that they actually employed was really the only one that was available to them and the problem that they had was that the coalition wasn't going to play by their rules they don't believe that it's possible for the coalition to move any further to the west it is trackless desert out there and the iraqis didn't believe that the americans could possibly move any further west than that because the iraqis themselves whenever they tried to operate in that desert out there got horribly lost there were no terrain features there were no roads it was impossible to maneuver out there and the one thing that the iraqis weren't aware of was at that time a brand new technology called the global positioning system it's the first gps war satellite technology enables the coalition to cross into iraq far to the west of the main iraqi defensive line setting the stage for an attack on their unprotected right flank at 1300 hours the us seventh corps breaches the sand berm marking the border between iraq and saudi arabia we had a psyops platoon uh with us with these 25 000 watt speakers on top of humvees they were there to broadcast surrender appeals but i had them play right at the ball crease as we were crossing over the berm into a rock it's kind of cool watching it but there was nothing there our unit was moving moving to the north and to the east and really not hitting a whole lot i mean yeah we did we had some reconnaissance units we ran into but after a couple of shots at us they would give up [Applause] you had an iraqi military that were desperately unhappy and really just wanted to go home these were not iraq's first-rate troops they were mostly shia conscripts who have been conscripted during the iran-iraq war and been kept in the army ever since they were desperate to get out of the army and massive u.s formations would run into these tiny little iraqi units these forces would fire at you you would quickly overwhelm them and then you would see the white flags come out and you would take large numbers of prisoners this is what the main coalition armored force encountered on the first day of its climactic swing around the right flank of the iraqi army [Music] the armor of the seventh corps rolls ever deeper into iraq but at a snail's pace cautious force commanders order continual halts and what they basically did was said you know what if we're going to go do east we're just going to use the eastings all the north-south grid lines as our methods to control your rate of advance it was almost like we were crawling it was it was not a fast lightning strike it was very slow okay we'd move a few clicks and they'd stop us i'm in a 50-ton vehicle all this ammunition i can drive 40-something 50-something miles an hour and you're telling me to stop you know the enemy's that way i need to keep going there was no one forward to see anything to make a personal evaluation there were no patent uh rommel gadarian types who were pulling up next to my tanks saying well they're major what do you think by the end of the second day the initial surprise and strategic advantage of the flanking maneuver is lost and the iraqis realize that the u.s seventh poor is about to cut off and surround their forces in kuwait it's at that moment that iraq's general staff actually demonstrates some degree of real competence they recognize what's going on and what's more they realize from the ease with which american formations have been destroying iraqi formations throughout the theater that if they are going to stop the american seventh corps they're not going to be able to throw some ash and trash some weak formations in front of it and allow their better units to escape instead they're going to have to put their best formations in front of those american divisions the iraqis make their stand on a defensive line stretching 90 kilometers along the northwestern border of kuwait two infantry and two armored divisions of the republican guard will defend the northern half of the line in the south and directly in the path of the advancing americans are the cream of saddam's armored forces the southern half of the iraqi republican guard line is handled by the tawakhal na allah division which means in arabic in god we trust and they see themselves as being great warriors warriors who defended their nation for eight years and ultimately defeated iran the persian menace and they saw themselves as republican guards as being the best of the best iraq's elite professional warriors not conscripts who were expected to stand and fight and even die so that others may live we respected them we knew that they were capable of some serious destruction and we knew there were a lot of them [Music] they got tons and tons of equipment we respected that we were real worried about their their armored vehicles and of course our biggest fear was the t-72 tank [Music] the soviet t-72 known in iraq as the lion of babylon was the backbone of the iraqi armored core its 125 millimeter main gun can destroy targets over 1800 meters away it's a 41 ton monster plated with armor that is in places 300 millimeters thick still it can reach a speed of 60 kilometers per hour this makes the t-72 one of the fastest and most lethal heavy tanks in the world and saddam has more than one thousand of them deployed along the republican guard's defensive line they're supported by hundreds of armored vehicles including the soviet-designed bmp the republican guard seems ready to take on all comers heading straight for them is the us-led seventh corps with hundreds of m2 bradley fighting vehicles and well over 1 000 tanks the most powerful of these is the m1a1 abrams main battle tank the abrams is armed with a 120 millimeter high velocity cannon and protected by composite armor that's as tough as 60 centimeters of pure steel it's one and a half times heavier than the t-72 but just as fast making it the most powerful tank on the battlefield [Music] by the end of the day on february 25th these two armored forces are only 14 kilometers apart [Music] the morning of the 26th very early uh perhaps uh 4 30 5 o'clock i can't remember precisely we suddenly get a change of orders and essentially find and destroy the republican guard for intents and purposes it got to the point for late morning early afternoon where you couldn't see more than perhaps uh 20 30 all of a yards we're about to go into combat against the one real enemy that we had practiced to defeat and suddenly our visibility is terrible but the abrams is up to the job it has a thermal imaging system that can identify the heat signatures of potential targets even in the worst conditions so we're moving in this very limited visibility and we begin to identify some hot spots as mcmaster's platoon approaches 73 easting a line of longitude on the map he encounters a tawakawna division forward outpost it's manned by infantry with anti-tank guns and rocket-propelled grenades and it was at this point that we first received fire from the what we had enemy is we were paralleling a road that ran due east right into the enemy's position the battle of 73 eastern the last great tank battle of the 20th century is about to begin [Music] february 26 1991 it's been two days since the u.s led international coalition invade southern iraq in an attempt to outflank iraqi forces and drive them out of nearby kuwait in response the iraqis establish a defensive screen deploying five divisions of saddam hussein's elite republican guard including the fully mechanized tawakalna division [Music] just west of the map reference 73 easting the u.s second armored cavalry to spearhead the coalition advanced makes contact with the republican guard it was at this point we first received fire from from the enemy [Music] and then pull up our nine tanks online all of us oriented on this village i give this troop fire command village direct front frontal one round heat at my command ready report which means everybody load a heat round look at that village pick out your aim points on the enemy positions and when they're ready we're gonna fire nine simultaneous main gun rounds at the center i fire one round before that to mark center with a tank heat round green says ready white says ready i say fire nine tank main gun rounds impact [Music] simultaneously now we get the word continue your move to the east and it's at that point i just get this gut feeling you know i get this feeling that we're about to make contact with with you know with a defending enemy force and i make the decision to go into a tank's lead formation that means positioning the abrams tanks in a rolling wedge with the more vulnerable bradley fighting vehicles tucked in behind for protection this formation places mcmaster's big guns forward ready for whatever lies ahead so my tank comes up over that crest and again remember it's a sandstorm right you can't see very far but it is if the sandstorm just lifted i mean as soon as we came over that ridge there was some weird environmental factor but it was like a curtain lifting and what i was confronted with was the enemy defensive position they were deployed in a reverse slope position which is designed to minimize the amount of time and the amount of distance that an attacking force actually has before it can start to fire on the defenders unfortunately they didn't count on the sophisticated optics and fire control systems of the usm1 tanks which made their thinking entirely obsolete i could see eight enemy tanks in defensive positions and i said fire fire sabo which means we had a heat round in and it means the next round going in that gun is going to be a sabo tank you know armor defeating round the abrams tank carries two types of high-velocity ammunition the sabo an armor-piercing dart made with high-density depleted uranium and the high-explosive anti-tank round a shaped charged projectile which can bore through heavy armor we engage that first tank with a heat round that fireball blows the tank commander out of that tank and then ultimately there's a secondary explosion that blows the turret off that tank my gunner traverses left we're able to destroy three tanks as our tank hits the first leading edge of the minefield i looked to the right and i saw what looked like explosions to the left uh front of the mcmasters tank and i couldn't tell if these were mines or artillery fire game and my gunner dewey jones pipes up and says holy sh look at this and i dropped down inside i looked through my commander's site and i said oh yeah i was vitally impressed with the enemy here were you know rows literally 10 15 tanks spread right across to the front and you could see that these tank guns were moving and i imagine since these were manual t-72s the poor republican guard was in there visibly cracking to get the guns around towards us [Music] then all of a sudden my tank went into a minefield when this thing rocked the 70-ton tank a fireball went over it knocked me down to the turret floor and uh fortunately my driver was very tough-minded so what the hell was it and i said don't worry about it keep driving as we were coming out of minefield we had a couple of tanks to the front it was sure i got tanks to my front and i'm looking at the damn tank that we're about to take under fire and the gunner has said sir can i shoot can i fire soon for god's sake [Music] we swung to the next one and fired [Music] and in the meantime i could see that eagle troop was taking enormous numbers of vehicles on your farm initially there was a great deal of disorientation on the iraqi side because they just assumed that this couldn't be american tanks attacking them it had to be aircraft [Music] but even after they figured it out they still had difficulty getting into their vehicle in time because they didn't realize how quickly the americans were closing on them american armored forces would charge using speed to simply try to disorient the iraqis and it worked the iraqis could not imagine armored forces this big this powerful moving at them as fast as they were it's a tactic developed by general irwin rommel the great world war ii german tank commander and the m1a1 abrams is ideally suited for this kind of warfare the gun stays right on target it has a geo-stabilized system and um i mean you could you can be moving out at you know 40 50 kilometers an hour going over bumps and firing and then the shock effect of a seven time machine hurtling at you i think this is the blow from which the enemy could never really recover we were now on top of their command post and we entered their reserve position and in just in like typical soviet doctrine they had put their tank reserve like a coil but we moved too fast they couldn't get out of their coil on time they were just starting their engines i looked at an enemy tank commander looked over his shoulder at me i could see the expression on his face and and we engaged that tank at very close range and you couldn't tell the difference between the enemy tank being hit and our gun going off and just big hunks of metal new sparks parked right back over our heads and the rest of our tanks came up and we destroyed these tanks in their assembly yard the iraqis you know had set up a pretty sound defense i mean it was a reverse slope defense it had a reserve it had a counter-attack plan it had a minefield to disrupt our movement but the fatal flaw was that we gained surprise over them despite the iraqis best efforts eagletree overwhelms the position killing hundreds of iraqis and destroying more than 50 tanks and armored vehicles it's the opening round in a furious tank battle that will soon be fought across a much larger front [Music] eight kilometers to the north the second armored cavalry's ghost troop slowly makes its way through the blinding sand storm in the reduced visibility they have lost touch with eagle troop ghost troops commander sends two lightly armored bradley reconnaissance vehicles to re-establish contact i tell the drivers start slowing down because i'm starting to see these little objects but what could they be i mean you're in the middle of the desert so i'm immediately thinking well they're vehicles but my number one concern of course is i'm gonna go link up with eagle that's maybe that's eagle maybe that's not and i see all these people emerging out of nowhere out of the ground and then you see like this diesel plume and immediately followed by this bmf giant t-72 tank backing up out of a hole ah that must be enemy now i'm seeing a lot of activity turrets start moving and i'm like huh where is eagle's room february 26 1991 1600 hours eagle and ghost troops of the second us armored cavalry have become separated in a sandstorm two bradley fighting vehicles from ghost troop have been dispatched to re-establish visual contact between the two tank units but they run into a platoon of iraqi t-72 tanks so i tell the driver to pull up to this little mound and as soon as he comes to a stop he says tank front roger got it thanks and uh he goes no no there's a tank to our immediate front because i see it no no you don't understand there's a tank to our front and i just get up push myself out of that turret and i look down i go i'll be damn well what happened is i didn't realize the little mound of dirt that i told to pull up from was a t72 i just grabbed the commander's override max deflect the 25 millimeter cannon and then i say you know we're scouts we don't go toe-to-toe with tanks we need to back up well now i'm seeing all these a lot of activity so i'm backing up i'm backing up where am i going to go to okay so i'm wondering raise the missile so i lay him onto this t-72 that's filming this beautiful bright profile so i wonder gutter missile tank is right to our front and you know i i can't identify this is this this could be eagle and i'm just like how could you miss it's bigger than a barn door what do you mean you can't see this so i said go clear channel he goes flips over takes it off thermals identified t72 tank it's a fire the tow missile is the bradley's most powerful and accurate weapon it's guided by wires enabling the gunner to steer it to the target even at ranges of up to 3 000 meters now i realize there's like eight of them all in this immediate vicinity at this time i'm thinking okay these guys all know that i'm here and they're probably a little pissed off of that so i go gunner missile tank he has identified and i say i see this missile come out from the launcher go just past my gun tube fall to the desert floor i'm like hmm um uh misfire misfire at that time my wingman opens up a missile blows the heck out of this thing that was turning the turret on then it occurred to me we both have shot both our missiles and we both have to our front at least eight t-72 tanks ameriweather says hey i need to do a reload drill so i said roger that we got you covered and i told certain wonder all right whatever we do we're going to keep firing and firing until we can't fire no more you start firing 25 millimeter cannon into this bouncing off the turret i had my gun or he's like bouncing off and bouncing off you know just pissing it off and my intent was look better us than my wingman who's staying there you know basically naked i'm thinking well i wonder how long it's going to take that gunner and commander to shoot me while i'm sitting there pinking it with a 25 millimeter cannon [Music] the m2 bradley is a reconnaissance vehicle designed for mobility rather than heavy combat it is equipped with a 25 millimeter main cannon capable of firing high explosive rounds but to increase its speed and range it is protected by just 25 millimeters of armor plating the bradley is no match for the powerful t72 then at that time my wingman reported up almost instantaneously he serviced that tank with a missile probably saved my life so out of the sandstorm and a lot of smoke now on the battlefield he murdered some a couple of eagle troop brownies slowly approaching me from the right and he pulls up next to me and he screams at the top of his lungs there's tanks over there i go i know [Music] in just minutes haynes and his wingman destroy no fewer than five t-72s but this is just one strong point in an iraqi defensive line stretching across a 90 kilometer front that is in places 10 kilometers deep to the north ghost troop continues through the sandstorm unaware they are moments away from contact with the main line of iraqi defense we're slowly moving forward and when i'm when i mean slowly i mean about as fast as a man can walk and when you're in a tank you've got track pads we were going slow enough where you could actually feel the individual track pads hitting the ground we get a little bit a little bit of a a wind shift and we can see something out in front of us we saw heads pop out and we think what it was they were in a bunker they felt the movement of the armored vehicle [Music] the bunker is barely recognizable because it's cold but when the bodies come out of it they're white hot they're glowing hot they're so wide on your on your background and so they're running from one bump to another but i can figure out if they're coming out of something running to something that's probably a vehicle when they talk all the soldiers finally figure out that there is a major attack on them they leap to their tanks they get in their tanks and their armored fighting vehicles and they fight back as best they can the problem they have to begin with is that the americans are shooting at them at ranges at which they can't possibly fire back i told the gunner to shoot the vehicle immediately followed just a second or so later by a heat round from go 6. so we shot it and this thing exploded and the next thing i know you know my other tank platoons have seen similar things to what i was seeing and they started engaging now you've got the dark oily black smoke mixed in from the vehicle that's just destroyed that is hot you can see people and things moving behind it so i called my troop commander and told him hey sir there's something past that smoke that wasn't a single vehicle i want permission to move up and poke my nose through the smoke i said yeah okay roger makes sense so these four tanks of andy's just disappear through the black smoke and then it is just absolute armageddon i can see rounds being fired the whole i don't know whether it's friendly i don't know whether you know they're being attacked and i'm trying to raise andy on the net and you know as i'm watching this it's like okay captain what are you gonna do february 26 1991 [Music] the remote desert of southern iraq erupts in a fierce tank battle between the u.s second armored cavalry and the tawakawa mechanized division of the iraqi republican guard [Music] captain h.r mcmaster the men of eagle troop have destroyed an entire company of iraqi t-72 tanks now lieutenant andy kilgore and ghost troop are about to experience their own baptism of fire at that time seventh corps was four m1 abram tanks there was 110 000 soldiers behind me there was nobody in front of me on poke through the smoke we realized that we had about a company defense spread out in front of us he was in them he was in their assembly area i mean he was in and amongst these guys i mean he basically it's like you know he opened open the front door and just started shooting the t-72 is a pretty good tank for when it is developed but it is developed in the 1970s it's got good armor but it's very much outclassed by the m1 abrams tank which is it's superior in every imaginable category its armor can take anything that the t-72 has to throw at it whereas the t-72 gets sliced open uh like a hot knife going through butter the soviets had a different theory on storage of ammo than the americans they've got the ammo basically stored around their hull so if you make the ammo explode on a t72 or any russian tank all that explosive force is funneled up through the turret [Music] ghost troop fires repeatedly until the iraqi tank company is all but destroyed but the men of the tawakawa division won't give up they saw themselves as being the best of the best iraq's elite they manned their positions they manned their vehicles they fought back hard they didn't surrender and they died fighting in many cases the americans had to kill every single member in an iraqi squad or a platoon to get these guys to stop fighting i'm looking over and i can see past my wing man to my platoon sergeant i see an iraqi jump up in front of him with an rpg rocky is probably 50 meters in front of the tank he slewed the gun onto the target the gunner very excited to see a guy pointing an rpg straight at him instead of flipping the coax he just pulls the trigger what looked to me about center mass with a heat round 120 millimeter projectile about like that in the center of the guy's chest it looked like he imploded the guy's body is just picked up and thrown away like a leaf in just a few minutes lieutenant kilgore's platoon kills dozens of iraqis and destroys four tanks and nine armored vehicles when i finally destroyed all the vehicles that we could see i got back up on a troop net called it a spot report to the troop commander who was not very happy with lieutenant kilgore at that time since i had been engagement for a few minutes and not reporting i said you ever pull any stuff like that i'll you know i'll put a bullet in you myself but as it turned out you know in hindsight uh that was the absolute right thing to do move forward that smoke because basically he took the initiative away from the enemy despite heavy losses the iraqis won't quit and launch a counter-attack in an attempt to halt ghost troops advance we got to the point where we were on 73 eastern where we started engaging we're moving and i'm so intent on what's going on i'm in the moment and all of a sudden i get thrown to the ground i get thrown to the turret of my vehicle and i'm like what the hell just happened and what i looked at i look up at my gunner and he's yelling at me and i can't hear him because i have a headset on and and i finally get him on the intercom why did you do that and he says sir there are artillery rounds landing right next to our vehicle and you didn't even notice that you were sticking your head all the way out of the vehicle he said you didn't see those rounds i said i have no idea that was happening because i was so focused on what was happening on the radio what was going on with all the other things that's how intense it is you just just go go go they saw that we were attacking from their flanks so they tried to to move out and and come around on our flank with what that ended up doing was that gave us a bunch of silhouettes moving across our phone and the crazy thing is that when we go to gunnery we practice with moving targets to look just like that when that occurred what i did is i scrambled two tanks give them to the scalpel tune and the scalpel tune would give two two bradleys and give it to the tangle too by scrambling bradley's and abram's tanks in combined fighting units sartiano creates a lethal sea and shoot combination the bradleys with their superior targeting systems pinpoint targets for the tanks which then open fire with their high velocity 120 millimeter guns able to unleash a deadly accurate round every four seconds you imagine putting something that's about as brown as a grapefruit two miles away onto something that's as big as uh you know a little bigger than a van [Music] that's unbelievable we had tank shooting over two miles and getting heads it was absolutely amazing all of a sudden i remember it was jeff garwick's that sargon has been hit [Applause] and all of a sudden the whole troop net just went silent february 26 1991 the u.s second armored cavalry's eagle and ghost troops have dealt a crushing glow to the taliban mechanized division but just as it seems they will emerge from the battle unscathed one of ghost troops bradley fighting vehicles takes a direct hit and we notice at 1-6 which is on the extreme right of the scout platoon to our left he's pulled up on just a little bit of a rise he was probably hit by one of the vehicles that we had shot because i don't think there was anything left out there unengaged so i'm probably willing to bet that that bmp had been shot to sable round abandoned because it didn't explode and burn people got back in it the bmp is a lightly armored fighting vehicle like the bradley a high-velocity sabo round might tear right through it leaving it still operational armed with a 76 millimeter semi-automatic cannon the bmp has more than enough firepower to penetrate a bradley staff sergeant chaffey the bradley commander he said that andy turned and looked at him and said what the [ __ ] was that about that time the second round hit and decapitated circler really hurt morale of the truth to know that that uh sergeant muller died the whole troop was able to basically rally uh around around the situation you know one of our guys just got hit but i got a job to do this fight is not over you're in the middle of it you can't worry about this guy you gotta keep going the battle of 73 easting is all over in just 90 minutes american casualties are remarkably light one killed and 12 wounded for the iraqis however the toll is enormous the taoikalna was wiped out in the fighting against the us seventh corps thousands of members of the tower called the division were killed [Music] they started out the battle with about 200 tanks and barely two dozen were able to pull back off of it later on you know after the attack we ran out and uh and then captured some additional enemy prisoners we put them in the back of our squadron tactical command post bradley and as they closed the turret shield door there was a picture of erwin rommel who you know we had admired and sort of patterned ourselves after in terms of his tactics so this uh brigade commander says in perfect english you know why do you have a picture of your world war ii adversary in your and your bradley and one of our privates in the back of the bradley said listen why don't you just shut the hell up if you'd read a little bit more about romwe you wouldn't be sitting in the back of my track the reason for not only the american victory but also the overwhelming nature of that victory lay in the fact that the united states held pretty much every single advantage over iraq that you could imagine but there was the stand of the tawa khalna and several other divisions of the republican guard that slowed down the american advance it bought time for other iraqi units to retreat out of the kuwaiti theater it's a great tragedy because it set the stage for the intervention in 2003. it was the survival of the republican guard that ultimately preserves the saddam hussein regime he might have fallen right then and there in 1991 and saved the iraqis and the united states and the entire middle east another bloody war [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, saddam hussein, american history, gulf war, iraq, iraq war, al qaeda, afghanistan war, war in the middle east, american military history, war in iraq

Id: WKZn-vT9CRE

Length: 47min 6sec (2826 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021