The Battleground

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The most stunning, overwhelming victory in war is a beginning as well as an end. Diplomatic problems will persist long after the burned-out hulks of Iraqi tanks and the bodies strewn across the cratered battlefield are buried by sand. Political dangers will explode after the last of thousands of mines are dug up. Psychological reverberations will be felt when the final echoes of cheers for the victors have died away.

Saddam Hussein remains in power, at least for the moment, shorn of the military might that made him a menace but not of all capacity for troublemaking. Containing him may require not only a long-lasting arms embargo but also some sort of regional security scheme. Kuwait is liberated, but a smoldering wreck needing perhaps years of reconstruction. Then come the broader difficulties: trying to forge a stable regional balance of power -- or balance of weakness, as some commentators suggest -- and defuse the hatreds that have made the Middle East the world's most prolific breeding ground for war. French President Francois Mitterrand ticks off a laundry list of regional troubles that must be addressed: "The Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian problem, the problem of Lebanon, the control of weapons sales, disarmament, redistribution of resources, reconstruction of countries hit by the war."

The U.S. emerges with new power and credibility; any pledge it makes to defend an ally or oppose an aggressor means far more than such a promise would have meant prior to Jan. 15. But the U.S. also urgently needs to define George Bush's vision of a new world order. To what extent is America ready to assume the role of world policeman? More specifically, under what circumstances might it -- and some of its allies -- again mount a military effort comparable to the one in the gulf? Certainly that cannot be done in response to every case of aggression anywhere, but how does Washington pick and choose? What kind of relationship can it forge with the Soviet Union, which gave crucial support to the anti-Saddam coalition but also served brief notice, in its efforts to mediate a political settlement, that ultimately it will follow its own interests?

Among Americans, the war has finally laid to rest all the ghosts of Vietnam. Self-doubt, deep divisions, suspicions of national decline -- the very words suddenly seem quaint. The problem now may be to contain the surge of pride and unity before it bursts the bounds of reason and passes into jingoism, even hubris.

None of that, however, can detract from the awesome speed, power and totality of the allies' military victory. The war, particularly its climactic 100-hour campaign, bids fair to be enshrined in military textbooks for as long as the annihilation of a Roman army by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. That is still a model for a strategy of encirclement, like the one followed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the gulf.

The war as a whole might be the most one-sided in all history, as indicated by the casualty figures. Latest count for the full 43 days: 149 killed and 513 wounded among the allies, vs. perhaps more than 100,000 deaths and injuries among the Iraqis, though an accurate total may never be known. The conflict challenged a whole series of military shibboleths: generals always refight the last war (Saddam in fact planned a rerun of the 1980-88 war with Iran, but allied strategy and tactics bore no resemblance to Vietnam or Korea); air power alone cannot win a war (maybe not, but it destroyed up to 75% of the fighting capacity of Iraq's front-line troops in Kuwait, making the remainder a pushover); an attacking army needs at least a 3-to-1 superiority in numbers over a defending force, maybe 5-to-1 if the defenders are well dug in (allied forces routed and slaughtered, by a combination of firepower, speed and deception, Iraqi troops that outnumbered them at least 3 to 2 and were extremely well dug in).

Another shibboleth is that no battle ever goes totally according to plan. The final land campaign, however, may become the classic example of a battle in which everything happened exactly as planned, on the allied side -- except faster and better.

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 troops could not communicate even with adjoining companies and battalions; they fought, when they did fight, in isolated actions rather than as part of a coordinated force. One unit of the Republican Guard was caught and devastated on the war's last day while its members were taking a cigarette break; comrades in surrounding units had been unable to warn them that onrushing American forces were almost on top of them.

Bereft of satellites or even aerial reconnaissance, Saddam's commanders could not see what was going on behind allied lines. Thus Schwarzkopf was able to hoodwink Baghdad into concentrating its forces in the wrong places until the very end. Six of Iraq's 42 divisions were massed along the Kuwaiti coast, guarding against a seaborne invasion. U.S. Marines repeatedly practiced amphibious landings, as conspicuously as possible, and as zero hour approached, an armada of 31 ships swung into position to put them ashore near Kuwait City. The battleships Missouri and Wisconsin took turns, an hour at a time, firing their 16-in. guns at Iraqi shore defenses. It was all a feint; * the war ended with 17,000 Marines still aboard their ships.

Most of Iraq's front-line troops hunkered down behind minefields and barbed wire along the 138-mile Saudi-Kuwait border, awaiting what Baghdad obviously expected to be the main allied thrust. Coalition troops did in fact initially concentrate in front of them. But in the last 16 days before the attack, more than 150,000 American, British and French troops moved to the west, as far as 300 miles inland from the gulf, setting up bases across the border from an area of southern Iraq that was mostly empty desert. Part of that allied force was to drive straight to the Euphrates River, cutting off retreat routes for the Iraqi forces in Kuwait; another part was to turn east and hit Republican Guard divisions along the Kuwait-Iraq border, taking them by surprise on their right flank.

The battle plan did call as well, however, for narrowly focused thrusts through the main Iraqi defensive works. Concerned that his troops would get caught in breaches and slaughtered by massed Iraqi artillery firing poison-gas shells, Schwarzkopf ordered a shift in the bombing campaign during the last week to concentrate heavily on knocking out the frontline big guns. The planes succeeded spectacularly, destroying so much Iraqi artillery that its fire was never either as heavy or as accurate as had been feared. Also in the last week, special-operations commandos expanded their activities deep in Iraqi territory. Many additional units landed by helicopter, checking out the lay of the land and fixing Iraqi troop, tank and artillery positions so they could guide both air strikes and, later, advancing ground units.

Schwarzkopf had initially got Washington's agreement to Feb. 21 as the day to begin the ground assault. But some subordinates thought they needed two more days to get ready. So he and George Bush fixed 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 23 -- noon in Washington -- as zero hour, and Bush made that the expiration time of a final ultimatum to Saddam. As the deadline approached, tanks equipped with bulldozer blades cut wide openings through the sand berms Saddam's soldiers had erected as a defensive wall along the border, and tanks and troops began pushing through on probing attacks; some were across hours before the deadline.

During the night, B-52s pounded Iraqi positions and helicopter gunships swept the defense lines, firing rockets at tanks and artillery pieces and machine-gunning soldiers in the trenches. Allied artillery opened an intense bombardment from howitzers and multiple-launch rocket systems that released thousands of shrapnel-like bomblets over the trenches. Everything was ready for the ground troops to begin moving in the last hours of darkness, taking advantage of the allies' superior night-vision equipment.

SUNDAY: THROUGH THE BREACH

Between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., allied forces jumped off at selected points all along the 300-mile line. Though Hollywood has long pictured the desert as a place of eternal burning sunshine and total aridity, the attack began in a lashing rain that turned the sand into muddy goo. The first troops through were wearing bulky chemical-protective garb, in keeping with the allied conviction that Saddam would use poison gas right from the beginning. In fact, the Iraqis never fired their chemical weapons.

Saudi and other Arab troops hit the strongest Iraqi fortifications near the coast. To their left were the U.S. 1st and 2nd Marine divisions, which had moved inland. The Marines attacked at points known to allied commanders as the "elbow" of Kuwait, where the border with Saudi Arabia turns sharply to the north, and the "armpit," where it abruptly sweeps west again. They were led in person by Lieut. General Walter Boomer, the top Marine in the gulf area, according to operational plans he had forwarded only 16 days earlier to the Pentagon, where they caused raised eyebrows because of their audacity. But they worked.

The allied troops had built in Saudi Arabia sand berms and replicas of the other Iraqi entrenchments and practiced breaching them until they could virtually do it blindfolded. Among the tactics: Remotely piloted vehicles, or pilotless drone planes, guided soldiers to the most thinly held spots in the Iraqi lines. Line charges, or 100-yd.-long strings of tubing laced with explosives, blasted paths through minefields. Tanks and armored personnel carriers drove through those paths in long, narrow files, observing strict radio silence. Their drivers communicated by hand signals -- even in the dark, when night-vision devices worked perfectly.

Much had been written about the inferno the Iraqis would create by filling trenches with burning oil. But in the Marines' sector, U.S. planes had burned off the oil prematurely by dropping napalm. The Saudis did encounter trenches filled with blazing petroleum and in some cases with water, but crossed them by the simple expedient of having bulldozers and 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.

At the far western reach of the allied line, the French 6th Light Armored Division jumped off before dawn Sunday, attacking across the Iraqi border with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division toward a fort and airfield named As Salman, 105 miles inside Iraq. On the way, American artillery and French Gazelle helicopter gunships firing HOT antitank missiles subdued a force of Iraqi tanks and infantry, many of whom surrendered.

To the right of the French, the U.S. 101st Airborne Division mounted a deep- penetration helicopter assault into southeastern Iraq. Chinook helicopters, some skimming only 50 feet above the sand, others slinging Humvees, modern versions of the old jeeps, below their fuselages, ferried 4,000 men with their vehicles and equipment into the desert. The force established a huge refueling and resupply base, then jumped off again from there deeper into Iraq and struck out for the Euphrates River. Other units -- the British 1st Armored Division, seven U.S. Army divisions, and Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian units -- attacked at various times throughout the morning and early afternoon at points along the Saudi-Iraq border into the western tip of Kuwait. All moved fast and attained their most ambitious objectives. The 1st Marine Division, for example, by Sunday night had reached al-Jaber airport, half the 40-mile distance from the Saudi border to Kuwait City.

MONDAY: SPEEDING UP

Nearly all units continued moving at rapid rates: the Saudis and U.S. Marines in Kuwait toward the north; American Army units toward the Euphrates; British, other American, Egyptian and Syrian forces to the east. The French, having taken As Salman in 36 hours, stopped at midday on Schwarzkopf's orders to set up a defensive position guarding the units to their right against any Iraqi attack from the west.

Mass surrenders began almost with the first breaches of the Iraqi lines Sunday and by Tuesday had reached 30,000; the allied command stopped counting then. By war's end the number had easily passed 100,000. They came out of collapsed bunkers, waving handkerchiefs, underwear, anything that was white. Everyone on the allied side had a favorite surrender story.

Two striking ones: about 40 Iraqis tried to surrender to an RPV, turning round and round, waving their arms as the pilotless drone circled above. An Iraqi tank and another armored vehicle bore down on a U.S. Humvee driven by a lone soldier and stuck helplessly in mud. The Iraqi vehicles pulled the Humvee out of the mire; then their crews surrendered to its driver.

Schwarzkopf was careful to state that the mass surrenders did not necessarily mean the Iraqis were poor fighters. Most, he noted, had no belief in what they were doing and did not regard holding on to Kuwait as a cause worth dying for. They were starved, thirsty, often sick -- medical care was atrocious to nonexistent -- and some had been terrorized by their own commanders, who employed roving execution squads to shoot or hang troopers who had attempted to desert or defect. That barbaric method of keeping discipline backfired: soldiers gave themselves up as soon as the guns pointing at them were American, British or Arab.

Baghdad radio on Monday broadcast an order, supposedly from Saddam, for his forces to withdraw from Kuwait; many complied with alacrity. Those who paused to fight were often cut to pieces. On Monday afternoon, for example, the 1st Marine Division encountered Iraqi units in the Burgan oil field near Kuwait International Airport and flushed them out with "time on target" fire, the opposite of a rolling barrage: all guns in the entire division opened up at the same time to lay down a devastating curtain of explosives on the same limited target area. That forced the Iraqis out of the oil field. Emerging into the open, they were hit with more fire from artillery, Cobra attack helicopters and Marine tanks. Some 50 to 60 Iraqi tanks were reported destroyed in this brief engagement. Marine losses: zero.

Oddly, though, this day of burgeoning victory brought the one U.S. tragedy of the war. An Iraqi Scud missile heading for Saudi Arabia broke up in flight: the warhead plunged onto an American barracks near the huge base at Dhahran. The blast killed 28 soldiers, causing in an eye blink almost a third of all American battle deaths in the entire war. An additional 90 soldiers were injured, many seriously.

TUESDAY: BUGGING OUT

Residents of Kuwait City awoke to the sound of tank engines revving up. The Iraqis were pulling out, sparing the city, its inhabitants, and the allied forces closing in the agonies of house-to-house fighting. By afternoon Kuwaiti resistance fighters said they were in control of the city, though sniper fire continued for a while and Saudi and Kuwaiti troops did not stage their victory parade into the city until the following day.

Outside the city, said a U.S. briefing officer, "the whole country is full of people escaping and evading." Though some allied commanders described the Iraqi pullback as an orderly fighting retreat, at times it looked like a pell- mell bugout. Roads leading north toward the Iraqi city of Basra, military headquarters for the Kuwait theater, were so jammed with vehicles and troops that a pilot from the carrier U.S.S. Ranger in the gulf said it looked like "the road to Daytona Beach at spring break." Allied bombing of roads and bridges had created bottlenecks from which mammoth traffic jams backed up, making for still more inviting targets. So many allied planes converged on the main road from Kuwait City to Basra that combat air controllers feared they might collide, and diverted some of the attackers to secondary roads.

Pilots flying off the Ranger were so eager to refuel and get back into the air to kill more tanks that they had their planes loaded with whatever bombs or missiles happened to be available on the flight deck, rather than waiting for the ship's slow elevators to bring up ordnance specifically chosen for their mission. Pilot after pilot described attacks in which, after the first tank in a column was hit, the crews would abandon the others and set out on foot for home. Correspondents touring the road at week's end found mile after mile of blasted, twisted, burned, shattered tanks, trucks and other vehicles, many still incongruously carrying loot from Kuwait City: children's toys, carpets, television sets. Those Iraqi soldiers who reached the Euphrates threw up pontoon bridges to replace sturdier spans that had been destroyed by bombing; when more bombs wrecked the pontoon bridges too, some desperate troops crossed by walking along earthen dams.

WEDNESDAY: CLOSING THE RING

Some allied units had reached the Euphrates as early as Monday; by Wednesday morning they were established in enough force to prevent further crossings. British units cut the main Kuwait City-Basra highway early in the day; ! American Marines had reached it farther to the south the previous afternoon. The gate had slammed shut on Saddam's forces in Kuwait. Their escape routes were broken. Encirclement was complete.

The day was dominated by the two big tank battles of the war. U.S. Marines ran into a major Iraqi armored force at Kuwait International Airport. The sky was so dark because of the heavy smoke from oil wells set afire by the Iraqis that Marine Major General Michael Myatt had to read a map by flashlight. The Marines nonetheless resumed the battle by what light there was, and late in the day reported having destroyed all 100 Iraqi tanks they had engaged.

In a far bigger clash along the Kuwait-Iraq border, American and British troops pushing eastward after their flanking maneuver through the desert finally broke the Republican Guard. Schwarzkopf had defined these troops as the "center of gravity" of the Iraqi forces. Said a senior Army staff officer: "The whole campaign was designed on one theme: to destroy the Republican Guard."

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. But one American officer asserted that "basically we are chasing them across the plains, shooting as we go."

The Guard fared no better than other Iraqi units. Not only was allied air power unchallenged and decisive; U.S. M1A1 tanks proved superior in maneuverability and firepower to Iraq's best, the Soviet-built T-72s. One correspondent witnessed a duel between an M1A1 and a T-72. When they sighted each other, the American tank backed up, outside the T-72's range. The Iraqi tank fired a round that fell short. The M1A1 fired its longer-range cannon, scoring a direct hit that put the Iraqi tank out of action, then promptly swiveled and went looking for another victim.

By Wednesday evening Schwarzkopf, in a masterly briefing on the war about to end, began by saying that Iraq had lost more than 3,000 of the 4,700 tanks it had deployed in the Kuwait theater at the start of the war -- then added, "As a matter of fact, you can add 700 to that as a result of the battle that's going on right now with the Republican Guard." Saddam's forces lost similarly high proportions of their other armored vehicles, artillery and trucks. The result, said Schwarzkopf, was that Iraq was left with only an infantry army, no longer capable of offensive operations and therefore not a threat to other countries in the region. That fulfilled one of the two principal allied war aims; the other, clearing Iraq out of Kuwait, was just about accomplished as well. The war was as good as over.

THURSDAY: VICTORY

In a few more hours, the shooting officially ended. At 5 a.m. (9 p.m. Wednesday in Washington) Bush went on the air to announce that he was ordering a suspension of all offensive action, to take effect three hours later. Since it was a unilateral action rather than an agreement negotiated with the Iraqis, it was not officially a cease-fire, but it had the same result. Shooting in fact stopped at 8 a.m., and only sporadic incidents broke the silence as the weekend began. Some Iraqi units appeared not to get the word at first; allied troops set up loudspeakers blaring over and over again the message in Arabic that Iraqis would no longer be attacked if they held their fire. A warning to those that did not: on Saturday, a column of 140 Iraqi tanks and other armored vehicles ran into a U.S. force and began shooting. The Americans counterattacked with tank and helicopter fire, destroying 60 Iraqi vehicles and capturing the other 80.

The task of negotiating an official end to the battle was only beginning. Iraq designated a representative to meet with Schwarzkopf's officers and work out terms of a permanent cease-fire, but that was no simple task. The allies were pressing for a swift exchange of prisoners, but did that include the Kuwaiti civilians -- as many as 40,000 -- believed to have been carried into Iraq by Saddam's retreating forces? And what would the coalition do with the many Iraqi prisoners who feared, with reason, that they might be shot if they went home? Should Saddam's forces be allowed to take out of Kuwait what heavy equipment they had left, or must they leave it behind as spoils of war?

Long-range planning began too. U.S. and British officials intended to begin some token withdrawals of troops from the gulf as early as this week, but Americans warned that bringing all the forces home might take longer than the seven months that had been required to complete the buildup. Most will have to stay on until some permanent peacekeeping arrangements can be forged. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker prepared to set out on a swing through the Middle East this week, including his first visit ever to Israel, to scout the possibilities for a wider regional settlement.

Postmortems had already begun. Baghdad Radio claimed that Iraq had won but could give no rationale except some mumblings about spirit. In Moscow generals hastened to proclaim that the destruction of Iraq's mostly Soviet-built equipment said more about the deficiencies of the Iraqi military than the quality of the weapons. Some of them hinted, however, that Soviet cuts in military spending, if carried much further, might begin to weaken the nation's defenses against the demonstrated proficiency of Western high-tech weaponry.

On the allied side, Schwarzkopf seemed right in terming the coalition's ability to achieve nearly total success with so few losses "almost miraculous." Not only were the pessimists and skeptics wrong, including all those who had said the aerial bombing was going badly, but the optimists were far off the mark too. American casualties were less than 5% of the lowest prewar Pentagon estimates. U.S. forces had prepared about 10,000 beds, aboard ships and in three field hospitals, to receive the wounded; only a tiny fraction were filled.

Such overwhelming success, in fact, may be unrepeatable. The U.S. and its partners are unlikely to face soon, or ever, another combination of a cause so clear that it unites a mighty coalition; ideal terrain for high-tech warfare; a dispirited and war-weary enemy army; an almost total lack of opposition in the air; and an adversary, Saddam, who made nearly every blunder in the book.

With reporting by William Dowell/Kuwait City, Bruce van Voorst/Washington and Robert T. Zintl/Riyadh