thedrifter
05-20-03, 05:45 PM
Jim Landers: 'Alone and unafraid'
The Marines' 2nd Tank Battalion used speed and armor to make quick work of Saddam Hussein's regime
05/18/2003
By JIM LANDERS / The Dallas Morning News
Dispatches are exclusive reports from Belo Interactive field correspondents covering the war with Iraq. Jim Landers is a reporter for the Belo Washington Bureau and photographer Cheryl Diaz Meyer works for The Dallas Morning News. They are embedded in Iraq with the Marine Corps' 2nd Tank Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. E-mail them at correspondents@belointeractive.com.
AL AZIZIYAH, Iraq — The Iraqis fired rocket-propelled grenades from behind a taxi parked along a distant canal. One grenade zipped across the nose of an armored amphibious vehicle and exploded in the dirt.
That angered Maj. Andrew Bianca, executive officer of the Marines' 2nd Tank Battalion. Sheathed in aluminum plate, the tracked amphibious vehicles known as amtracks can withstand rifle fire, but not rocket grenades. And Maj. Bianca's support team was in amtracks. He ordered his tank crew to fire a round at the Iraqis.
The 120 mm cannon barrel dropped slightly, then erupted with smoke and flame. The noise ripped the air so violently that Marines standing in an amtrack behind the tank were knocked off balance.
A cloud of dirt appeared behind the taxi. The shell had gone through the taxi's open windows. But shrapnel from the round finished the Iraqis, and a finger of black smoke and flame soon rose from the taxi.
The tank column resumed its march to Baghdad.
For Marines and Army soldiers fighting throughout southern Iraq, this was their war: armored columns blasting through urban ambushes.
Air Force and Navy bombers made it impossible for the Iraqis to fight effectively with tanks and artillery. So when the Iraqis chose to fight, they hid in buildings and alleyways with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
The 2nd Tank Battalion started several fights with these urban opponents. Speed mattered more than body counts or seized ground. Using tanks to punch through enemy ambushes put the Marines closer to Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Lt. Col. Mike Oehl, the battalion's commanding officer, put it to his officers this way: "Speed is the essence of this endeavor." He was talking about a planned raid, but the remark held true for the battalion's mission in the war.
"It's hard to know what our part was in the overall war, but I'd like to think we made it a shorter war because we got here so quickly," Col. Oehl said when his unit reached Baghdad.
No single unit won the war with Iraq. The 2nd Tank Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., brought 44 tanks, 249 other vehicles and 975 Marines to a fight spread across almost 300,000 U.S., British and Australian men and women. The 2nd Tank Battalion suffered five killed and dozens wounded; other units saw more fighting and suffered more casualties.
Yet several analysts agreed that the battalion exemplified the strategy and tactics that toppled Mr. Hussein in just three weeks of warfare.
"Armor played an incredibly important role," said Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, director of international programs at the Virginia Military Institute. "The real objective was not the destruction of the Iraqi military but the unseating of the regime, and these flying columns, at the end, were key to causing the regime to collapse."
New life for the tank
Just a few years ago, the Marine Corps was so anxious to fund a new generation of aviation and amphibious equipment, it was willing to give up its tanks. Both Army and Marine Corps strategists argued that attack helicopters and helicopter-borne infantry forces were the machines needed for fast attacks.
The war gave armor advocates new life. The Army's one major attack with Apache helicopters went awry when the Iraqis, alerted that the helicopters were coming, shot up most of the force using rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.
"We're going to keep the tank, and it will be highly useful," said Kenneth Estes, author of Marines Under Armor and a retired lieutenant colonel. "Commandants and others who would like it to go away because of its monstrous budget, I'm sorry. If you are ever going to fight someone who is a serious opponent, you are going to have to have the tank again."
The 2nd Battalion's tanks traveled inland more than 500 miles from the shores of Kuwait to the streets of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown — farther than any battalion in Marine Corps history, said Lt. Gen. Earl B. Hailston, commander of Marine Forces at Central Command. They fought in Baghdad, Al Aziziyah and four other towns and villages in the 26 days it took for one of the battalion's companies to reach Tikrit.
Their main weapon was the M1A1 Abrams tank.
The Abrams has a 120 mm cannon and three machine guns. It was designed in the 1970s to give the Army tanks that were superior to anything in the Soviet arsenal.
The Russians developed the T-72 and T-84 tanks with a 125 mm cannon, and the T-72 became the main battle tank of Iraq's Republican Guards. But the Abrams fires a high-velocity round that the Marines say is superior to the Soviet-designed 125 mm cannon. Some Abrams rounds are made with depleted uranium that is so dense it burns through layers of tank armor before exploding inside an enemy armored vehicle.
Firepower makes tanks the battleships of land warfare. Unlike the warships of old, the Abrams does not need several range-finding shots to find its target. The tank's "ballistic solution" computer is so precise, the first shot usually finds its mark, tank gunners say. The same targeting excellence holds for the tank's .50-caliber "co-ax" machine gun mounted beside the cannon.
About halfway along the barrel rests a thick pad called a "bore evacuator" that allows air to rush inside to fill the vacuum created when a shell is fired. Tankers paint names for their tanks on the bore evacuators.
Col. Oehl's crew named its tank "Deadly Mariah" and animated the name with an angry cloud blowing swords from its mouth. Maj. Bianca's tank crew reached back to Greek mythology for the name "Two Furies" – anger and vengeance, minus the third fury, jealousy, which seemed out of place in Iraq.
An Abrams tank makes little room for its four-man crew. The driver is beneath the cannon barrel, by himself toward the front of the tank. He lies on a tilted bench and peers outside through thick prisms.
The gunner sits in the well of the turret, using thermal sights that enable him to find targets emanating heat at night or during severe storms. To his left is the tank loader, who pulls shells from a rear compartment and feeds them into the cannon. He has a turret hatch above his head equipped with a machine gun.
The tank commander sits behind and above the gunner. During the Iraq war, a Marine tank commander usually fought with his head and shoulders exposed above the turret hatch, where he could see the battlefield and fire a .50-caliber machine gun.
The tank weighs 68 tons and is powered by a 1,500-horsepower jet turbine engine. From the perspective of an opposing foxhole, it is a dreadful machine. It shakes the earth. It can travel at speeds as high as 55 mph. The shock from its cannon blast is incapacitating to anyone standing (or cowering) before it.
'Bully of the battlefield'
"The bully of the battlefield," marveled Lance Cpl. Billy Peixotto, a tank driver with the battalion from McKinney.
The Army's 3rd Infantry Division fought with more tanks than the Marines, and led the way into Baghdad with armored assaults that showed Mr. Hussein and his sons no longer controlled the capital.
But while the Army has other armored and mechanized divisions, the Pentagon turned to the Marines to fight the eastern prong of the war as a second land army.
"They've been able to sell themselves better than the Army as the embodiment of the 'revolution in military affairs' that [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld wants," said Col. Davis. "They train and fight as a combined arms force, with maneuver and flexibility tactics."
The 2nd battalion spent most of the war at the tip of the Marines' spear. It came within three miles of Baghdad on April 4, after three days that destroyed what was left of the Al Nida Division of the Republican Guards. They cleared the way to Baghdad for the 1st Marine Division and killed a large number of Arab Muslim volunteers who heeded Osama bin Laden's call to come to Iraq to kill Americans.
http://www.dallasnews.com/img/05-03/0518tank.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
A Marine used moonlight to get ready for the 2nd Tank Battalion's quick strike into Iraq on March 20.
http://www.kmsb.com/sharedcontent/iraq/dailyimages/051803meet.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
Lt. Col. Mike Oehl, commanding officer of the 2nd Tank Battalion, met with other commanders at the battalion command center west of Basra just a few days into the war.
http://www.kmsb.com/sharedcontent/iraq/dailyimages/051803fuel.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
Staff Sgt. Brian Flaherty of New York and Lt. Matt Ritchie of South Carolina connected a fuel bladder to a tank during a dust storm during the Marines' advance. The bladders were used to reduce the dependence on supply lines
continued
The Marines' 2nd Tank Battalion used speed and armor to make quick work of Saddam Hussein's regime
05/18/2003
By JIM LANDERS / The Dallas Morning News
Dispatches are exclusive reports from Belo Interactive field correspondents covering the war with Iraq. Jim Landers is a reporter for the Belo Washington Bureau and photographer Cheryl Diaz Meyer works for The Dallas Morning News. They are embedded in Iraq with the Marine Corps' 2nd Tank Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. E-mail them at correspondents@belointeractive.com.
AL AZIZIYAH, Iraq — The Iraqis fired rocket-propelled grenades from behind a taxi parked along a distant canal. One grenade zipped across the nose of an armored amphibious vehicle and exploded in the dirt.
That angered Maj. Andrew Bianca, executive officer of the Marines' 2nd Tank Battalion. Sheathed in aluminum plate, the tracked amphibious vehicles known as amtracks can withstand rifle fire, but not rocket grenades. And Maj. Bianca's support team was in amtracks. He ordered his tank crew to fire a round at the Iraqis.
The 120 mm cannon barrel dropped slightly, then erupted with smoke and flame. The noise ripped the air so violently that Marines standing in an amtrack behind the tank were knocked off balance.
A cloud of dirt appeared behind the taxi. The shell had gone through the taxi's open windows. But shrapnel from the round finished the Iraqis, and a finger of black smoke and flame soon rose from the taxi.
The tank column resumed its march to Baghdad.
For Marines and Army soldiers fighting throughout southern Iraq, this was their war: armored columns blasting through urban ambushes.
Air Force and Navy bombers made it impossible for the Iraqis to fight effectively with tanks and artillery. So when the Iraqis chose to fight, they hid in buildings and alleyways with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
The 2nd Tank Battalion started several fights with these urban opponents. Speed mattered more than body counts or seized ground. Using tanks to punch through enemy ambushes put the Marines closer to Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Lt. Col. Mike Oehl, the battalion's commanding officer, put it to his officers this way: "Speed is the essence of this endeavor." He was talking about a planned raid, but the remark held true for the battalion's mission in the war.
"It's hard to know what our part was in the overall war, but I'd like to think we made it a shorter war because we got here so quickly," Col. Oehl said when his unit reached Baghdad.
No single unit won the war with Iraq. The 2nd Tank Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., brought 44 tanks, 249 other vehicles and 975 Marines to a fight spread across almost 300,000 U.S., British and Australian men and women. The 2nd Tank Battalion suffered five killed and dozens wounded; other units saw more fighting and suffered more casualties.
Yet several analysts agreed that the battalion exemplified the strategy and tactics that toppled Mr. Hussein in just three weeks of warfare.
"Armor played an incredibly important role," said Marine Lt. Col. Dale Davis, director of international programs at the Virginia Military Institute. "The real objective was not the destruction of the Iraqi military but the unseating of the regime, and these flying columns, at the end, were key to causing the regime to collapse."
New life for the tank
Just a few years ago, the Marine Corps was so anxious to fund a new generation of aviation and amphibious equipment, it was willing to give up its tanks. Both Army and Marine Corps strategists argued that attack helicopters and helicopter-borne infantry forces were the machines needed for fast attacks.
The war gave armor advocates new life. The Army's one major attack with Apache helicopters went awry when the Iraqis, alerted that the helicopters were coming, shot up most of the force using rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire.
"We're going to keep the tank, and it will be highly useful," said Kenneth Estes, author of Marines Under Armor and a retired lieutenant colonel. "Commandants and others who would like it to go away because of its monstrous budget, I'm sorry. If you are ever going to fight someone who is a serious opponent, you are going to have to have the tank again."
The 2nd Battalion's tanks traveled inland more than 500 miles from the shores of Kuwait to the streets of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown — farther than any battalion in Marine Corps history, said Lt. Gen. Earl B. Hailston, commander of Marine Forces at Central Command. They fought in Baghdad, Al Aziziyah and four other towns and villages in the 26 days it took for one of the battalion's companies to reach Tikrit.
Their main weapon was the M1A1 Abrams tank.
The Abrams has a 120 mm cannon and three machine guns. It was designed in the 1970s to give the Army tanks that were superior to anything in the Soviet arsenal.
The Russians developed the T-72 and T-84 tanks with a 125 mm cannon, and the T-72 became the main battle tank of Iraq's Republican Guards. But the Abrams fires a high-velocity round that the Marines say is superior to the Soviet-designed 125 mm cannon. Some Abrams rounds are made with depleted uranium that is so dense it burns through layers of tank armor before exploding inside an enemy armored vehicle.
Firepower makes tanks the battleships of land warfare. Unlike the warships of old, the Abrams does not need several range-finding shots to find its target. The tank's "ballistic solution" computer is so precise, the first shot usually finds its mark, tank gunners say. The same targeting excellence holds for the tank's .50-caliber "co-ax" machine gun mounted beside the cannon.
About halfway along the barrel rests a thick pad called a "bore evacuator" that allows air to rush inside to fill the vacuum created when a shell is fired. Tankers paint names for their tanks on the bore evacuators.
Col. Oehl's crew named its tank "Deadly Mariah" and animated the name with an angry cloud blowing swords from its mouth. Maj. Bianca's tank crew reached back to Greek mythology for the name "Two Furies" – anger and vengeance, minus the third fury, jealousy, which seemed out of place in Iraq.
An Abrams tank makes little room for its four-man crew. The driver is beneath the cannon barrel, by himself toward the front of the tank. He lies on a tilted bench and peers outside through thick prisms.
The gunner sits in the well of the turret, using thermal sights that enable him to find targets emanating heat at night or during severe storms. To his left is the tank loader, who pulls shells from a rear compartment and feeds them into the cannon. He has a turret hatch above his head equipped with a machine gun.
The tank commander sits behind and above the gunner. During the Iraq war, a Marine tank commander usually fought with his head and shoulders exposed above the turret hatch, where he could see the battlefield and fire a .50-caliber machine gun.
The tank weighs 68 tons and is powered by a 1,500-horsepower jet turbine engine. From the perspective of an opposing foxhole, it is a dreadful machine. It shakes the earth. It can travel at speeds as high as 55 mph. The shock from its cannon blast is incapacitating to anyone standing (or cowering) before it.
'Bully of the battlefield'
"The bully of the battlefield," marveled Lance Cpl. Billy Peixotto, a tank driver with the battalion from McKinney.
The Army's 3rd Infantry Division fought with more tanks than the Marines, and led the way into Baghdad with armored assaults that showed Mr. Hussein and his sons no longer controlled the capital.
But while the Army has other armored and mechanized divisions, the Pentagon turned to the Marines to fight the eastern prong of the war as a second land army.
"They've been able to sell themselves better than the Army as the embodiment of the 'revolution in military affairs' that [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld wants," said Col. Davis. "They train and fight as a combined arms force, with maneuver and flexibility tactics."
The 2nd battalion spent most of the war at the tip of the Marines' spear. It came within three miles of Baghdad on April 4, after three days that destroyed what was left of the Al Nida Division of the Republican Guards. They cleared the way to Baghdad for the 1st Marine Division and killed a large number of Arab Muslim volunteers who heeded Osama bin Laden's call to come to Iraq to kill Americans.
http://www.dallasnews.com/img/05-03/0518tank.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
A Marine used moonlight to get ready for the 2nd Tank Battalion's quick strike into Iraq on March 20.
http://www.kmsb.com/sharedcontent/iraq/dailyimages/051803meet.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
Lt. Col. Mike Oehl, commanding officer of the 2nd Tank Battalion, met with other commanders at the battalion command center west of Basra just a few days into the war.
http://www.kmsb.com/sharedcontent/iraq/dailyimages/051803fuel.jpg
Cheryl Diaz Meyer / The Dallas Morning News
Staff Sgt. Brian Flaherty of New York and Lt. Matt Ritchie of South Carolina connected a fuel bladder to a tank during a dust storm during the Marines' advance. The bladders were used to reduce the dependence on supply lines
continued