The Road to Safwan: The 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry in the 1991 ...

10 The Breach
We now know to what extent the Big Red
One out-classed its Iraqi opponent. The
few thousand poorly armed, deployed,
and equipped soldiers of the Iraqi 26th Infantry Division were
simply not prepared for what was to come. Operating the most
sophisticated and lethal weapons in the world, and backed by
the largest concentration of artillery the United States had employed
since the Battle of the Bulge over forty-five years earlier,
the 26,000 soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division could not be
stopped by the paltry Iraqi defenses. But, we know this today.
At the time the division’s soldiers looked back to previous assaults
at Catigny, France (1917), Omaha Beach (1944), and Junction
City (Vietnam, 1967) as indicators of how bloody battle
could be.
The largest attack the United States Army had conducted in
almost fifty years began on a rainy, overcast morning. The
showers continued until about 1000 hours, but the visibility
continued to decrease as fog and blowing sand dominated the
soldiers’ view. Winds were fairly strong with gusts up to
twenty-five knots during the day. The horizon began showing
traces of light in the eastern sky at 0531 hours and sunset was
to come at 1753 hours. 1
American forces made up over sixty percent of the 472,000
coalition troops beginning their offensive. An attack by United
States Marines and Arabic forces into Kuwait was supposed to
fix the attention of the Iraqi high command. Then, LTG John
Yeosock’s Third Army would attack in the west with LTG Gary
Luck’s XVIII Corps heading for the Euphrates River and LTG
Frederick Franks’s VII Corps maneuvering against Saddam’s
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