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

160 The Road to Safwan
Iraq’s remaining combat power struggled to reach bridges at
Basra and safety on the north side of the marshes and the Shatt
al Arab waterway. 4
Attacking with five divisions and an armored cavalry regiment
across an eighty-five kilometer front, LTG Franks intended
to finish off the Iraqi forces within his zone of attack
during the night of February 27–28 with a double envelopment.
He wanted the 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions to continue their
attack east and maintain pressure on Iraqi defenders along the
Kuwait border, while the 1st Infantry Division, located south of
the 3rd Armored Division, attacked northeast toward the Basra
Highway. Franks also intended to the use the 1st Cavalry Division,
recently assigned to the VII Corps and still moving into
position from its original location along the Wadi al Batin, to
move north of the 1st Armored Division and then attack to the
southeast towards the Basra Highway in northern Kuwait.
Meanwhile, the British 1st Armoured Division was to race due
east to cut the highway just north of Kuwait City. North of VII
Corps, the U.S. XVIII Corps had the responsibility for attacking
the Iraqi units south of the Euphrates River and north of the VII
Corps zone. To the south, the attack by Arab forces and the U.S.
Marines had stopped with the capture of Kuwait City.
In the early morning hours of February 27, MG Thomas G.
Rhame’s 1st Infantry Division was reorganizing and refueling
on the eastern side of Objective Norfolk, in southeastern Iraq,
just west of the Kuwait border. In one of the most dramatic battles
of the war, and one of the most intense night-time armored
battles in history, Franks’s three-division attack had annihilated
the reinforced Tawakalna Mechanized Division, one of the best
units in the Iraqi Army. The 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions had
destroyed the northern two-thirds of the Iraqi defensive line.
The 1st Armored Division then continued to the east and that afternoon
destroyed the Medina Armored Division at the Battle of
Medina Ridge. Meanwhile, slicing across the southern portion
of the Tawakalna’s battle line, the Big Red One reduced the Iraqi
18th Mechanized and 37th Armored (12th Armored Division)
Brigades to little more than memory, leaving almost 300 tanks
and infantry fighting vehicles burning in the division’s wake. 5
As the southern arm of his double envelopment, Franks