Storm on the Horizon - Khafji--The Battle That Changed the Course of the Gulf War

Zusatztext “One of the best books yet on the first Gulf War.” –H.W. Brands! author of Lone Star Nation and The Age of Gold “This is the story no one thought could be told about the Gulf War! but David Morris has done so magnificently. . . . These Marines come alive as blood brothers! and their story becomes our story.” –Doug Stanton! bestselling author of In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors “A HELL OF A STORY.” –General Chuck Horner! commander of U.S. air forces in the Gulf War Informationen zum Autor David J. Morris Klappentext On January 29! 1991! Saddam Hussein hurled three crack armored divisions into Saudi Arabia! determined to stop the American attempt to liberate Kuwait before it began. Caught without warning in the path of the Iraqi juggernaut were small groups of U.S. Marines and Special Forces soldiers! their weapons no match for the Iraqi tanks bearing down on them. Based on scores of firsthand reports and newly declassified documents! Storm on the Horizon is a riveting account of how these elite fighting men not only escaped the Iraqi onslaught but fought their way to victory with true American grit. From the ferocious desert attacks to the desperate street fighting in Khafji! Marine David Morris captures the ordeal through the eyes of men who fought it! giving readers a front-row seat to the bloodiest battle of the Gulf War. The Persian Gulf Theater, Winter 1991 I calculated that it is only by a counterstrike that one can disrupt the enemy’s preparation for a new offensive. To force the enemy to take the offensive earlier than at the time which he had set is more advantageous for us than to sit and wait until he is fully prepared. —Soviet General Vassili I. Chuikov, remarks regarding the Soviet offensive at Stalingrad, October 1942. Early on the morning of January 17, 1991, the multinational Coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein kicked off an air campaign the likes of which the world had never seen. Capitalizing on nearly two decades of unprecedented American techno-military advancement, the execution of such a wide-reaching surgical campaign signaled a revolution in warfare. Conceived by a top secret U.S. Air Force planning cell known as Checkmate and its iconoclastic leader, Colonel John Warden, this air assault made use of a ground-breaking new class of weapons technologies developed in the years after the Vietnam War. Unlike the comparatively crude carpet-bombing campaigns of World War II and Vietnam, this operation, portentously named Instant Thunder, was designed to systematically demolish Saddam’s leadership structure without leveling Iraq’s cities along with it. What made Instant Thunder unique, however, was not just the technology it exploited but the extreme discretion with which it was prosecuted: Rather than try to methodically kill off every arm of the vast Iraqi war machine, Instant Thunder zeroed in on the Iraqi central nervous system: its electrical grid, its telecommunications networks, its radar installations, its command-and-control nodes, leaving Saddam’s vaunted armored divisions to die on the vine. Taken as a whole, Warden’s audacious plan seemed as much an argument to prove the supremacy of airpower as it was an attempt to force Saddam out of Kuwait. Handpicked to fire the opening salvos of this new war was a four-ship flight of Apache helicopter gunships from the Army’s 101st Airborne. Piercing Iraqi airspace just after 2:00 a.m., they unleashed a volley of Hellfire missiles into a key battery of Iraqi radar dishes poised on the Saudi border, opening the door to flights of electronic jamming aircraft and Stealth fighters. Wave upon wave of American aircraft soon thundered over Baghdad, unleashing their deadly cargo, in some cases near waiting television cameras. And as CNN fl...

Product details

• Authors: David Morris
• Publisher: Presidio Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.08.2005
• EAN: 9780345481535
• ISBN: 978-0-345-48153-5
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 112 mm x 174 mm x 28 mm