1991 Gulf Peter and Dan Snow: 20th Century Battlefields

Contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

In 1991, the small Arab state of Kuwait

was at the centre of the last major war of the 20th century.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq had invaded Kuwait,

putting nearly half the world's oil within his reach.

Virtually everyone agreed he had to be stopped.

Over 1 million troops faced each other across the battlefield.

Revolutionary new technology like stealth bombers,

cruise missiles and precision guided bombs would make this

a battle unlike anything anyone had seen before.

I'll be getting to grips with some of the challenges faced

by the men and women on the front line in this new era of warfare.

And I'll show how the commanders chose their tactics in a war

dominated by cutting-edge technology and ruthless political calculation.

With his seizure of Kuwait,

Saddam Hussein threatened to hold the whole world to ransom.

He warned that the fight that would follow would be

"the mother of all battles".

Everything would now depend on the outcome of Operation Desert Storm.

A battle for Kuwait.

In the early hours of August the 2nd, 1990,

Iraq's army shocked the world by invading its neighbour, Kuwait.

They smashed through the defences on the border

and headed straight down this road towards the capital, Kuwait City.

Kuwait's tiny army was unable to mount any serious resistance.

Thousands of Iraqi troops were soon swarming through the capital.

At around 4.30am, just hours after the start of the invasion,

Iraqi troops arrived here at the Parliament Building.

The guards were taken completely by surprise and, within minutes,

Kuwait's Parliament had been captured.

The ruler of Kuwait, the Amir,

along with most of the royal princes, abandoned their palaces and fled.

By the end of the day, the entire country of Kuwait was completely overrun

as thousands of Iraqi troops continued to pour across the border.

And they were all obeying the orders of one man - Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein was the President of Iraq and a brutal dictator.

For 11 years, he had enforced a violent regime

that murdered and tortured without hesitation.

He'd built up the fourth largest army in the world with over a million troops.

But his regime was in serious trouble.

Not least because an eight-year war with his neighbour Iran had left him with a mountain of debt.

Iraq was bankrupt.

Saddam had to come up with a solution to his cash crisis

and it lay across the border, here in Kuwait.

This is Iraq and here is Kuwait.

Kuwait is almost floating on oil.

Outside the capital, Kuwait City, oil wells cover much of the country.

To the north, there are oil fields on the border with Iraq.

Here in the centre, the Burgan Oil Field

is the second largest in the world.

Altogether, Kuwait held 10% of the world's oil,

and it was this vast wealth that Saddam had captured.

Together with the Iraqi oil fields that Saddam already owned,

he now had control of over a fifth of the world's oil reserves.

Saddam gambled that Western leaders did not have the stomach

for a Middle East war and would have to accept his occupation of Kuwait.

But he was in for a rude shock.

This will not stand.

This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.

What has happened is a total violation of international law.

Please raise their hand.

The United Nations condemned the invasion and called on Saddam to withdraw his troops from Kuwait.

But far from withdrawing, there were signs that he might be planning something even bigger.

Thousands of Iraqi reinforcements were moving into Kuwait.

Some set up defensive positions along the coastline.

But most worrying for global leaders

was the large number of troops and tanks

driving down through the country and massing on its southern border.

The question was, would they stop there?

200 miles south of the border

was the richest concentration of oil wells in the world -

the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi army was small -

if Saddam chose to attack now, there was nothing to stop him.

If he seized Saudi Arabia's wells,

he would control nearly half the world's oil.

President Bush Senior, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were determined to stop him.

They were convinced that the only way to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil

was to put US and British troops in on the ground.

But there was a huge problem.

Saudi Arabia is the spiritual home of Islam.

It contains the cities of Mecca and Medina, the most holy sites in the Muslim world.

Its royal family ran the country according to strict Islamic laws.

Any attempt to fly in tens of thousands of troops

from the non-Muslim armies

of Britain and America was a political minefield.

On August 6th, 1990, just four days after Iraq had invaded Kuwait,

a top-rank White House team flew to Saudi Arabia to meet King Fahd.

They offered to fly in thousands of US troops to defend the kingdom.

King Fahd knew his meagre forces couldn't stop Saddam Hussein if he chose to invade,

and so, despite the risk of huge anger from devout Muslims,

he immediately gave the Americans the invitation they wanted.

Within hours, one of the biggest deployments of troops

since World War II was underway.

More than 250,000 American and British troops

from bases in the US and Europe

headed for the deserts of the Middle East.

The Americans and British were determined that their stand

against Saddam Hussein should be seen as an international operation,

and not as an American-led attack on an Arab country.

In the coming months, troops from over 30 countries would take their place

alongside the Americans and British in the Saudi Arabian desert.

It was an extraordinary coalition, that even included several Arab states, like Egypt and Syria.

But it was the Americans that dominated.

The man in charge was called General Norman Schwarzkopf.

He was a giant of a man with a keen intellect.

He also had a fiery temper and he set the tone

with one of his first public comments about Saddam Hussein.

But if he dares, he dares come across that border and come down here,

I'm completely confident that we're gonna kick his butt when he gets here.

Schwarzkopf was a tough talker, but he knew he faced a mammoth task.

Many of the troops had been trained to go into battle

on the green, rolling hills of Europe.

They arrived to find a scorched, barren desert like this one.

It was a place few of them had ever imagined

they'd have to fight over.

The sand clogged their engines. It got in their food.

And no one was even sure it was stable enough

to take the weight of the big American combat vehicles.

But the biggest problem by far was making sure the Western troops

did not offend their Muslim hosts.

Even apparently innocent behaviour like female American troops

wearing short sleeves could cause huge offence in a country

where women are expected to cover up completely.

Troops were issued with instructions on how to behave appropriately in a devout Muslim country.

US Army chaplains were even renamed "morale officers"

so as not to cause offence.

But it remained a fragile co-existence.

An Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia remained a constant fear for the coalition.

But it was the stories about the actions of Saddam's army inside Kuwait that outraged world opinion.

They brought a reign of terror to Kuwait,

including summary executions in the street.

Saddam's men were looting shops, houses and factories across the city.

Torture and punishment beatings became commonplace, as the Iraqis

tried to crush any sign of Kuwaiti resistance.

Some resistance fighters were even shot dead in front of their own families

as a warning to everybody else not to get involved.

Western civilians living in Kuwait and Iraq had been rounded up

and taken to Baghdad as hostages.

Saddam appeared with some of them on television in a clumsy attempt

to show that they were being treated well.

-TRANSLATOR: You are British?

-British.

At the moment, yes.

SPEAKS IN ARABIC

-TRANSLATOR: Does Stewart get his milk?

-Yes, he does.

'Meanwhile, his grip on Kuwait was tightening.'

Saddam Hussein had turned Kuwait into a defensive fortress.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops were in and around Kuwait,

many of them dug in down here on its southern border.

They built very heavily defended positions with great sand ramparts

close to the frontier with Saudi Arabia.

Behind them was a second line of defence with thousands of troops.

And then, about a hundred miles further back, just inside Iraq,

were Saddam's elite troops, the Republican Guards, waiting in reserve.

By November 1990, world leaders had run out of patience with Saddam.

Although he hadn't attacked Saudi Arabia, he showed no signs of withdrawing from Kuwait.

So the UN Security Council passed a new resolution

that changed the coalition's mission dramatically.

Twelve votes in favour,

two votes against,

one abstention.

No longer would the coalition just defend Saudi Arabia.

If Saddam's troops had not withdrawn from Kuwait in six weeks,

the coalition will attack and force the Iraqis out.

The countdown to war had begun.

For the US military, it was a daunting prospect.

They were haunted by the memories of the United States' last major conflict

and knew that they could not afford to make the same mistakes again.

If one American soldier has to go into battle, that soldier will have

enough force behind him to win and then get out as soon as possible.

This will not be another Vietnam.

But Saddam was determined that that was exactly what it would be.

He calculated that if the Americans attacked,

his best hope was to inflict massive casualties on the US troops.

Saddam believed that, after the Vietnam War, it was not something the US public would tolerate.

And in 1990, he had the weapons to cause thousands of casualties in seconds.

Just two years earlier, in March 1988, the Iraqi Army had attacked

a Kurdish village in Northern Iraq

using a mixture of mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin.

5,000 people were killed,

and thousands more suffered terrible injuries.

Throughout the coalition, every soldier lived in fear of an Iraqi chemical attack.

Day after day, they practised the drills that would save their lives if nerve gas was used against them.

To understand more about what this meant to the coalition troops,

I joined a British Army training exercise.

My job was to help unload equipment

until the instructor launched a gas attack drill.

Gas! Gas!

Get up!

Nine seconds, come on. Think about the drills.

OK, let's go. Well done.

If a soldier couldn't get their mask on this quickly in a real attack,

the gas could be lethal.

Two minutes, let's go!

I then had to carry on with my task

exactly like the troops would in a combat situation.

Come on, work hard! Well done.

Come on! Come on!

'But gas masks make it impossible to breathe properly,

'as I was finding out.'

I can't actually speak.

I'm not getting enough air in here.

Two minutes!

HE PANTS

Excellent. Good. Well done. Stop!

Stand still.

Unmask.

Good. Well done.

-PANTING:

-There's just... no air in there at all.

And...the idea of...

fighting something like a battle under those conditions...

is absolutely unimaginable in that.

A lot harder than what I was just doing there, those shuttle runs.

The idea of spending hours on hours in this get-up,

charging across hills, is extraordinary.

HE PANTS

But in 1991, soldiers feared they really would have to fight

while under chemical attack.

Some of them were already suffering heat exhaustion

just from wearing gas masks in training.

Schwarzkopf knew that, if it came to war,

the greatest threat to his troops was Iraq's chemical weapons,

and he also knew he would have to minimise American and coalition casualties.

The key would be to keep his ground troops out of the battle for as long as possible.

INAUDIBLE

Schwarzkopf's plan was to launch a colossal air attack

on Iraq itself and on its forces on the ground,

to try and force Saddam to abandon Kuwait.

But if this didn't persuade Saddam to leave,

Schwarzkopf knew that he would have to take a far more risky step -

he'd have to order his forces to fight their way into Kuwait.

And some of the experts predicted that this would cost thousands of American lives.

His strategy would call upon the full might of the United States armed forces.

More and more of the world's most sophisticated aircraft, tanks and weapons were arriving in the Gulf,

and six American aircraft carriers, with over four hundred planes,

would be positioned within striking distance of Iraq and Kuwait.

One week before the UN deadline expired, 750,000 coalition troops

waited on the battlefield as the politicians made one last attempt to find a diplomatic solution.

The US Secretary of State, James Baker, met Iraq's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, in Geneva.

Both men knew that tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives were at stake.

And James Baker warned the Iraqis not to use chemical weapons,

reminding them that America had nuclear bombs.

But seven hours of talks ended in failure.

If Iraq should choose to continue its brutal occupation of Kuwait,

Iraq will be choosing a military confrontation which it cannot win

and which will have devastating consequences.

But Saddam remained as defiant as ever and promised his people a great victory.

He warned that the Americans depended too much on technology.

He boasted that Iraq could rely on the bravery and experience of its soldiers.

Their faith would defeat the enemy.

At midnight on January the 15th, 1991, the UN deadline expired.

Across the world, people watched and waited.

Everybody knew it was just a matter of time before the war began.

In the early hours of January the 17th, 1991,

hundreds of coalition aircraft took to the skies and headed for their targets.

Operation Desert Storm had begun.

British RAF pilots in low-flying Tornado aircraft carried bombs designed to crater Iraqi runways.

The Americans' first target was Iraq's capital.

From the rooftops of Baghdad, 3,000 anti-aircraft guns fired into the night.

Flying straight into this wall of fire were eight American bombers.

They were so sophisticated that the Saudis had nicknamed them "ghosts".

The F1-17 Stealth Bomber was designed to be invisible to radar,

but this was its first test in major combat.

The Stealth's first target was the main communications tower in Baghdad.

At exactly 3am, the pilot in the lead aircraft pushed the button

and a 2,000 pound, laser-guided bomb descended on its target.

Across the city, the ground shook as 14 more bombs from other Stealths hit their targets.

The aircraft turned for home.

Cruise Missiles launched from US warships

knocked out the power stations and plunged the city into darkness.

The air campaign unleashed by the coalition against Saddam's Iraq

was codenamed Instant Thunder.

It was the most powerful and focused use of air power in the 20th century.

On the first night, coalition aircraft flew over a thousand sorties.

They hit power stations, radar and communication networks,

airfields and chemical weapons facilities.

The aim was first to gain control of the skies above Kuwait and Iraq

and destroy Saddam's ability to coordinate his forces,

and then to target the forces themselves.

Guided in by laser, a bomb launched from planes like these

could explode within three metres of its target,

even from a range of seven miles.

The bombing campaign had badly damaged Iraqi radar stations,

and gave Iraq pilots little chance to respond.

Rather than fly blind against the most sophisticated air force

the world had ever seen, most of them opted

to leave their aircraft inside hardened hangars

and try and sit it out.

Throughout that night and into the following day,

American and coalition aircraft continued to attack Iraqi targets,

including Saddam Hussein's palaces.

Saddam Hussein was in fear for his life.

He moved between safe houses to avoid the coalition attacks,

but in public, he would not be cowed.

On Baghdad radio, he declared that

"the mother of all battles" had begun.

And in secret, he ordered his army to launch the weapon

that he hoped would blow the coalition apart.

Its target was a country over 700 miles from Kuwait.

At 2am on January the 18th, 1991, air raid sirens sounded across Israel.

They warned of a Scud Missile attack from Iraq heading for Tel Aviv, Israel's biggest city.

Moments later, the first Scud hit this factory

near a housing estate in a residential suburb of the city.

Initial reports from the Israeli Army suggested that Israel was under chemical attack.

In the confusion and panic, people all over the city put on their gas masks.

Some even injected themselves with the antidote to nerve gas.

Saddam Hussein's attack on Israel was an act of ruthless calculation.

He hoped Israel would retaliate.

If it did, Israel would then appear to be on the same side as the Arab nations in the coalition.

Saddam's hope was that the Arabs' hatred of Israel would make this unthinkable for them.

They'd withdraw from the coalition and the coalition would collapse.

From Washington, senior White House officials called

the Israeli Defence Minister, urging him to show restraint.

For hours, the whole world held its breath, waiting to see how the Israelis would respond.

Eight Scuds had been fired at Israel that night, and by daybreak, residents were still on alert.

But reports of a chemical attack had turned out to be a false alarm,

and, remarkably, nobody had been killed by any of the missiles.

Under huge pressure from the White House,

the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir,

agreed not to retaliate, at least for the time being.

In return, the Americans promised to make the destruction

of the Scud Missile launchers inside Iraq their top military priority.

The Scud hunt was on.

Coalition aircraft began flying around the clock,

searching thousands of square miles of empty desert,

hoping to spot Iraq's estimated 20 mobile Scud launchers

and then destroy them.

For the American commander, General Schwartzkopf,

it was a tough challenge.

Finding the mobile launchers is like finding a needle in a haystack,

as you can well imagine.

Scuds continued to hit Israel,

and Washington ordered Schwartzkopf to step up the search.

By January the 24th, 40% of the coalition's air sorties

were diverted to Scud hunting,

and special forces like Britain's SAS were sent into Iraq

to try and destroy the launchers from the ground.

The Scud attacks on Israel went on, but still they failed to break up the coalition as Saddam hoped.

In a further attempt to weaken public support for the war,

British pilots John Nichol and John Peters, shot down on the first night, were paraded on Iraqi television.

They had been tortured and were forced to denounce the war.

This war should be stopped, so we can go home. I do not agree on this war with Iraq.

The pictures provoked condemnation across the world,

and only inflamed Western public opinion against Saddam.

Saddam was unable to prevent the air campaign systematically destroying his army.

So, two weeks after the air war began,

he ordered an attack that would force the Americans

into the risky ground combat they wanted to avoid.

At around 8.30pm, Iraqi troops broke cover from their positions here in Kuwait,

and headed down there towards the Saudi border.

Their movement was watched by an unmanned American spy plane feeding pictures back to its operator.

What do we have?

Let's see what they are.

Hey, this is something.

Here we go.

Closer. Closer...

And, er...

2200 and 53 hours, they have crossed the border.

They are in Saudi Arabia.

King Fahd's gonna be pissed. Fahd baby's gonna be pissed.

He's gonna be hot.

The coalition had complete control of the skies over Kuwait,

but not a single aircraft was close enough to stop the Iraqis.

Where's our air? This is ridiculous.

Frickin' bomber couldn't ask for a better target than that.

The Iraqis took the coalition by surprise.

They met little resistance and seized the Saudi town of Khafji about ten miles down the road.

Troops from America, Qatar and Saudi Arabia

now had to fight their way into the city to regain control.

Missile launcher downrange - take that bad boy out.

When air support finally arrived, they had a decisive advantage.

I certainly would not want to be an Iraqi troop there.

Aircraft are swarming over that battlefield like gnats.

After two days of fighting, coalition troops finally regained control.

An estimated 38 Iraqis were killed and hundreds more captured, but the coalition had suffered too.

In their first taste of ground combat, 43 coalition troops,

including 25 US Marines, were killed.

For some, it had been a sobering experience.

I never expected that kind of fear, but you have to overcome it,

because if you don't overcome it, it's...

it's just like being defeated without actually

being killed or anything like that.

But with Khafji back in coalition control,

world attention turned once again to the air campaign,

which was now in its fourth week.

Television audiences across the world had become hooked

on the extraordinary footage

being beamed into their homes around the clock.

It was all part of the public relations war.

After their experiences in Vietnam, American commanders knew that

unfavourable coverage might damage public support for the war.

So they carefully managed what was actually seen by the watching world.

-Splash.

-Good.

That was an excellent splash.

The American general who commands all the Allied forces in the Gulf

has said that Operation Desert Storm has been going according to plan.

The aim was to portray the war as clinical and bloodless,

with so-called smart bombs making surgical strikes.

I'm now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq

on this particular day. Keep your eye on the crosshairs.

Right through the crosshairs.

And now, in his rear-view mirror...

LAUGHTER

But the laughter was about to end.

In the early hours of February the 13th, 1991,

two Stealth bombers flew towards the Amiriyah bunker

in the suburbs of Baghdad,

on what was supposed to be a routine mission.

Shortly after 4.30am, they released two laser-guided bombs.

Exactly as planned, the bombs dropped down a ventilation shaft

and exploded deep inside the bunker to maximise destruction.

The trouble was, it was packed with over 400 civilians.

Americans are criminals!

For what?! Why?!

For what the war? For what the war?!

Hundreds had been killed, many of them children.

Pictures of the disaster were broadcast around the world.

I lost my wife and my children.

Is that fair?

Nobody, nobody say something to stop this massacre.

It was a terrible mistake.

Coalition air planners had believed that the Amiriyah bunker

was being used by Iraqi commanders, not civilians.

These images of so many dead civilians and their distraught relatives shattered the myth

that this was a bloodless war and it forced Schwarzkopf

to curtail the bombing of Iraqi cities, for fear of causing more civilian casualties.

But the Iraqi Army got no such reprieve.

The air campaign had battered Iraqi targets for over a month,

and still, Saddam had not withdrawn his army from Kuwait.

Schwarzkopf knew coalition ground troops would soon have to drive them out

and, in preparation, he intensified the air strikes against the Iraqi front line.

There was nothing "smart" about this bombardment.

Old-fashioned planes, like the giant B52s that had flown over Vietnam,

dropped old-fashioned explosives and napalm on the Iraqi positions.

When a canister of napalm hit the ground, it exploded in a mass of burning jelly,

which incinerated anything it touched

and sucked the air out of everyone's lungs within 50 metres.

Coalition airmen flew around-the-clock bombing missions,

attempting to destroy 50% of the Iraqi armour.

We're trying to get ready for the ground troops going in,

we're trying to hit them hard to clear it up for the ground troops.

We sent out three or four hundred, five hundred bombs today.

Some of them weigh 1,000 pounds apiece, so it's...it's just unreal.

In retaliation for the coalition's continuous aerial bombardment,

Saddam Hussein unleashed a new kind of destruction.

He ordered the Iraqi Army to blow up the oil fields of Kuwait.

It created scenes of apocalyptic devastation.

It looks like what I envision hell would look like.

The country of Kuwait is burning.

Hundreds of wells were blown up, sending a wall of flame and smoke thousands of feet into the air.

Pipelines were ruptured, storage tanks exploded, and huge lakes of oil pooled in the desert sand.

Choking black clouds filled the air and day turned to night as the smoke blocked out the sun.

This piece of environmental vandalism

only increased the pressure on Schwarzkopf

to launch the ground campaign.

His plan was a masterpiece of strategic deception.

The main attack would appear to come down here -

across Kuwait's southern border.

40,000 American Marines would thrust up into the Iraqi defences.

Alongside them, troops from other coalition countries, including large forces from Syria and Egypt.

Their job was to make Saddam think they were just the start of a much larger attack from here in the south.

But Schwarzkopf's main blow would come not from the south, but from the west.

Under the cover of the air war,

he had secretly shifted the bulk of his army -

1,500 tanks and nearly 300,000 men up to 300 miles off to the west -

to launch a giant left hook.

His main heavy tank force,

with Britain's men and tanks on their right flank,

were waiting for the signal to burst into Iraq and swing east

into Saddam's Republican Guard divisions,

dug in on the Kuwait-Iraq border.

Schwarzkopf's men had a double mission -

to liberate Kuwait and to so weaken the Republican Guard and the Iraqi Army

that they could never cause trouble in the area again.

On the 24th of February, 1991, the ground attack began.

Out in the Gulf, the big guns of the US warships

began a massive artillery barrage onto the Kuwaiti coastline.

But the real attack would come from the ground troops.

And the first to go in would be the US marines.

This is it, have fun.

Got an American flag in this pack we're gonna raise in Kuwait.

The Marines had to bulldoze gaps in huge banks of sand, like this one,

so the tanks and artillery could advance.

As the first troops went in, none of them knew what would happen.

The fear of a chemical attack was so great

that the US troops wore chemical protection suits and gas masks.

In front of them, they expected vast minefields

and tens of thousands of Iraqi troops in heavily defended, entrenched positions.

Coalition commanders expected the marines to be able

to penetrate just a few miles into the heavy Iraqi defences

with as many as one in three of the marines being killed or injured.

But as the marines crossed into Kuwait, they were amazed at what happened.

Everywhere, Iraqi troops had either abandoned their positions or were raising the white flag in surrender.

Most of them were conscripts and, after the devastating five-week air bombardment,

they were sleep deprived, shell-shocked and dehydrated -

they were in no position to fight.

MAN SOBS

It's OK, it's OK.

HE SPEAKS IN ARABIC

It's OK, it's OK, it's OK. You're all right.

Hey, let's go, get up here!

The marines continued forward into Kuwait.

There was little resistance and, nearly everywhere,

their progress was unopposed.

Right now, I feel sorry for the people remaining on the enemy side, cos we're gonna wipe them out.

The marines were scoring a major success

in their thrust up here into Kuwait.

Almost too successful.

They and the Arab forces to the east and west of them

were fast heading for Kuwait City.

There was now a risk that some of the crack Iraqi units,

like the Republican Guard up here,

might retreat before Schwarzkopf's army could destroy them.

So he brought forward the timetable for his main attack.

He ordered his big left hook, including Britain's tank force,

to go in 15 hours ahead of schedule.

The British would go for Kuwait

and the US tanks would head for the Republican Guard.

Ten hours into the ground war, at 2.30pm,

British and American troops began a massive artillery barrage

onto the Iraqi positions in front of them.

One of their key weapons was the multiple launch rocket system.

As each of the rockets burst in the air above the Iraqis,

it scattered 644 bomblets over them.

It was as if they were being showered by hand grenades.

In just over 30 minutes, more than half a million of these bomblets landed on the Iraqi troops.

As the artillery died down, more than 150,000 coalition troops

and over 1,500 tanks began their advance.

Saddam knew he couldn't keep Kuwait much longer,

but he was still determined to show the Americans

he had the capacity to hit them where it hurt.

He ordered his troops inside Kuwait

to counter-attack against the US marines.

But they couldn't match the Americans' firepower

nor halt their relentless drive towards Kuwait City.

However, Saddam still had one last sting in his tail.

Iraqi troops fired a Scud missile

towards a coalition base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

The resulting explosion killed 28 Americans and 100 were left wounded.

It was their biggest single loss in the war so far.

Despite this incident, the British and American troops

had to keep up the speed of their advance.

Saddam's army was collapsing by the minute, and every minute counted

if Schwarzkopf was to be able to destroy

the bulk of Iraq's military equipment before it escaped.

Schwarzkopf's main armoured thrust had swept across

100 miles of Iraqi desert west of Kuwait

and closed in on Saddam's elite Republican Guard.

Finally, at 4pm on the 26th of February,

they came face to face.

A gunner in one of the lead vehicles spotted a line of Iraqi tanks on the horizon.

The US tank commander realised that he was heading straight

for a major Republican Guard position.

The gunner in the lead American tank

quickly fired off a shot at one of the Iraqi tanks.

Seconds later, the American Commander watched

as the shell landed directly on the target.

The Iraqi tank exploded,

throwing a man out through the hatch engulfed in a ball of flame.

Within seconds, the other American tanks had opened fire.

In just a few minutes,

the Republican Guard's position had been obliterated.

The Iraqi tanks had been utterly outgunned.

The American tanks could score a hit on the move from over 2,000m away.

Iraqi tanks were only accurate below 1,700m and had to be stationary.

Within a couple of hours,

over 50 Iraqi armoured vehicles were destroyed with few American losses.

Throughout the night, the Americans pursued the Republican Guard.

By daybreak, they'd smashed an entire division,

leaving over 100 tanks and armoured vehicles smoking on the battlefield.

The remaining Republican Guard divisions made a desperate retreat,

and the Americans continued to hunt them down.

It looked like the Americans now had the Republican Guard at their mercy.

But something had happened inside Kuwait that would help save them from destruction.

Iraqi troops had been fleeing from Kuwait City

in any vehicle they could get their hands on.

American commanders were determined to stop them.

It led to one of the most controversial episodes of the war.

Using laser-guided bombs, pilots attacked Iraqi vehicles

along a stretch of this road leading north from Kuwait City.

This created a road block and, behind it,

hundreds of vehicles became trapped in a giant traffic jam.

This made them totally vulnerable to the American aircraft overhead.

Some of them were so desperate to escape

that they drove off across the desert.

Every available American aircraft was ordered into the attack

with devastating results.

For mile after mile, charred vehicles and human corpses

littered the desert and choked the two main roads going towards Iraq.

An estimated 2,000 vehicles were destroyed.

Only very few of them were tanks or armoured personnel carriers.

Most were civilian vehicles

stolen by the Iraqi Army as they fled Kuwait City.

Nobody knows how many hundreds or thousands of Iraqis died in the attacks.

The American leadership realised that pictures like these

would soon be on television around the world

and they feared it would look like a massacre.

This would become a key factor in deciding when to end the war.

36 hours later, coalition troops,

led by units from Kuwait's own army, arrived in Kuwait City.

The streets soon filled with vehicles

as people celebrated the end of the Iraqi occupation.

Welcome in Kuwait! Welcome, Mr Bush, welcome!

Alongside them were American troops, greeted as heroes,

as liberators of a country that had been subjected to months of horror by the Iraqi regime.

They don't have any civilisation, they kill not by guns only, by torturing.

They brought them over here in this space and they just shot them

and killed them and left them for five days, just like a garbage.

They want to put, er, name Saddam in my hands and they tell me

to remember it, er, even when you are old man.

With the liberation of Kuwait, the main political goal of the war had been achieved.

But the Republican Guard had not yet been destroyed.

However, President Bush feared that continuing to bomb a retreating enemy

might give the impression that America was behaving like a bully,

and, so, on February the 28th, 1991, Bush declared a cease-fire.

'I am pleased to announce

'that, exactly 100 hours since ground operations commenced

'and six weeks since the start of Operation Desert Storm,

'all United States and coalition forces'

will suspend offensive combat operations.

CHEERING 'The Gulf War was over.'

Within weeks, tens of thousands of coalition troops began the long journey home,

all of them grateful that the mass casualties they'd feared had never materialised.

In total, 248 coalition troops were killed,

far less than anyone had dared hope.

Nobody knows how many Iraqis died, though some estimates put the figure

at over 30,000, including 3,000 civilians.

Despite the pre-war fears of the coalition, it had turned out to be

one of the most one-sided battles in modern history.

FANFARE PLAYS CROWD CHEERS

Schwarzkopf and his men returned home to a hero's welcome.

The allies could have chased Saddam all the way to Baghdad,

but they had no authority from the UN and no wish to become mired in Iraq.

Instead, they hoped that Saddam would now be too weak to be a threat.

But Saddam's regime did not crumble as the Americans hoped.

He crushed two uprisings that followed the end of the war

and remained in power for another 12 years.

Several thousand US forces remained in Saudi Arabia

to keep watch on Saddam's army.

Osama Bin Laden has claimed that it was this presence of US troops

in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia

that motivated him to launch

a series of attacks against American interests.

This culminated in the events of September the 11th, 2001.

President Bush's son, George W Bush, was now in the White House

and, in response to the 9/11 attacks, he declared a global war on terror.

As part of this war,

he launched a US- and British-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,

which ousted Saddam Hussein from power.

Thousands of British and American troops remain in Iraq to this day, dealing with the consequences.

No-one knows when they will return home.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd