The Allies: A Partnership to Remember

By JAMES WALSH

If General Norman Schwarzkopf did not march into Kuwait City last week proclaiming "I have returned," it was for two reasons. One was that he had never been driven out. The second was more important: the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm wanted the ravaged Arab capital to be liberated by Arabs -- exiled Kuwaitis as well as Saudis and kindred units in the anti-Iraq coalition. So strongly did Schwarzkopf feel about dramatizing the Arab role that he was expected to pass up any uninvited triumphal visit to Kuwait. In 1944 a jut-jawed General Douglas MacArthur had made a point of being the ceremonial first to wade ashore in the recaptured Philippines. In 1991 Schwarzkopf remained at Desert Storm headquarters in Riyadh extolling his command's "great coalition of people, all of whom did a fine job."

Whether U.S. forces alone could have liberated Kuwait is an academic question. The fact is that from the outset of the Persian Gulf military buildup intended to thwart Iraq, a multinational effort was politically necessary. Designed to demonstrate that the world community opposed Saddam Hussein, it was also meant to show that the Iraqi strongman was not the leader of an Arab-Muslim holy war against the infidel. That was the symbolism, a display of teamwork that skeptics thought would work only in an internationalist's fantasy. In practice, however, the alliance moved as a smoothly coordinated machine during the stunningly triumphant 100-hour ground war. While U.S. forces were the backbone of the operation, its success relied on the nerve and muscle of a variety of nationalities. Lieut. General Peter de la Billiere, commander of British forces, called the alliance's grand-slam performance "one of the greatest victories that we've ever experienced, certainly in our lives and possibly in history."

About half the combatants in the land campaign were non-American: mainly, in descending order of strength, Saudi, Egyptian, British, Syrian and French. The . small gulf sheikdoms -- including Kuwait's government-in-exile -- fielded 11,500 troops with the Saudis, while lesser contingents from 17 other countries carried out some aircraft, ship and behind-the-lines assignments. Most of the 28 coalition members performed noncombat duties or tried, as the 1,700 Moroccan troops did, to stay invisible: their dispatch to Saudi Arabia had become a focus of controversy back home. But Schwarzkopf took pains to tip his forage cap to the chief partners, all of whose missions he termed "very, very tough."

In the first hour of the ground war, two Saudi task forces launched an assault across the feared "Saddam line" of fortifications into eastern Kuwait. In the northward plunge along the coastline they had an unenviable double duty: to deceive Baghdad into thinking that all of the allies were massed for a frontal assault, and to deflect Iraqi defenders from U.S. Marine crossings farther west. The Saudi-led Arab forces "did a terrific job" in breaching "a very, very tough barrier system," Schwarzkopf said, noting that they had been "required to fight the kind of fight that the Iraqis wanted them to." Some Kuwaitis in the Saudi force kissed the earth on returning to home ground and were among those Arabs eventually privileged to be in the vanguard entering Kuwait City.

Later on G day, another Saudi force crossed into southwestern Kuwait, paralleling an Egyptian-led thrust. The 38,500 Egyptians, second in number only to Saudi Arabia's 40,000 among the allies, ran into Saddam's dreaded oil- filled fire trenches, according to Schwarzkopf; though the trenches were not aflame, it was a position the general called "not a fun place to be." Behind Egypt's two-division tank and paratroop contingents was the 19,000-man Syrian 9th Armored Division, with its 270 Soviet-made T-62 tanks. The two- pronged Arab attack took out Iraqi defenders on the U.S. Marines' left flank, then wheeled east in a sweep toward the sea.

But it was the British who took on one of the most specialized chores and earned glory in doing it. In the now celebrated flanking maneuvers launched directly into Iraq from the west, Britain's 1st Armored Division mounted a highly mobile battle against Saddam's best forces, the Republican Guard. British soldiers are no strangers to desert warfare, of course: aided by the heroics of T.E. Lawrence -- the legendary Lawrence of Arabia -- they helped oust the Ottoman Turks from the Bedouin homeland in World War I and later defeated Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Libyan desert. One tank unit that punched into Iraq last week was the 7th Armored Brigade, World War II's famous Desert Rats, who helped drive the Germans out of North Africa.

The division's task was to accompany U.S. VII Corps armor in destroying the Republican Guard -- specifically, to form an advancing blockade from the west that bottled up the Iraqi forces. Schwarzkopf said the British units performed the job "absolutely magnificently." In addition to the gutsy, low-flying attacks on Iraqi airfields by British pilots early in the air war, Britain's partnership in the ground campaign proved the forces to have been what the U.S. commander called "absolutely superb members of this coalition from the outset."

Numbering 35,000 troops in all, British regiments bearing such names as the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars sped forward into fire fights and swept through Iraqi armor concentrations without losing a single tank. In the ground war's most tragic incident, however, nine British soldiers lost their lives to friendly fire when an American A-10 tank-killer aircraft hit two armored vehicles by mistake.

It was the kind of misadventure that critics had predicted would occur on a wide and bewildering scale once the oddly assorted multinational forces went into battle. Snafus in lines of command, in the coordination of differently trained and equipped soldiers, in attempts to simply speak with one another -- all had been pointed up as potentially fatal pitfalls facing such an ungainly coalition. Yet the so-called AirLand strategy, adopted in the 1980s by NATO as a counter to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, proved to be more than a knockout military punch. Because NATO relies on a central command of joint forces, the doctrine managed surprisingly well to integrate the polyglot gulf alliance.

U.S. Special Forces teams served with every Arab ground unit from battalion level up, acting as communicators with nearby English-speaking allies. They called in air strikes when necessary and warned off any threatening friendly fire. At least some Green Berets, it turned out, labored under a misnomer in this assignment: a few of their scouts arriving early in Kuwait City were spotted wearing Arab headgear.

In the westernmost assault, the French demonstrated that they were expert at desert combat as well. With its Foreign Legion components, France's 7,600-man 6th Light Armored Division conducted one of the most spectacular feats of the war, racing across 105 miles of Iraqi territory to seal off enemy avenues of retreat. The flanking movement blitzed to capture an airfield at the fortified town of As Salman. French Defense Minister Pierre Joxe boasted that impressed U.S. officers likened the troops to a "high-speed train."

Before they settled in to form a long defensive cordon, the French units had their hour in the sun of gulf victories. Together with some U.S. paratroop and artillery units, a French regiment with dune-dodging Gazelle helicopter gunships carrying HOT air-to-ground missiles led an attack on a fortified position, code-named Rochambeau, 30 miles inside Iraq. Defenders resisted for some time, but hundreds of them raised white flags as soon as they spied the approach of French tanks. As in a Foreign Legion adventure film of old, the force ended up neutralizing a division of some 8,000 Iraqis within 36 hours.

It was when a mine-clearing reconnaissance unit ventured into As Salman's hilltop fort that France suffered its only two deaths in the war. A paratrooper stooped to pick up a greenish, tangerine-shape object, and it exploded in his face, killing him and a soldier standing nearby. Would-be rescuers tripped a similar explosive device, wounding 25. The munitions turned out to be antipersonnel cluster bombs that had been dropped earlier by U.S. aircraft. But after the smoke had cleared and an unchallenged French line lay strung across a third of Iraq's width, Paris felt it had grounds for some chest thumping. Said General Gilbert Forray, the army Chief of Staff: "We can never emphasize enough the excellence of our men and materiel."

Schwarzkopf saluted it as well. If he failed to dwell on Egyptian and Syrian exploits, the omission was probably political. Damascus had all along assiduously downplayed its coalition role because of simmering pro-Iraq sentiments among the Syrian public. Cairo marked Saddam's defeat with red- letter newspaper headlines, but President Hosni Mubarak remained notably mum. Egypt's domestic opposition to the war was milder than Syria's, but explosions of anti-U.S. protest broke out at several Egyptian universities last week. Mubarak also faces a relatively long engagement in the gulf: while all the Arab armies had forsworn in advance any invasion of Iraq, Egyptian forces expect to police Kuwait in the immediate postwar term. In return, Cairo awaits handsome Saudi aid and gulf jobs for Egyptians.

What did troops from other nations do in the war? For the most part, their jobs were supportive. Yet it seems certain that some of them will return home feeling that they had upheld national honor. A 225-strong Czechoslovak team of medical and chemical-warfare specialists flew their colors with special pride. Its members resisted outside help to the point of refusing desert-camouflage fatigues, resting content with green winter uniforms and caps complete with earflaps. Asian Muslims -- including 11,000 Pakistanis, 2,000 Bangladeshis and about 310 Afghan mujahedin guerrillas -- were assigned to guard Islam's shrines. As for the inconspicuous Moroccans and other minor units -- well, the way Washington was feeling last week, they also served who only stood and waited.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Defense Budget Project}]CAPTION: If allied pledges of support are made good, U.S. war costs will be more than covered

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Riyadh, Frank Melville/London and Farah Nayeri/Paris