Famous Tank Battles

The plan that would become famous as the Hail Mary did not begin with tanks racing across the desert. It began with a problem that looked almost too large to move around. Iraqi forces sat in Kuwait behind mines, trenches, wire, artillery, and dug-in armor, facing south toward the most obvious direction of coalition attack. If the coalition simply drove straight at them, the war might become exactly what Saddam Hussein wanted: a costly collision against prepared defenses, broadcast to the world in images of burning vehicles and stalled assaults. General Norman Schwarzkopf needed a way to make Iraq look in one direction while the real blow gathered somewhere else. The answer was audacious in its simplicity. Hold the enemy’s eyes on Kuwait, then send the heavy army far west, north into Iraq, and east into the Republican Guard’s flank and rear.

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The nickname fit because the plan carried the feeling of a long throw into uncertain space. It was not desperate in the sense of being careless, but it did ask a modern army to do something immense and risky. The coalition would stretch the battlefield from the Persian Gulf far into the western desert, wider than the Iraqi command could easily understand or control. Along the coast and near the Kuwaiti border, Marines, Arab coalition forces, and other units would keep Iraqi attention fixed on the defenses Iraq had spent months preparing. Farther west, XVIII Airborne Corps would move deep into the desert to guard the outer flank and threaten Iraq’s lines of communication. Between those two worlds, VII Corps would carry the main armored punch, turning east toward the Republican Guard.

To understand why the plan mattered, picture Iraq’s defense like a clenched fist pointed south. The knuckles were the prepared positions in and around Kuwait, where Iraqi infantry, artillery, mines, and tanks waited for an attack coming up from Saudi Arabia. Behind that fist stood heavier forces, including Republican Guard units positioned farther north and west, ready to reinforce, counterattack, or cover withdrawal. A direct assault into the knuckles might still win, because the coalition had enormous power, but it could be slow and bloody. The Hail Mary aimed at the wrist and elbow instead. It tried to unhinge the whole arm by moving around the prepared front, striking where the defense was less ready, and forcing Iraqi commanders to react after the decisive movement had already begun.

Deception and fixation were as important as speed. The coalition did not want Saddam to recognize too early that the main armored weight was shifting west. Amphibious forces in the Gulf helped keep alive the fear of a landing on the Kuwaiti coast. Attacks and movements near the obvious front suggested that the coalition might drive directly north into Kuwait or through the Wadi al Batin, the dry channel that seemed to offer a natural avenue into Iraqi-held territory. Iraqi commanders had to defend against possibilities, not certainties, and that uncertainty pinned attention in the wrong places. This was not a magic trick. It was military misdirection built from real forces, real threats, and real danger. The best deception works because the enemy cannot afford to dismiss it.

The western sweep demanded more than a bold arrow on a map. It required whole formations to move through terrain that looked open but was not easy. The desert could swallow alignment, scatter convoys, and make distances feel unreal. Units had to travel far enough west to get around Iraqi defenses, then north, then east, while staying close enough to support one another and far enough apart not to jam the desert with vehicles. A mistake in timing could leave one corps exposed or cause armored formations to arrive at the fight in pieces. In a smaller battle, a commander might correct direction by reference to a town, road, or ridge. Here, the army had to navigate across space where the enemy, the weather, and the land itself all worked against certainty.

The plan also depended on logistics holding together at a scale that is easy to understate. Tanks could not simply charge across the desert until they found the Republican Guard. They needed fuel, ammunition, spare parts, water, food, medical support, recovery vehicles, and roads or routes that could bear the traffic of war. The farther west the coalition moved, the longer its supply lines became, and the more every decision about timing mattered. Fuel trucks had to keep pace with armored brigades. Ammunition had to be close enough to matter without clogging the attack. Maintenance crews had to recover vehicles before small breakdowns became permanent losses. The Hail Mary looked like maneuver, but underneath it was a wager that the coalition’s supply system could keep the maneuver alive.

Airpower was meant to prepare the field before the armored blow landed. The coalition’s air campaign would attack Iraqi command networks, air defenses, supply lines, bridges, artillery, and fielded forces, making it harder for Iraq to see, move, and coordinate. But the ground plan did not assume that bombing alone would solve the problem. The Republican Guard could not be declared defeated from the air and left in place if Kuwait was to be liberated securely. Armored forces would still have to close with Iraqi units, find them in bad weather and broken visibility, and force the issue on the ground. That is one of the central lessons of this campaign. Airpower could shape the battlefield dramatically, but tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, and cavalry still had to finish the work.

For VII Corps, the Hail Mary meant becoming the central hammer in a moving battle. Its divisions would not merely advance north; they would wheel east toward the Iraqi heavy formations that mattered most. The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment would screen ahead, searching for the enemy and protecting the corps from surprise. Behind it, the heavy divisions would follow, each with tanks, mechanized infantry, artillery, engineers, and support elements moving as part of a larger machine. This was the kind of mission VII Corps had been built for in the Cold War: not a static defense, not a narrow assault, but a corps-level armored battle against a serious mechanized opponent. The difference was that Germany’s forests and villages had become sand, dust, and open distance.

XVIII Airborne Corps had a different but equally important role on the wide western side. It included lighter and highly mobile formations, along with the 24th Infantry Division, a mechanized force capable of moving fast and deep. Its job was to extend the sweep, protect the coalition’s exposed flank, threaten Iraqi rear areas, and help prevent Iraqi forces from escaping or shifting freely. That outer movement stretched the Iraqi problem until it became harder to grasp. If Iraqi commanders focused on Kuwait, they risked being turned from the west. If they shifted west too late, they risked moving under air attack and into the path of coalition forces already in motion. The plan sought to give Iraq no comfortable answer, only late choices under pressure.

The greatest danger was not that the plan lacked imagination. It was that imagination might run ahead of control. A wide flanking movement can become a masterpiece when timing, reconnaissance, and logistics hold together. It can become a confusion of columns when they do not. Commanders had to know where their own units were, where neighboring units were, and where the enemy might be, all while moving through weather and terrain that could shrink visibility to almost nothing. Communications had to carry intent, not just orders, because subordinate leaders would face moments when the situation changed faster than higher headquarters could explain it. The Hail Mary therefore rested on a particular kind of trust: trust that trained units could keep moving toward the purpose even when the map no longer felt clear.

The Iraqi side of the story is just as important, because the plan was designed around Iraqi assumptions and weaknesses. Iraq had prepared to defend Kuwait against the attack it expected. Its army had strength, but much of that strength was tied to fixed positions, centralized command, and a defensive arrangement that looked south. Once the coalition began moving far to the west, Iraqi commanders had to detect the shift, understand its meaning, report it clearly, receive orders, and reposition forces quickly enough to matter. That is difficult for any army under air attack. It is especially difficult for an army whose command culture discourages initiative and whose communications are being disrupted. The Hail Mary was not just a movement around ground. It was a movement around an enemy decision-making system.

There was also a moral seriousness hidden inside the operational design. The coalition wanted speed not because speed made war exciting, but because speed could shorten the campaign and reduce the time Iraqi forces had to inflict damage, execute demolitions, or regroup into new defenses. At the same time, speed increased the risk of confusion, friendly fire, bypassed enemies, and units colliding in darkness or dust. Modern armored war promises precision, but the battlefield remains crowded with uncertainty. The Hail Mary tried to use overwhelming power intelligently, striking hard where it could matter most rather than grinding through every trench line in sequence. It was a plan meant to defeat an army, not to turn every defended position into a separate bloodbath.

When the ground war began, the success or failure of the Hail Mary would be judged by whether the coalition could keep its moving parts aligned. The fixing attacks had to hold Iraqi attention. The western forces had to move fast enough to make the envelopment real. VII Corps had to turn east at the right time and find the Republican Guard before it slipped away. The cavalry had to lead without becoming isolated, and the heavy divisions had to follow without losing momentum. In that sense, 73 Easting was already being shaped before anyone reached the 73 grid line. The coming battle would be the sudden, violent moment when this sweeping design touched an Iraqi armored defense that had not yet escaped.

The Hail Mary deserves its place in the story of armored warfare because it showed how far the tank battle had evolved from a simple breakthrough attempt. At Cambrai, tanks were tools to crack a trench line. In the Gulf, tanks were part of an immense operational system built around deception, airpower, logistics, reconnaissance, long-distance navigation, and command initiative. The famous left hook was not a side road to 73 Easting. It was the road. It turned a defended frontier into a moving campaign and turned VII Corps from a force waiting in the desert into the instrument of decision. The plan’s drama lay not in recklessness, but in the question every commander must face before committing armor at scale: can this army move farther, faster, and more coherently than the enemy can understand?