Desert Storm was the Marines at their best.
The Air Force bombed the enemy for a month. Finally the Marines went in and claimed to be the tip of the spear.
A read of Task Force Grizzly, and Task Force Taro, tells the story. The Marines were ordered in well before the rest of the ground forces were deployed.
February 23, 1991, although the ground campaign of Operation Desert Storm would not begin for more than twelve hours,
U.S. Marine Colonel James A. Fulks had nearly twenty-seven hundred U.S. Marines a dozen miles inside of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and had orders to move that night through the first of the two thick minefields the Iraqi army had planted just to the north.
Task Force Taro, commanded by Colonel John H. Admire, had marched into Kuwait two days earlier. Alone, with no tanks and few heavy weapons.
Both units were ordered to infiltrate through the first minefield well before the start of the ground war. They then were to march farther into Kuwait to shield the breach of those mines by Myatt's two powerful mechanized regiments the next morning. In the midst of the most technologically advanced conflict in history...the so-called Nintendo War....
most of the marines in the two task forces marched the twenty miles from the Saudi border to their blocking positions, carrying their gear on their backs or pulling it in crude handcarts.
In Operation Desert Shield, Seventh Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB), commanded by Maj. Gen. John I. Hopkins, began flying into Saudi Arabia on August 14, while three ships of Maritime Preposition Squadron (MPS) 2 sailed toward the gulf with the unit's heavy weapons, vehicles, and supplies. Within two weeks, 15,248 marines were deployed in the desert north of the Saudi port of Al Jubayl
.
As more marines arrived from their bases in California, Hawaii, and Okinawa, Hopkins' brigade was integrated into Myatt's First Division. It was the first time a full marine division had deployed overseas since Vietnam. At the same time, helicopter, fighter, and attack squadrons of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, under Maj. Gen. Royal Moore, flew from air stations in California and Arizona to occupy airfields prepared by marine engineers and navy Seabees.
Myatt organized his division into five task forces with different capabilities and purposes. The first was Task Force Shepherd, which would use its nimble eight-wheeled light armored vehicles (LAVs) for screening and scouting. Myatt then formed two assault units, Task Force Ripper, commanded by Colonel Carlton W. Fulford, and Task Force Papa Bear, led by Colonel Richard W. Hodory. In anticipation of a fast-moving battle in the desert, these units were equipped more like army mechanized brigades than the usual marine light infantry regiments. Each assault force had two infantry battalions plus combat engineer and reconnaissance units. For the mobility essential in desert warfare, each had two companies of thinly armored, tracked assault amphibious vehicles. Ripper also had two companies of M-60 main battle tanks, and Papa Bear had one. Task Forces Taro and Grizzly were more typical marine units, with two battalions of infantry but no tanks or armored vehicles.
While the marines of the First MEF were moving into defensive positions in the desert, fifteen thousand more leathernecks were sailing for the gulf aboard ships. And tens of thousands of soldiers of the U.S. Army's Eighteenth Corps and hundreds of U.S. Air Force warplanes and support aircraft flooded into Saudi Arabia and neighboring nations. Military forces also came from Great Britain, France, and several Arab countries.
Just after midnight on January 16, 1991, Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm.
The two marine division commanders devised different plans for breaching the minefields, but with similar goals. The First Division would use Task Forces Grizzly and Taro to protect the main assault forces, Ripper and Papa Bear, which would conduct their own breaches. The Second Division would rely on artillery and air cover to defend against counterattacks and assigned only one regiment, the Sixth Marines, to make their breaches. Each of the regiment's three battalions would cut a single lane.
Moving closer to the Kuwaiti border, most of the Marines left behind their tents and sleeping bags, only to suffer through surprisingly wet and frigid nights. The ground war initially was set to start on February 22, but Boomer asked for a delay in the hope of getting better weather to allow full use of the vital marine air support. The weather, however, did not improve, and in a situation similar to what General Dwight D. Eisenhower had faced on the eve of D-Day in 1944, Schwarzkopf decided to attack despite the poor conditions. 'We fought the ground campaign over the worst four flying days of the whole war,' Moore, the marine air commander, later complained. 'General Schwarzkopf and every weather guy in Southwest Asia promised 72 hours of good weather, but we probably didn't get 72 minutes.
In the end, the U.S. Marines had made about one hundred miles in one hundred hours, defeated seven Iraqi divisions, destroyed 1,040 tanks, 608 armored vehicles, and 432 artillery pieces, and taken 22,308 prisoners — at the cost of five killed and forty-eight wounded.