BUILDUP

The first signs of the end of uncertainty came quickly. In November, the President’s approval of the additional corps began to take visible effect when the heavy VIIth Corps began to deploy from Germany to Saudi Arabia. In Germany, VIIth Corps had defended the strategic Fulda Gap in the face of the now rapidly disintegrating Warsaw Pact; in the Gulf, their mission was to be the armored fist of Schwarzkopf’s flanking attack aimed at the armored divisions of the Republican Guard, now based near the northwest corner of Kuwait.

Early that month, General Schwarzkopf called a commander’s conference at the “Desert Inn,” a military dining facility at Dhahran Air Base, to outline his plan for those who were new to CENTCOM, Lieutenant General Fred Franks and his VIIth Corps commanders, who had just flown down from Germany for an initial look-around. The old CENTCOM hands, like Yeosock, Boomer, Luck, and Horner, were already familiar with what the CINC would be telling them. They’d come to the Dhahran conference essentially to meet and greet. Though they were more than happy to have VIIth Corps and its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, the old hands had their brown desert camos and suntans, and their close comradeship developed in the desert, and to them the new men looked just a little out of place and edgy in their pale skins and forest-green camouflage fatigues. The new people would fit in—that’s what they were all trained and paid for—but there would be many tough moments in the weeks ahead.

In his briefing, the CINC covered what air was going to do, what the USMC, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, and the Islamic Corps were going to do, and what he expected VIIth Corps to do. The Marines and the Islamic forces would attack the heart of the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait. XVIIIth Corps and the French would move into Iraq in the west, where they would support the flank of the main, VIIth Corps attack. When XVIIIth Corps reached the Euphrates River, they’d turn east and join the attack against the Republican Guards.

The CINC’s final message was simple: Hit them hard. Hit them fast. Never let up. Never slow down. “We are going to move out fast,” he told his commanders. “If you have commanders who are going to worry about outrunning their logistic tails, or about having their flanks exposed, don’t bring them to this fight. This attack will slam into an army that has been greatly weakened from weeks of air attack; and I want you to start out running and keep running until we surround them and destroy them as a fighting force.”

★ The buildup that followed was spectacular. There had been nothing like it since the buildup in the south of England in the spring of 1944. In November alone, CENTAF’s force grew by close to 40 percent, and that was only the beginning. Here is a snapshot of what was going on:*

Material Buildup

People Buildup