![]() ![]() While the bombing was an act of war ordered by allied field commanders seeking to protect their troops on a dangerous battlefield, it also was the focus of a public relations campaign managed by the U.S. But there was no way to know this in the heat of battle, they added. In retrospect, some officers say, the doomed Iraqis crowded on the highway - many of whom had loaded their vehicles with loot stolen from Kuwait - probably wanted to go home to Baghdad, not reinforce the Republican Guard. military officers said their main purpose in pounding fleeing Iraqi troops was to protect allied forces elsewhere on the battlefield by cutting off potential reinforcements for Iraqi Republican Guard divisions north and west of Kuwait. forces held them in place and destroyed them. The bombing demonstrated one grim irony of the brief ground phase of the conflict: that a war undertaken to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait ended with some Iraqi troops desperately trying to leave the emirate while U.S. military officers - also constitutes one of the war's most complex and ambiguous episodes. Yet the way the highway bombing unfolded - its ferocity, timing and public presentation by senior U.S. The highway north of Kuwait City became the most vivid scene of destruction in the six-week Persian Gulf War, its images of wreckage and death contrasting sharply with emotionally remote "smart bomb" videotapes and television pool reports filmed from the rear of the desert battlefield. Frank Sweigart, the squadron leader, when interviewed later that day by reporters. The victims were "basically just sitting ducks," said Cmdr. ![]() Scores of Iraqis were blown apart or incinerated in their vehicles. Navy, Air Force and Marine pilots trapped the long convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then pummelled the traffic jam for hours. 26 and suddenly found itself overlooking an attack pilot's dreamscape - more than 1,500 Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, jeeps, water and fuel tankers, ambulances, tractor-trailers and passenger cars clogged in a traffic jam on a six-lane highway headed north.įire and shrapnel exploded on the highway as bombs fell from the Silverfox squadron's A-6E and other attack planes. ![]() Navy's Silverfox bombing squadron swooped beneath low clouds north of Kuwait City in the early hours of Feb. ![]()
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