By Jim Lacey
Over the years the influence has grown that the 2003 invasion of Iraq met with little resistance and that, with few exceptions, the Iraqi military easily melted away. As this e-book in actual fact exhibits, not anything may be farther from the reality. In its force to trap Baghdad, the U.S. Army's third Infantry department was once in approximately consistent wrestle for twenty-one days. whereas american citizens have been gazing Saddam's statue being torn down on television, a brigade of the third identification was once at the verge of being overrun through Iraqi Republican defend devices attempting to break out north. advised to carry bridges in his quarter, a brigade commander needed to blow up considered one of them simply because he didn't have the wrestle strength to carry it. the corporate commander maintaining the opposite bridge was once so challenging pressed that he known as at the artillery to fireside their ultimate protecting fires a command made basically whilst a unit is in mortal hazard and person who had no longer been given seeing that Vietnam. each of the division's armored cars used to be hit by way of rockets a few taking greater than a dozen hits and the struggling with used to be so fierce every now and then that whole battalions ran out of ammunition. however, while the combating used to be ultimately over, the third identity had destroyed Iraqi average military divisions and 3 divisions of the a lot vaunted Republican shield.
Takedown tells the little-known tale of what occurred to the third identification in the course of its fight to win Baghdad, a crusade that a few name essentially the most vicious in American army heritage. to supply this firsthand account, Jim Lacey, a former Time journal reporter embedded with the first Brigade of the one hundred and first Airborne department, attracts on huge interviews that he performed with the yankee squaddies concerned in addition to entry to private papers and conflict memoirs. This tale is usually enriched via his vast use of interview transcripts of senior Iraqi military officials besides their own written reminiscences. From the Kuwaiti border to the streets of Baghdad, those dramatic eyewitness descriptions of what went on provide readers a correct examine the brutal engagements within which the department fought for its life.
In using this sort of wealth of basic resource fabric, Lacey has succeeded in writing a quick paced narrative of the clash, subsidized up by means of verifiable proof, that exhibits how smooth wars are rather fought.
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Extra resources for Takedown: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-One Day Assault on Baghdad
Sample text
No question. ” Perkins’s time training in the desert paid other major dividends. In particular, it told him what he did not know. He learned, for instance, that the Army knows how much fuel an M-1 tank uses, but it did not have a clue how much a larger formation of M-1 tanks would use. An M-1 burns fifty-six gallons of fuel an hour, standing still or moving. But there were no calculations for how much fuel an armored unit would use in a long move, which would be filled with halts, detours, delays, and possibly combat.
His commanders gave him credit for being the one person during the war constantly pressing higher headquarters to be aggressive and maintain the momentum. In fact, the decisive moment of the war resulted from his push to keep moving when the situation was unclear and many of those above him were beginning to clamor for a lengthy operational pause. He convinced the wavering souls above that the enemy was breaking; to keep the 3rd ID waiting one hundred miles south of Baghdad for weeks while reinforcing divisions arrived would just give the enemy time to recover.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL STEPHEN TWITTY (3-15 INFANTRY) “He was a commander’s commander. ” “He was very direct, almost always calm, and incredibly tactically competent. ” “A complex person, but a great trainer and very aggressive in combat. ” “There are a lot of kids alive today because of his tactical performance. When I had something hard to do I called Twitty. He often did not get the glamorous tasks. ” “I found him easy to get along with. ” LIEUTENANT COLONEL ERNST MARCONE (3-69 ARMOR) “He brought the battalion an attitude that we will always win.