(4 of 9)
Saudi and other Arab troops hit the strongest Iraqi fortifications near the coast. To their left were the U.S. 1st and 2nd Marine divisions, which had moved inland. The Marines attacked at points known to allied commanders as the "elbow" of Kuwait, where the border with Saudi Arabia turns sharply to the north, and the "armpit," where it abruptly sweeps west again. They were led in person by Lieut. General Walter Boomer, the top Marine in the gulf area, according to operational plans he had forwarded only 16 days earlier to the Pentagon, where they caused raised eyebrows because of their audacity. But they worked.
The allied troops had built in Saudi Arabia sand berms and replicas of the other Iraqi entrenchments and practiced breaching them until they could virtually do it blindfolded. Among the tactics: Remotely piloted vehicles, or pilotless drone planes, guided soldiers to the most thinly held spots in the Iraqi lines. Line charges, or 100-yd.-long strings of tubing laced with explosives, blasted paths through minefields. Tanks and armored personnel carriers drove through those paths in long, narrow files, observing strict radio silence. Their drivers communicated by hand signals -- even in the dark, when night-vision devices worked perfectly.
Much had been written about the inferno the Iraqis would create by filling trenches with burning oil. But in the Marines' sector, U.S. planes had burned off the oil prematurely by dropping napalm. The Saudis did encounter trenches filled with blazing petroleum and in some cases with water, but crossed them by the simple expedient of having bulldozers and tanks fitted with earth- , moving blades collapse dirt into the trenches until they were filled. It took only hours for the allied troops to burst through the supposedly impregnable Iraqi defenses and begin a war of maneuvers, sweeping right past some of the heaviest concentrations of troops and armor, and calling in withering air strikes and tank and artillery fire on those that fought. Throughout the 100-hour campaign, the allied soldiers avoided hand-to-hand fighting wherever possible, preferring to stand off and blast away at their foes at more than arm's length.
At the far western reach of the allied line, the French 6th Light Armored Division jumped off before dawn Sunday, attacking across the Iraqi border with the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division toward a fort and airfield named As Salman, 105 miles inside Iraq. On the way, American artillery and French Gazelle helicopter gunships firing HOT antitank missiles subdued a force of Iraqi tanks and infantry, many of whom surrendered.