Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Famous Tank Battles is a multi-season history podcast series that follows the story of armored warfare from its uncertain beginnings in the First World War to the fast-moving, technology-driven battles of the late twentieth century. Across the full series, listeners move from the muddy shock of Cambrai through the desert campaigns of North Africa, the giant armored clashes of the Second World War, the hard lessons of the Arab-Israeli wars, and finally into the era of thermal sights, modern fire control, and high-speed mechanized combat. The goal is not simply to tell battle stories, but to explain why these battles mattered, how they were fought, and what they revealed about the changing character of war.
Each season is built around one famous tank battle or armored campaign, allowing the series to go beyond broad summaries and instead explore the fighting in depth. That means the podcast does not stop with a basic retelling of who won and who lost. It looks closely at the commanders, units, terrain, planning, doctrine, logistics, communications, weapons, and tactical decisions that shaped events on the battlefield. Some seasons focus on innovation and first attempts. Others focus on adaptation under pressure, desperate defense, operational breakthrough, or the moment when older ideas about armor were challenged by new realities.
Taken together, the seasons show that tank warfare was never just about the tank itself. Armored combat was always tied to artillery, infantry, engineers, air power, supply, maintenance, and the ability of commanders to make decisions under confusion and extreme pressure. One season may highlight the birth of massed armor and surprise attack. Another may show the brutal learning curve of desert warfare. Another may reveal how industrial strength, doctrine, and sheer scale turned armored battle into something vast and devastating. Later seasons trace the rise of anti-tank missiles, night fighting, better sensors, and the professional training that defined modern armored forces.
This series is designed for listeners who want military history with both narrative energy and serious substance. It is for people who enjoy battlefield storytelling, but also want to understand the deeper lessons behind the action. Whether the subject is Cambrai, Kursk, El Alamein, the Golan Heights, the Chinese Farm, or 73 Easting, Famous Tank Battles treats each campaign as part of a larger story: the evolution of armored warfare across decades of conflict, innovation, failure, and hard-won battlefield experience.
Objective Collins was not a town the men were trying to seize, not a ridge with a name from old campaign maps, and not a landmark a soldier could point to easily through the dust. It was a control measure, a piece of invisible geometry laid across the desert so a moving army could keep its shape. By February 26, 1991, the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment had pushed east of that line into the kind of weather that turns distance into guesswork. The regiment was screening ahead of the 1st Infantry Division, and behind that division stood the weight of VII Corps. The great turn east had begun, but now the campaign’s clean arrows were disappearing into a shamal, the desert windstorm that filled the air with dust and made every mile feel narrower, closer, and more dangerous.
If you would like to move beyond the podcast, you can see my available books at Military Author dot me. And at Trackpads dot com, you will find magazines and galleries with hundreds of thousands of photos and videos to explore.
The word objective can be misleading here because Collins was less a prize than a hinge. The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment had come off the earlier obstacle and mine belt near the Saudi border and moved into Iraq as the forward screen for the corps. Its job was to find the Iraqi army before the main body found it the hard way. That meant protecting the movement of the 1st Infantry Division, reporting enemy positions, and keeping the corps from losing tempo as it turned toward the Republican Guard. The regiment was not advancing into empty desert. It was crossing from the approach march into the zone where real contact could come suddenly. Objective Collins marked that transition from movement with danger somewhere ahead to movement with danger close enough to smell in the dust.
The shamal changed the meaning of reconnaissance. In clearer weather, armored cavalry could use the desert’s long sight lines to build a picture at distance, watching for vehicles, bunkers, tracks, smoke, antennae, and the small signs that reveal a defensive system. In the storm, the world contracted. Dust blew over the ground and mixed with the haze thrown up by hundreds of vehicles. One moment a troop could feel alone in a brown cloud, and the next it might see the outline of another vehicle, a berm, or a burning wreck emerging from the murk. The Americans possessed thermal sights, and those sights gave them a powerful advantage, but even thermals did not turn the battlefield into daylight. They showed heat, shape, and possibility. Human beings still had to decide what those images meant.
For cavalrymen, weather is never just background. It alters time, confidence, and judgment. A troop commander trying to keep his platoons aligned has to think about the enemy, but also about where his own vehicles are, whether intervals are holding, whether radio reports match what can be seen, and whether the unit is drifting away from the regiment’s intended axis. In dust, a formation can begin to feel like a handful of separate crews rather than one instrument. The driver sees one world through his vision blocks. The gunner sees another through the sight. The commander sees fragments from the hatch, hears fragments over the radio, and tries to turn them into a decision. Objective Collins was where that mental strain began to sharpen.
The regiment’s commander, Colonel Don Holder, had to maintain the cavalry’s old balance between boldness and self-preservation. If his squadrons moved too slowly, VII Corps might lose the chance to strike Iraqi heavy forces before they withdrew or repositioned. If they moved too fast, the cavalry might run into a prepared defense without enough support immediately behind it. The 1st Infantry Division depended on the regiment to open the picture ahead, but the regiment depended on the division’s presence to keep reconnaissance from becoming a lonely battle. This relationship was delicate. The cavalry had to be aggressive enough to find and fix the enemy, yet disciplined enough not to disappear into a fight the corps was not ready to exploit.
Behind the cavalry, the 1st Infantry Division carried the weight of the next act. Its name belonged to an older infantry tradition, but in the Gulf it was a mechanized heavy division with tanks, Bradleys, artillery, engineers, and infantry working as a combined-arms force. It had already played the crucial role of opening the breach. Now it was following the cavalry screen into deeper Iraq, preparing to pass through or reinforce as the situation demanded. That made the space east of Objective Collins important beyond the regiment itself. Every report from the cavalry could shape how the division deployed. Every delay in the screen could ripple backward. Every enemy position discovered in the storm helped determine whether the corps would strike cleanly or stumble into a wider fight in pieces.
The Iraqi forces ahead were not yet fully visible, but they were no longer an abstraction. The Americans were approaching the security zone of the Tawakalna Division, a Republican Guard formation positioned as part of Iraq’s deeper defense, along with other Iraqi armored and mechanized forces in the area. A security zone is meant to warn, delay, confuse, and wear down an attacker before he reaches the main defense. It can include tanks in prepared positions, infantry in bunkers, mines, artillery observers, and scattered vehicles placed to make the attacker reveal himself. For the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, entering that zone meant the mission was changing by degrees. The regiment was still screening, still reconnoitering, still reporting, but it was also moving closer to the point where finding the enemy would mean fighting him.
The ground did not help the listener’s imagination in the way a European battlefield might. There were few villages, few obvious roads, few features that could anchor a story. Instead, the battle space was organized by grid lines, objectives, phase lines, and named control measures that existed so commanders could impose order on emptiness. Objective Collins was one of those names, a way of saying where the regiment had been and what lay ahead. Easting lines, the north-south grid lines on the map, would soon become even more important. Men who had never heard of 68 Easting, 70 Easting, or 73 Easting as places in any human sense would soon remember them as stages in a violent discovery. In this kind of war, a coordinate could become a battlefield.
The storm also made radio discipline more precious. In poor visibility, reports become the nervous system of the force. A sighting by one troop can warn another. A note about bunkers, mines, or tanks can keep a following unit from blundering into the same danger. But radio traffic can also become crowded, excited, or unclear just when clarity matters most. The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment had trained for this kind of pressure, not necessarily this exact desert storm, but the deeper discipline of moving, observing, and reporting under stress. Crews had to resist both panic and overconfidence. The regiment needed facts, not rumors. It needed direction, not noise. It needed to keep pushing while preserving enough order that the information it gathered remained useful to the corps.
This was also where the technology of the Gulf War met the old reality of fear. Thermal sights could find heat signatures through dust better than the naked eye, but they could not tell a crew how brave the enemy would be, whether a position was abandoned, whether a minefield lay just beyond the next rise, or whether artillery would begin falling on a halt. The Americans had trained hard and carried better night-fighting equipment than their Iraqi opponents, yet the men in the vehicles still entered the unknown one bound at a time. The myth of perfect modern war dissolves in places like Objective Collins. The battlefield was not transparent. It was only more readable to the side that had better tools, better habits, and the confidence to act while the reading remained incomplete.
For the Iraqi defenders, the storm may have seemed to offer concealment, but concealment did not solve their larger problem. Coalition airpower had spent weeks damaging command systems, supply routes, and morale. The coalition ground attack had opened on a front so wide that Iraqi commanders struggled to understand where the decisive blow would fall. Now, in the dust west of their main positions, American cavalry was probing into the security zone of forces that needed time, clear orders, and reliable information to respond effectively. The shamal could hide movement, but it could also isolate defenders from one another and make their already strained communications feel even thinner. Weather does not belong to either army. It gives and takes from both, and the better-prepared force usually makes more of what it is given.
Objective Collins matters because it was the last breath before the battle became unmistakable. The regiment was no longer merely traveling across the desert, and it had not yet reached the collision that would make 73 Easting famous. It was in the dangerous middle, where the enemy’s shape begins to appear through fragments and where commanders must decide whether to slow down, halt, push forward, or call the main body closer. The cavalry’s role was becoming more consequential with every mile. It was not just protecting VII Corps from surprise. It was creating the conditions under which the corps could strike at speed. That is a harder mission than it sounds, because the screen must remain both sensitive and strong, both cautious enough to see and aggressive enough not to surrender the initiative.
In the long history of armored warfare, Objective Collins is a reminder that modern battles are often born before the famous moment. At Cambrai, tanks struggled forward through smoke, mud, and wire, searching for the opening that would make mobility meaningful. In the Gulf, the machines were faster, the sights sharper, the radios better, and the scale far greater, but the central problem remained familiar: how does an army move through uncertainty without losing itself? The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment east of Objective Collins answered by doing what trained cavalry is meant to do. It kept moving, kept reporting, kept feeling for the enemy in the storm. Ahead lay 68 Easting, the halt line at 70, and the violent grid line at 73. Objective Collins was the threshold, the place where dust swallowed the march and returned it as battle.