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.
The ground war did not begin when tanks crossed the line on February 24, 1991. It began in the sky thirty-eight days earlier, when the coalition opened an air campaign meant to blind, isolate, and weaken the Iraqi army before the armored corps ever came within sight of it. In the early hours of January 17, the war changed from waiting to action, from heat and rumor in the Saudi desert to the sudden, organized violence of aircraft striking command centers, air defenses, communications nodes, airfields, bridges, and military headquarters. For the soldiers of VII Corps, still preparing their heavy formations for the great turn west and north, the air campaign was both a shield and a promise. It was supposed to make the coming tank battle shorter, faster, and less costly, but it could not make the tank battle disappear.
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 coalition’s first air strikes were aimed at Iraq as a military system. That distinction matters. The purpose was not simply to bomb whatever looked important or to punish Iraq from above until it surrendered. Planners wanted to take apart the means by which Saddam Hussein’s forces could see, communicate, command, move, and resist. Radar sites, surface-to-air missile batteries, aircraft shelters, command bunkers, and communication centers became early targets because an army cut off from its eyes and nerves becomes slower even before it loses its weapons. Modern armored warfare depends on time, and the air campaign was designed to steal time from Iraq. Every disrupted headquarters, every broken bridge, every destroyed relay station made it harder for Iraqi commanders to understand what was happening quickly enough to answer it.
From the beginning, the coalition held an advantage Iraq could not match: the ability to sustain a large, coordinated air campaign across the whole theater. American, British, French, Saudi, and other coalition aircraft flew missions day after day, creating pressure that reached far beyond the front lines in Kuwait. Bombers, fighters, electronic warfare aircraft, tankers, reconnaissance platforms, and command aircraft all formed part of the machinery. The pilots in the cockpit were the visible edge, but behind them stood intelligence analysts, maintenance crews, munitions handlers, tanker crews, planners, weather specialists, and air controllers who kept the campaign functioning. As with tanks, the aircraft themselves were only the most dramatic part of a larger system. Airpower at this scale was not a series of raids. It was an industrial rhythm.
For Iraqi soldiers on the ground, those thirty-eight days were a war before the war. Many sat in bunkers, trenches, revetments, and vehicles while aircraft they could rarely answer passed overhead. Some units were hit repeatedly. Others were bypassed for days, only to be struck later when they moved, transmitted, or revealed themselves. The psychological strain was heavy, because helpless waiting can wear down a formation even when casualties are uneven. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that bombing turned every Iraqi unit into a broken shell. Some soldiers deserted, some surrendered at the first chance, and some units became disorganized. Others endured, hid, repaired, shifted positions, and remained capable of fighting. Air attack weakened the Iraqi army, but it did not erase it.
This is the point where later memory can become too simple. The Gulf War’s air campaign was so visible, so technologically impressive, and so heavily reported that it tempted many observers to believe a new kind of war had arrived, one in which ground combat might become secondary. Precision weapons, stealth aircraft, laser-guided bombs, and televised imagery suggested a battlefield being mastered from above. There was truth in the sense that airpower had changed the conditions of battle profoundly. But the conclusion that airpower alone had won the war was too neat. Armies can be shaken from the air, but if they still hold ground, occupy cities, man defensive belts, and possess armored reserves, someone must eventually close the distance and decide whether they will stand or collapse.
The air campaign did its work in layers. First came the struggle to suppress and evade Iraqi air defenses so coalition aircraft could operate with growing freedom. Then came attacks against command and control, leadership targets, airfields, and strategic infrastructure tied to Iraq’s ability to sustain war. Over time, more attention turned toward Iraqi ground forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Tanks in revetments, artillery batteries, supply areas, troop concentrations, and lines of communication all became targets. The goal was to make the Iraqi army brittle before the coalition’s ground forces struck. A brittle army might still look solid on the map, with divisions in place and defensive lines drawn, but inside it communications are frayed, morale is damaged, movement is dangerous, and commanders hesitate because every order may expose another target.
For VII Corps, the air campaign was both helpful and frustrating. Helpful, because every Iraqi tank destroyed from above was one less threat to an American crew later. Every artillery battery silenced made the cavalry screen safer. Every disrupted headquarters reduced the chance of a coordinated Iraqi counterattack when the left hook came around. Frustrating, because the corps could not know exactly what would remain when it arrived. Bomb damage assessment is never perfect, especially against forces that can hide, dig in, use decoys, and move at night or in poor weather. The soldiers preparing to attack had to assume the enemy was damaged but not gone. That assumption was sober, and it was right.
The Republican Guard became one of the central concerns. These divisions were not all-powerful, and later stories sometimes inflated their quality into something larger than reality. Still, they were politically important, better regarded than many regular units, and positioned as the armored reserve that could shape the ground fight if left intact. Air attacks struck at Republican Guard formations, supply lines, and supporting units, but many of their vehicles and soldiers survived into the ground campaign. Dug-in armor is hard to kill completely from the air, especially when crews disperse, camouflage, and use prepared positions. A tank hidden under cover or placed in a revetment may be damaged, abandoned, or untouched, and from a distance those possibilities can blur together. VII Corps would have to find out the hard way.
Airpower also shaped Iraqi behavior. Movement became dangerous, and that mattered enormously. An armored army that cannot move freely is already losing part of what makes it armored. Fuel convoys, ammunition trucks, artillery relocations, command vehicles, and reserve formations all risked detection and attack. Iraqi commanders faced a cruel dilemma. If they stayed hidden and static, they became less able to respond to the coalition’s maneuver. If they moved, they became vulnerable from above. The coalition’s later ground plan depended on exploiting exactly that dilemma. When the left hook swung wide into the western desert, Iraq needed to detect it, understand it, and shift forces to meet it. The air campaign made every step in that response slower and more dangerous.
At the same time, the air campaign could not solve the old battlefield problems of mines, trenches, bunkers, and prepared defenses by itself. Along the Kuwaiti front, Iraqi units had built obstacle belts meant to slow an attacker and channel vehicles into kill zones. Mines do not surrender because a command post is bombed. Wire does not disappear because aircraft control the sky. Dug-in infantry and antitank weapons can remain dangerous even after weeks of bombardment. That is why engineers, infantry, artillery, and tanks would still be needed when the ground war opened. The 1st Infantry Division would still have to breach. The Marines and Arab coalition forces would still have to attack into Kuwait. The 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment would still have to ride ahead and discover what airpower had not destroyed.
For the American cavalry crews who would later fight at 73 Easting, the thirty-eight days overhead created a strange confidence mixed with uncertainty. They knew the Iraqi army had been hit hard. They knew coalition aircraft owned the sky in a way that no Iraqi commander could ignore. But they also knew that an enemy does not have to be fresh to be lethal. A single surviving tank in a good position can kill. An artillery battery with a few guns left can disrupt a formation. A minefield missed by intelligence can stop a column at the worst moment. The cavalry’s mission was not to admire the air campaign from the ground. It was to move into the space the air campaign had opened and test what remained inside it.
The weather, too, reminded everyone that technology had limits. Sand, smoke, cloud cover, and wind could complicate both air operations and ground observation. The same desert that gave coalition forces room for a sweeping maneuver could also hide vehicles, distort distances, and make coordination difficult. Airpower did not create a clean, transparent battlefield. It created an enemy under stress, with damaged systems and reduced freedom, but still present in an environment that could conceal danger until the last moment. This is why the coming fight would reward the combination of air preparation and ground reconnaissance. Aircraft could strike widely and deeply. Cavalry could confirm, feel, report, and fight at close range. Each arm made the other more effective.
There was also a human cost to those thirty-eight days that should not be flattened into a chart of sorties and targets. Iraqi conscripts, professional soldiers, officers, drivers, mechanics, and civilians near military targets lived under bombardment whose effects were terrifying even when militarily effective. Coalition pilots and crews faced their own dangers from air defenses, accidents, weather, and mechanical failure. War from the air can look clean when viewed through distant imagery, but it is never clean to those beneath it or those sent to conduct it. The air campaign reduced the coalition’s risks in the ground war and helped shorten the conflict, but it did so through real destruction. A serious history has to hold both facts at once.
Thirty-eight Days of Air matters because it explains why 73 Easting was possible, and also why 73 Easting was still necessary. The coalition air campaign broke open the conditions for a fast armored victory: Iraqi command was disrupted, movement was punished, morale was weakened, and many combat units were damaged before the first coalition tanks crossed into Iraq. Yet the decisive Republican Guard fight remained unfinished. The air war shaped the battlefield; it did not occupy it. It loosened the enemy’s grip; it did not pry every finger away. When the ground offensive finally began, VII Corps and its cavalry screen advanced into a battlefield already battered from above, but not empty. The storm at 73 Easting would prove the central lesson of modern armored warfare: victory comes when airpower, reconnaissance, logistics, training, and tanks converge, each doing what the others cannot do alone.