Interview with General Frederick Franks, Commander of VII Corps

Franks: We met with General Schwarzkopf, I believe it was Tuesday, we had gone to Saudi Arabia on a leaders reconnaissance, we got notified Thursday, late Thursday evening, we flew down there on Sunday and we met Tuesday. The setting was a dining facility, essentially a mess hall, with flat tables, a small room, and we were all in there, all the senior commanders from all the services were in there, in our case, in 7 Corps, these were all fellow soldiers and members of .. the other services that I knew, we were all combat veterans of Vietnam, of another generation of US soldiers, we had all been products of our own military schooling system, so we all knew each other, so there was a very calm professional atmosphere in the room. On the walls were maps, it turned out they were aerial photographs with covers over the top, and in the front of the room was essentially a podium and General Schwarzkopf came in and delivered the whole briefing himself as the Commander, laid out the whole enemy situation, friendly situation and the four phases of the scheme of manoeuvre, and there was no particular excitement among those of us there in the room, people were calmly taking notes, looking around at each other, a couple of small chit-chats passed back and forth as General Schwarzkopf gave the briefing. He was very clear, very precise in the description - we didn't know at the time if we would execute this or not but certainly if you're going to get called on to execute an offensive operation, you need to start to prepare for it well in advance, so that's what the purpose of the briefing was and it was very clear and at the end of it he asked if there were any questions, as I recall there weren't any, and then he invited us.. all to get up and take a look at the maps which showed the Iraqi positions and then showed roughly the sector of operations that we would get to operate in. So I recall, we got up, those of us that would comprise 7 Corps, the US commanders, and walked up to the map - at that point I didn't know that we would have the 1st British Armored Division as part of the US 7 Corps, went up and looked at the map, quickly internalised what I had heard General Schwarzkopf say, I'd never been to Saudi Arabia before and so this was all relatively new to all the commanders, the geography, the names, the Iraqi positions and so forth, so this was rapid internalisation of what had just been said and I was looking at the map and rapidly making up in my own mind schemes of manoeuvre for the Corps, I'd been in command of the Corps well over a year at that point so we had had some operations, and General Schwarzkopf walked up and he said what do you think, Fred, and I .. looking at the map, I said, this'll work, we can do it, and that was it.

Q: You took these guys seriously, they were the fourth largest army in the world ....

Franks: Oh, we were very serious professional soldiers there taking a look at the conditions of the mission, the enemy forces, the terrain, the troops we had available to us and the amount of time that we had to get to the theatre, to essentially make a Cold War Central European Corps into a contingency Corps tailored for that particular mission, which was a considerable undertaking, so all of those things were going through my mind at the time and, no, we did not underestimate the enemy - I don't think we overestimated the enemy either, I believe we were .. we had reasonable information about what their capabilities were, how they fought against the Iranians, so we were .. very sober-minded about Iraqi capabilities.

Q : How did it come about that the Big Red One were the guys who made the breach?

Franks: I went to see General Tom ........ who commanded the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, and I really wanted the Big Red One to do the breach so I knew that they had done a lot of work at our national training centre at Fort Owen in California, practising a breach, and I said to Tom, look, I need the division to conduct a breach operation, you've done a lot of that, he said, we'll do it, we know how to do that, we'll do it and we'll do it right and we'd like the mission, and I said, okay Tom, you got it, that was early December.

Q: It was a tough mission.

Franks: It was a tough mission, it was a tough mission on two counts, one the actual breach operation, clearing 24 lanes for the passage then --it turns out the first British armored division to pass through them--and secondly the logistics of the Corps to pass through, and then third it turns out the 1st Cavalry Division to pass through the breach as well, so yes, it was a tough, complex mission, required a lot of rehearsal, required some new techniques developed there in the desert and developed a lot of co-ordination with the 1st British armoured division, so a tough mission but Tom and the Big Red One did it superbly, the soldiers and leaders, they thoroughly rehearsed it and I was very proud of them.

Q : And they were the obvious division, they've got a history.

Franks: Well, they've got great tradition in breach operations, the division was awarded an Arrowhead device for the heroic actions at Omaha Beach, D-Day in Normandy, June 6th 1944, and so it was in that tradition that they carried off this breach superbly and I was proud of them, soldiers and leaders of the Big Red One.

Q: At that stage, you were aware that the life expectancy of the first guys through that breach was not necessarily great and you were going to do everything you could to increase it.

Franks: I knew that I was giving the Big Red One a very tough mission, I knew that the soldiers, especially in the lead vehicles, were going into--they were out on the tip of the spear so to speak, particularly the Arrowhead as it turned out, and that it was a tough mission, and so what I wanted to do was to do everything that I could to provide them the kind of support to minimise our own casualties in the accomplishment of that mission and to be very aggressive in the accomplishment of that breach, and so we did that.

Q: Could you sum up for me, as you prepared for the war, what was your plan?

Franks: As I looked at the disposition of the Iraqi forces, the mission we were given, the troops I had available to me and the time that we had, we had three fights, we had to fight against the front line Iraqi infantry, in essence the Iraqi 7th Corps, as it turns out, then it was a fight against the tactical reverse which was positioned right behind the front line infantry divisions, then it was a fight against the Republican Guards. So those three fights had to be sequenced in a way that would allow us to have our point of main effort initially at the breach and when the success of the breach was assured then to shift that point of main effort to mass against the Republican Guard, so essentially we had three fights, those three.

Q: And you wanted to mass?

Franks: I wanted to mass, I knew that again in the breach mass of fires and rapidly push through the breach, and then secondly to ensure that when we hit the Republican Guards we would go in at full speed, full speed, and that we were massed into a fist - I didn't want to poke at the Republican Guards with some extended fingers or hit them piecemeal, I wanted to hit the Republican Guards with a left hook, with a fist, with a three division fist, and when we hit 'em we'd hit them hard and be through them in a minimum amount of time.

Q: What happens to people who attack in fingers rather than fists?

Franks: What you get is, you get piecemeal commitment, you get lack of coherence in the attack or lack of synchronisation of fires with manoeuvre forces, with ground and air co-ordination, and what you get is you get a chance, a probability of increased casualties, you get the probability of an attack that starts and stops and starts and stops, loses momentum, and you get all those things that you really don't want - what you want to do is you want to hit .. you want to hit at max. speed, you want to hit massed and you want to hit the enemy from an unexpected direction and at a speed that they just can't handle, and that's what we were after.

Q: What sort of forces did you have, I mean I don't know if there's a Second World War analogy or something, but what is a corps, what did you have in Corps?

Franks: We had in 7 Corps, we had 146,000 American and British soldiers, we had 5 divisions, essentially 5 armoured divisions, although one was a mechanised infantry division and one was a cavalry division, essentially 5 armoured divisions. We had close to 1600 tanks, American and British, a sizeable force, a lot of moving parts, we consumed well over 2 million gallons of fuel a day, we had a support command, vital logistics support command of over 26,000 soldiers, we had 15 hospitals, we had over 800 helicopters, a sizeable force, a lot of moving parts.

Q: Is there a sort of Second World War analogy--how big a force was this you were commanding, how destructive?

Franks: Well you can go back to the battle in the Ardennes and General Patton's Third Army, essentially making a 90-degree turn and going to the relief of the forces in Bastogne, I believe that whole unit that went to the relief there was about the size of maybe one and a fraction of another one of our divisions, so we were .. 7th Corps was a World War II army, was about .. probably about the size of George Patton's Third Army in World War Two terms .. considerable combat power and the capability of the equipment, Apache helicopters, M1 .. M1/A1 tanks, 120 millimetre tanks the British .. certainly a British equivalent tank, and infantry fighting vehicles, so considerable combat power to fight day and night, fight day and night, fight in bad weather, capability to reach out and hit the Iraqi forces before they even knew we were coming - as a matter of fact some of their prisoners said to us afterwards, one of them said, hey, the tank to the right of me blew up, the tank to the left of me blew up, I couldn't even see what was firing at us, and that was because we were able to hit them at .. in some cases at extended ranges, so a considerable amount of combat power, but the combat power is only realised by superbly trained and motivated soldiers and that's really what made the corps, British and American soldiers, superbly trained, motivated, tough, took the fight to the enemy, well led.