Franks: I heard it, it went on late. No, I did not, the particular battle, I'm not sure they named it 73 ....... until later, but that particular battle that discovered .. the initial success against the Republican Guards, where their main battle positions were and the fact that we had caught them by surprise, I knew then that our armored divisions would be successful as the British 1st Armored Division was being very successful against the Iraqi tactical reserve.

Q: So the Iraqis by now, the J-STARS were showing that they were beginning to peel off, they're beginning to retreat, they'd left a defensive screen, what was your perception of how the battle was at that stage, as we go into Tuesday night/Wednesday morning?

Franks: My instructions to the Corps were we had to keep up the intensity of attack for the next 24 or 36 hours, a straight message to the Corps. My perception was we would have .. the 3rd Armoured Division, General Butch ........, 3rd Armored Division, hit the Tawakalna right in the centre, the 1st Armoured Division to the north and the Big Red One came out of the breach after the 1st British Armoured Division had attacked through, so we essentially had 4 divisions from north to south, the 1st US Armoured Division, 3rd US Armoured Division, 1st US Infantry Division and the 1st UK Armoured Division, 4 divisions on line as it were, about 8 to 9 brigades, depending on what the units were doing, each one of these considerable, sizeable formations, I think the calculations were if you would line up vehicle to vehicle, end to end, in the 1st UK Armoured Division, you'd stretch about 350 kilometres, so we're talking sizeable numbers of units packed into a frontage of maybe 120 kilometres.

Q: You've got a wall of tanks ..

Franks: That's about correct, a massed fist, smashing into the Republican Guards and destroying them, as was our mission. All throughout the night of Tuesday, into Wednesday morning, Wednesday morning then I wanted to go and do a quick assessment, because my initial calculation was that we could entrap the remaining units in our sector if we could do a double envelopment.

Q: Tell me about the Medina Ridge, what was the significance about that?

Franks: There it was that we ran into the Medina Division of the Republican Guards. I actually went out to visit General Ron Griffith and the 1st US Armoured Division, to talk about moving the 1st Cavalry around to the north, it was at that point that the battle of the Medina Ridge was going on. Again it was an indication of the great skill and toughness and capability of our soldiers and our equipment in that the 1st Armoured Division was able to essentially reduce a brigade of Iraqi vehicles, render them totally combat ineffective and destroyed in lessthan an hour, at great ranges, at ranges in excess of 2 kilometres where you couldn't even see the target with a naked eye, so a tremendous combat victory there by the 1st Armoured Division but also an indication that the line of defence of the Republican Guards had stretched further to the north and what they were trying to do was rapidly get vehicles and units in our way as we were attacking and driving to the east.

Q: As this was going on, General Schwarzkopf was standing up saying that the gates are closed.

Franks: I believe that's correct, I didn't know at the time that there was a briefing going on, I found out later that there was a briefing going on, this fight went on mid-afternoon of Wednesday, the 27th of February.

Q: Had General Schwarzkopf consulted you, did General Schwarzkopf say to you, are the gates closed?

Franks: No, .. most of my communication, except for that one phone call, was through my immediate commander there, General John Yeosock, who was commanding the Third Army.

Q: I suppose what I'm getting at is that here you have the Commander in Chief standing up saying the gates are closed and you're on the ground and you're the guy who knows that they're not closed because you've just had a major engagement and you're doing damned well but the gates aren't closed yet, what do you make of all that?

Franks: I knew we were in the middle of a continuous intensive armoured fight, our troops were doing terrific, we had extended the battlefield so it was not just a fight of tank against tank, our scheme of manoeuvre was to extend to simultaneously attack the Iraqi forces throughout the depth of what are now called battle space, so we were using attack helicopters, we were using Air Force air, rocket and cannon artillery, so we had an extended attack zone and that was moving, that was very lethal and deadly and that was moving due east towards the Gulf.

Q: I accept all that was going on, but General Schwarzkopf said the gates were closed, were they?

Franks: I knew that--actually Wednesday morning-- that the 1st Infantry Division and the 1st UK Armoured Division had essentially achieved a breakthrough and they were in essentially pursuit and exploitation, which the Big Red One was. I also wanted to attempt to encircle the remaining Iraqi forces that were in front of 7 Corps and so we came up with a double envelopment scheme of manoeuvre to do that, using 2 divisions.

Q: In very simple terms, what was going to happen the following day, the Thursday, what were you going to do?

Franks: Our scheme of manoeuvre in 7 Corps was to bring the 1st Cavalry Division around to the north of the 1st Armoured Division and around from the south we would bring the 1st Infantry Division and they would link up in front of .. actually just to the south of Basra and encircle any remaining Iraqi forces in our sector.

Q: So the following day, what would have happened to the Iraqis?

Franks: Any forces that were still in the 7 Corps sector would have been caught in this encirclement and then in addition we had the 18th Corps attack in the east with the 101st Airborne, with the 24th Division and then the 3rd Cavalry attacking due east and one of the .. the ARCENT plan was that they would be the hammer on top of the 7 Corps anvil, right on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border.

Q: How were you told that the war was going to end and what did you feel?

Franks: We had .. all day on Wednesday I had gone around personally visiting units and assembling commanders out on the battlefield to put into motion this double envelopment scheme which would utilise all the assets, all the combat assets of the Corps. Early in the evening then I got the word from my main command post, which was back in Saudi Arabia, that there would be a possible ceasefire the following day so I called my commander, the Army commander, General Yeosock, and asked what was this all about and he told me, yes, there was a possibility, a very real possibility of a ceasefire, he would confirm it later, and so that meant that the scheme of manoeuvre that we had put into effect certainly would not happen so we had to make some adjustments, plus put a warning order out to cease all offensive operations at that point, at 5 o'clock in the morning.

Q: You travelled across all this desert, hundreds of miles to get to grips with the Republican Guard and destroy them and the following day that would have happened, you would have encircled them--and now someone's ringing up saying, hey, you are never going to really get to grips with them, what did you feel? Franks: We felt that the purpose of destroying the Republican Guard's forces, in our sector anyway, was the means to achieve the strategic objective and the strategic objective was the liberation of Kuwait and so what we had done to that point had achieved the strategic objective.

Q: Should the war have gone on for a little longer, just military considerations?

Franks: We essentially had achieved our objectives, strategic objectives in the theatre, there was some resistance but not very strong organised resistance in the 7 Corps sector.

Q: So you felt no feeling of frustration that just as you were ..

Franks: Not at that point, no, did not, I felt that we had achieved a great victory, I was very proud of the soldiers, as a matter of fact I assembled the commanders of the corps, all the division commanders at the Corps Tactical CP that morning at .. I believe it was about 10 o'clock and I told them I wanted to be the first one to tell them that they and their soldiers, I was enormously proud of them then and I am even more proud of them today for their extraordinary achievement .. extraordinary achievement, toughness and willingness to take the fight to the enemy day and night in some tough weather, sand storms and then the rain.

Q: It undoubtedly was a great .. it achieved everything you wanted to but there were two divisions worth of Republican Guards, according to the D.I.A. who went over and counted them with some of their funny stuff in the next couple of days, two divisions worth of armour stacked up in that Basra pocket that was allowed to drive out eventually into Iraq, with all this fire power, with you chasing across the desert, with all the air, how could it be there was still two divisions worth of armour left at the end of the war?

Franks: I don't know the exact count, what was there, what left the theatre, I'm not aware of the exact figures on that, there've been a variety of pieces of information on that - I do know we were attacking the Iraqi forces in our sector throughout the depth with attack helicopters, with air, and with ground combat vehicles, and within the attack scenario destroyed almost 4,000 then and after, going around the battlefield, destroyed almost 4,000 essentially armoured vehicles and other pieces of equipment. So I believe that the sensing was in the Corps that the strategic objectives had been achieved, that we were enormously proud of the soldiers and the leaders of the Corps. Could we have gone on had we been asked? Of course, but that certainly wasn't the decision of the Tactical Commander at the time.

Q: Safwan ..how did you become aware that Schwarzkopf was irate, what happened?

Franks: There was a call I got said we need a place to conduct the ceasefire discussions, one proposal was the village of Safwan, another proposal was let's do it at the captured headquarters of the Medina division which lst Armoured Division had overrun, which was not very accessible, it was out in the middle of the desert, no roads to it or anything, so the site was Safwan which then I informed my commander that we don't own Safwan, we had not been there, I think what happened was that, as I learned later, that a map got erroneously posted at CENTCOM and if you talk about the scale of maps, on a large scale map distances show up as a very small space on a map, so I don't know how it happened but apparently as the C-in-C was looking at the map he was under the impression that we had captured Safwan when in fact we had not, none of our maps showed that, I had no information, I knew we were not in Safwan, everybody in the Corps knew we were not in Safwan - the Big Red One knew they were not in Safwan and so then there was a phone call that asked for an official explanation of this, which I provided in writing--I sat down and wrote out a handwritten explanation to the C-in-C as to what happened and why we were not in Safwan. We eventually got there after the cessation of hostilities, the Big Red One did.

Q: Can you describe, as you took off in that helicopter to Safwan, can you just take us through that helicopter ride, what you did, what you felt, what he said, what you could see.

Franks: From Kuwait City to Safwan is about a 20 minute helicopter, in a B....... helicopter. We had arranged for a company of Apaches to accompany us on the way up there - we wanted a show of force to Iraqis who could see all of this that there was plenty of combat power still available if they wouldn't agree to the ceasefire terms, but I wanted to show General Schwarzkopf what I had seen, the destruction, we flew over the 1st British Armoured Division, how far they'd come, the Big Red One, the lst US Infantry Division, so I wanted him to see what I had been able to see on the battlefield and the destruction of the Iraqi military, at least close to Highway 8, so as we took off I instructed the pilots to fly so we could see a lot of that on the way to Safwan and I told General Schwarzkopf as we were flying along, I didn't want to talk too much, except to point out the units, the lst UK Armoured Division and the lst Infantry Division, because I wanted him to be able to look out and see what the forces under his command, in this case 7 Corps, had done and the magnificent achievement, victory that they had achieved.