For example, each march unit of fifteen to twenty-five vehicles required road space. An M-1 tank — thirty-two feet long, or just under ten meters — requires at least that much road space. Because there was a threat of air attack, the vehicles had to be spread out lest a single air attack destroy many vehicles traveling bumper to bumper. On this road march the distance between tanks was fifty meters, or 164 feet. Thus, an M-1 tank did not take ten meters of road; it took sixty meters. Multiply that times fourteen for a single tank company with fourteen M-1 tanks and that company will occupy eight-tenths of a kilometer, or half a mile, worth of road. The fifteen hundred vehicles of the 3rd Brigade, in column, without breaks, required 90 kilometers, or 55.8 miles, of road space. Every inch of that column had to move down a single two-lane road, a road the Egyptian 2nd Army was also trying to move west on.
Added to the above was the need to travel no faster than the slowest vehicle. It would do no good to arrive in battle with M-1 tanks cruising along at forty-five miles an hour, leaving their ancient M-88 recovery vehicles to the rear chugging along at a breathtaking twenty miles an hour. Finally, throw in a refuel stop — near the end of the road march, lest the tanks move into battle on empty — and you have a snail instead of a jaguar moving toward the Libyan frontier.
Road marches, even under the best of conditions, are hard on men and machines. At night, in the desert, after hours without sleep, and with an increasing threat of combat at the end, they are hell. Even for Lieutenant Colonel Vince Vennelli, commander of Task Force 3–5 Armor, the road march was tiring. He was traveling with A Company, an M-1 unit, that night. When they came to the right turn that led to the tactical assembly area where A Company would stop, Vennelli ordered the driver of his hummvee to pull over to the left and stop. The driver, groggy from the long, slow march, didn't hear him. Leaning over, Vennelli yelled in his ear. "TURN LEFT AND STOP — NOW!"
The driver jerked the wheel to the left, causing the hummvee to throw up a cloud of dust as it spun off the road, then back on. When the driver brought the vehicle to an abrupt halt, the cloud of dust continued forward and shrouded the vehicle. Angered by his driver's ineptness, Vennelli decided to wait until he tended to his personal needs before chewing him out. Stepping out of the hummvee, Vennelli walked around to the right side of the vehicle. Standing next to the right rear wheel, he undid the buttons of his fly and prepared to relieve himself.
On tank A-33 the driver lost sight of the vehicle to his front. Keying his intercom, he called to his tank commander for help. "Hey, Sarge. Where'd the hummvee go?"
Staff Sergeant Jonathan Maxwell looked to his front, then from side to side. To his right he saw a cloud of dust. "Right, Billy. Go right."
Confused, and seeing nothing but a cloud of dust and no road, Billy hesitated. "Where? I don't see a road."
Though he was a good driver, Billy Magee could be dense sometimes. Maxwell keyed the intercom again. "Now, Billy! Turn right-now!"
Jerking the steering T to the right, Billy brought the M-1 around to the right and into the cloud of dust. "Okay Sarge, I hear ya. Ya don't hav'ta yell all the time."
The sudden grinding of tank tracks running through sprockets to his immediate left surprised Vennelli, causing him to urinate on his hands. Stepping back from the hummvee, Vennelli began to stuff himself back in while he looked for the tank that was approaching. From out of the darkness and dust, the fender of a tank emerged and smacked him on the shoulder, sending him sprawling to the ground. Looking up, Vennelli saw the dark gray sky obscured by total blackness as the track of A-33 came crushing down on him. Even his screams were smothered by the tank's sixty-three tons.
"Hey, Sarge — did you hear something?" "Like what, Billy?"
There was a pause before Billy answered. "I don't know. Sounded like a scream."
Maxwell pulled his crewman's helmet away from his ear. The cold desert wind howled between his ear and his helmet. He eased the helmet down. "It's only the wind, Billy. Now, pay attention and see if you can catch up to the colonel's hummvee."
Startled by the tank that nearly hit his hummvee, Vennelli's driver picked his head up off the steering wheel and listened for a moment. After the tank passed, there was silence. Though he wanted to move, he decided against doing so until the colonel got back. Vicious Vinnie could be a real asshole when people did things without his permission. So the driver put his head back down on the steering wheel and went back to sleep as the column of tanks continued to grind past his hummvee.
Positioning himself with a platoon of three tanks, Lieutenant Colonel Hafez stood high in the turret of his own M-60A3 tank and watched to the west. There was another platoon of tanks to his right, positioned between the railroad tracks and the coastal road. The bulk of his battalion, what was left of it, was deployed on the high ground two kilometers to his rear. In two days of fighting his battalion had been reduced to seventeen operational tanks. They had more than taken their fair share of the enemy, with a tank-to-tank kill ratio of better than three to one. But it seemed to make no difference. The Libyans kept coming, while relief for Hafez's unit or replacements for his losses didn't.
All day the eighteenth, the Republican Brigade had fought a series of delaying actions. The tank battalions of the brigade took turns setting up tank ambushes on the coastal road. Each battalion in turn set up in hasty defensive positions. When the Libyans came, the tank battalion in ambush would engage them for as long as possible. When the Libyans recovered from the initial contact and began to deploy, the tank battalion broke contact. Once free of the fight, it pulled back to its next position to set up again. In moving back, it would bypass its sister tank battalions, waiting in their ambush sites for their turns to pounce.
The idea of a delay is to force the enemy to stop and deploy, slowing its advance as much as possible without becoming decisively engaged. While the enemy is preparing to conduct a hasty attack, the force conducting the delay slips away. The advancing enemy, left with the battlefield, has to regroup, take stock of the situation, and begin its advance again. The problem for the unit conducting a delay is to get away after the enemy begins to deploy and before it is able to bring its weight to bear on the delay force or outmaneuver it. To prevent a flanking attack, the mechanized battalion of the Republican Brigade was screening to the south, making sure the Libyans didn't slip in behind the tank battalions on the coastal road.
There is a gruesome side to a delay, at least for the force conducting it. Because a delaying unit is always firing, then rapidly moving back, there is little or no time for it to pick up its own wounded or men who have dismounted when their vehicles are damaged. Loss of one's vehicle, for any reason, in most cases means eventual death or capture. The wounded are at the mercy of the enemy, which not only has its own wounded to tend to but, after seeing its own men burned to death or blown apart, may be in a less than charitable mood. There is a natural desire on everyone's part to want to leave a delay position as soon as possible. Thus a commander is faced with the need to inflict maximum delay on the enemy while preserving his own force so it can fight again. That was why Hafez chose to place himself with the element farthest forward. From there he could judge for himself when to commence engaging the enemy and, more importantly, when it was time to leave.
Hafez's plan for this action was to fight the battle in two phases. He had reformed the remains of his battalion into two companies around his remaining officers. The company on the coastal road, the two platoons, would begin the fight. They would handle with ease the combat reconnaissance patrol and the forward security element, if the Libyans had one. When the enemy's main body began to close, Hafez would give the order for the two platoons to make a high-speed run to the east, past the rest of his battalion. The Libyans, seeing the Egyptians run, just might be induced into charging after the fleeing enemy in the hope of destroying them. If the Libyans did so, the second company of Hafez's battalion on the high ground would give the pursuing force another bloody nose.