Thunder Run (1) into Baghdad
46A US Army Task Force made up of roughly 100 tracked vehicles including 29 Abrams tanks and 14 Bradley armored fighting vehicles of the 1st Battalion of 64 Armored Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, under the command Colonel David Perkins and led by Lieutenant Colonel Eric Schwarz, was sent on a lightning raid designed to test the defenses of the Iraqi capital.
The task force almost immediately came under heavy fire, which they returned, and so a kind of moving battle rolled along almost the entire route to Baghdad International Airport, with the crowded suburbs of Southern Baghdad to either side of the highway.
Though they fought fiercely the Iraqi soldiers were only able to delay the Americans who pushed through their barricades and brushed off their sometimes suicidally brave attacks even as more and more of the cities defenders were drawn toward the sound of the guns.
After hours of fighting and travelling 20km through the enemy capital and with the loss of one soldier killed and several wounded all but one vehicle made it to the now secured Airport: an Abrams had been crippled by an RPG and had to be abandoned and was destroyed later by the airforce.
Though most of the vehicles had been damaged and some would have to scrapped, the Thunder Run showed that the city’s defenses could be penetrated and the sudden appearance of US Tanks near the heart of Saddam’s Capital along with the fact that they were not stopped
demoralized the Iraqi troops who were told that the Americans were dying in their thousands hundreds of miles away.