There was silence, too, when Brown radioed the other tanks of his squadron.

Inside, despite the pandemonium in the hide, which now included a burning fuel-tanker, the crew were surrounded by a surreal silence. A Challenger 2 main battle tank is a sound-proof metal box. And even against high explosive frag-shells, it would be much safer in the tank than under it.Īfter the next explosion, Brown and his crew raced for the hatches, plunged through, and pulled them tight shut above them. What if they fired gas shells? Fear of chemical weapons had dominated preparations for both Gulf Wars. For a few moments more, Tim Brown lay frozen beneath his tank. The noise, the smell, the sudden deadly threat produced a panic-stricken scramble for safety. No-one at that moment thought about anything except survival. As another half-dozen explosions erupted across the hide – the Iraqis had got the range dead-on with the third round – men who had been sound asleep seconds before threw themselves off the tops and dived underneath their tanks. Then the second explosion detonated with an ear-splitting crash right in the middle of the hide, where tanks and vehicles were parked up while most of the men bedded down in sleeping bags on the tanks’ back decks. They needed as much sleep as they could get, and most men at first assumed the racket was their own artillery. They were scheduled to enter Basra at dawn, supported by Black Watch infantry riding in Warrior APCs (armoured personnel carriers), tasked with destroying three targets: the city’s main TV and radio mast, the headquarters and main operating-base of the Fedayeen, and a massive statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. When the first explosion went off, the men of ‘A’ Squadron, Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, simply rolled over to catch some more sleep. What is it like to fight a modern urban battle from inside a tank? In April 2003, following the invasion of Iraq, Major Tim Brown led the first deep-penetration tank raid into enemy-controlled Basra.

1ST GULF WAR TANK BATTLE