- Joined
- May 29, 2021
The incident is a somewhat notorious case of misreporting. The tank was one of a group of vehicles. The vehicles were in an area where they could not leave the road. The Iraqis concentrated initially on taking out the vision systems of the tank. They took out one sight with small arms fire. They took out another sight on top the tank with an RPG hit. They then took out the front machine gun with another RPG hit. A third RPG hit another vision system in the tank.
The vehicle group then was ordered to retreat. The tank that had been hit tried to retreat back up the road but due to poor driving, it went off the road into a ditch and threw both tracks.
The rest of the tanks in the group surrounded the immobilized tank and an artillery strike was called in on the Iraqis. The Iraqis then managed to hit the immobilized tank with an ATGM. But the ATGM hit the tank in the heavy front turret armor. The hit caused one of the crew to break their arm but otherwise did no serious damage.
The tank was immobilized and the recovery of it was extremely complicated. The Iraqis would occasional take shots at it from long range and tried to hit it with mortars. The tank wasn't recovered by nightfall and the Iraqi managed an estimated three more RPG shots at it from long range which did little. All the shots were to the front of the tank.
After 14 hours of recovery efforts, they got the tank out of ditch and dragged it back to a rear area.
They spent four days replacing tracks, wheels, sights and a new machine gun before the tank was back in service. The official British Army estimate was that the tank had experienced 7 RPG strikes and one ATGM strike. Seemingly all from the front.
The positive in the incident was that the front armor was strong enough such that the crew compartment was never compromised. The negative is that a small number of Iraqi infantry were able to disable all the weapons systems of the tank.
The facts of the incident have been known for many years. But rather than reporting truth, sites like Wikipedia report what "trusted sources" are saying. The trusted sources reported the myth and have no interest in correcting the story.
It's a free country.
