THE GULF WAR CHRONICLES: A Military History of the First War with Iraq Paperback – March 18, 2008

Very informative. Love how this book breaks the war down by individual days.

Author Richard S. Lowry’s book The Gulf War Chronicles: A Military History of the First War with Iraq, fills in the blanks and answers many questions about Operation Desert Storm 1991. Chronicles starts with his reasons for writing this book and ends with a brief discussion about possible mistakes made by the Coalition after the guns went silent and gives a basic day to day accounting of the war in between. Lowry certainly does the dirty work in digging up the details in this detail oriented, if not stellar read.Operation Desert Storm was the first real crisis for the United States after the cold war ended. Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, a former ally of the United States, brutally attacked its neighbor Kuwait and destabilized the entire Middle East in fall 1990. Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was the military reaction to that aggression. Lowry does an excellent job in piecing together the very complex puzzle of a very short but complicated war. Lowry’s Chronicles is an answer to the person that wants to know the details of this war. He notes the perception Operation Desert Storm is one of a vicious prolonged bombing campaign with our tanks and soldiers shooting Iraqis like fish in a barrel. Lowry presents the Iraqi’s in their true form; a large, well-supplied and very capable fighting force that was short of command structure due to nepotism and cronyism of Saddam Hussein. He argues that as the United States had been preparing to fight world war III, the Iraqi’s had become delusional and believed that WW I capabilities would be sufficient as long as they had a large enough army, something akin to the Chinese in Korea.Lowry also argues that although the Coalition acted in concert with precision and timing, mistakes were made and some coalition partners were not up to standards such as the Italians not being able to refuel their jets in flight which led to complications and missed opportunities. He also argues that a well-executed deception was more than partially responsible for such a one sided victory for the coalition, the most one sided in history according to Lowry. Chronicles is divided into chapters logically based on the evolution of the battlefield and is very well organized and easy to follow and it even has a section at the end of the book with a list of American dead.Chronicles is a very good, detail oriented read. Lowry although often dry and lacking creativity put together a very informative book that historians and casual readers alike can appreciate. As a veteran of Operation Desert Storm I felt the combination start to tumble as answers to long asked questions began to be answered. Richard S. Lowry is a military historian and the author of New Dawn, The battles for Fallujah, Marines in the Garden of Eden and US Marines in Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom.

I was an early grade school child when this War broke out and my father left to fight it. I recall very little of the conflict outside of the family watching the televised Baghdad Night bombardment cam and the subsequent return of my fathers unit in great fan fair. Later years I figured it was just a quick run easy affair with the great difficulty being the herding of surrendered Iraqi’s. My father said it wasn't that easy and most Iraqis his unit encountered fought their best and to the death. He and the others were incredibly lucky; it could have gone the other way quickly and he wouldn’t want to do it again. Most of his experience of combat with the Iraqi’s was in a tank battle that he said had no name, that he was aware of.Picking this book up has educated me from the popular ignorant stereotype of this War that I described above. Contents focus at trading between the strategic and front line view with a 100% combat military history view that runs through as a practical day by day description. The War was a quick run thing but difficult, tiresome, dangerous, full of fight, and no pause. Most Iraqis were full of fight and the Iraqis did try their best to defend and even attack. Found that tank battle that my Father participated in has a name, Madina Ridge.

I was in the Gulf War with the Big Red One. I keep a calendar diary while I was there and everything mentioned in the book was right on time and accurate. I learned a lot about what was going outside of my area while I was there. Not having Internet back then kept information flow pretty slow. A great read.

Cost too much but I got it for my daughter to know what daddy's war was all about. Serious inaccuracy on a specific incident that I was involved in, but it is understandable because the commanders didnt want the true story that night. So what else was recorded wrong? Just a thought.

As a previous reviewer already mentioned, The Gulf War Chronicles isn't entirely an all-encompassing account of the 1991 Gulf War - with material mostly coming from U.S. sources and from the U.S. perspective - but it's probably the best book that attempts to be that at the moment. Although the author's intent was to make the book a "factual military history", I sensed pretty much right off the bat a skewing of facts to give readers an even more favorable impression of the U.S. effort. In the first chapter, the reason given for the first U.S. casualty of Desert Storm, LCDR Michael Speicher (who I admire as a hero), was one of several things that hinted to me that this might be a big U.S. Military propaganda piece.The book makes the claim that the aircraft he was in was downed by a surface to air missile when almost all real evidence that exists - the wreckage that was found, accounts from members in his flight, and an account from the intel officer charged with determining the cause for the downed aircraft - has indicated that LCDR Speicher's plane was shot down by another aircraft. I got the feeling the account given in the book was an attempt to perpetuate the idea of U.S. invisibility in air combat, which made me wonder if I was going to get a lot more propaganda than a pure and balanced history of the war. Gladly, I didn't get that feeling as much as I thought would happen as I continued to read through.Overall, it's a great overview and military account of Operation Desert Storm, especially from the Coalition perspective. I purchased this book, however, thinking it was a completely comprehensive and balanced analysis of the war which is why it didn't quite fit the bill for me.

It was hard to put this book down. I did, however find some of the description of troop movements a little confusing and I did not think the diagrams were very helpful.