Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War Paperback – Illustrated, October 19, 1994

I have the highest regard for Mr. Atkinson's scholarly approach to his topics. This is an in depth look at not only major and a few 'minor' (though not to those involved!) actions but what went on behind the curtain that we citizens never saw: Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf going full Patton/MacArthur on his underlings, weapons that were touted as one shot/one kill which failed perhaps 50% of the time to do the job, the internecine and ridiculous macho matches between the branches of our (the US) givernment, different armed forces, different generals, different countries.... This, the first of two wars to fight Saddam's military, touted at the time as the 4th largest mil in the world, has been largely forgotten except for those who carry it with them as surviving participants and those who lost loved ones. It is a worthy read.Two quibbles: the paperback's printing is not blurry but is not clear, looks cheap and makes reading a bit of a pain, and the photos look like someone photographed newspaper clippings and then printed them, lack of sharp focus. Buy the hardback which I assume has good paper and some care attended to it but I don't know. The paperback was 1/2 the price of the hardback btw which might explain some things.

This should be your book about the first Iraq war go to. The author is not only precise but also enlightens the reader on Military tactics, Iraquí History plus the American Military Psyche. Read it it will enlighten you as to what really happens and also see that kuwaití was not the innocent sheep that they claimed to be !!

The book was perfect - just what my son wanted for Christmas.

If you took a sight-seeing vacation via automobile, upon your return, I would love to have heard about the great things that you saw on your vacation. I would not love it if you would have, instead, popped the hood of your automobile and showed me every component of your car’s engine. If you videotaped your vacation, and had videotaped 120 hours of footage, I would like to see a 15-minute recap of the highlights, I would not like to have to sit through and watch all 120 hours of unedited footage.I use these analogies because while I was reading this book, I sometimes felt like I was watching 120 hours of video of someone showing me every component of a car engine. I felt like this book was simply too much, and was way overdone in terms of detail.This book is about the 1991 Gulf War. A war that lasted six weeks. Yet this book is 500 pages long. Think about that for a second – a 500-page book about a six-week war. I’m not sure anyone could do a good job giving such a drawn out narrative about such a brief moment of time, so safe to say, I would have enjoyed this book a lot better had it been carved in half. There’s just too much detail. Too many descriptions of military movements, weapon specifics, battle positions, and detailed meetings of Norman Schwarzkopf constantly berating his generals. I was just mainly bored. This book actually took me longer to read the book than the actual conflict lasted. I had to force myself to read ten pages every day just so I could get through with it.Then there’s the fact that most of this book focuses on the “here and now” and not enough on the causes of the war, and the backgrounds of the countries involved in the conflict. Some of this is here, but not enough. Had the author given us more background of the Middle East, and the turbulent histories, it would have made a much better book. Instead, it seems were transplanted immediately to the battlefield and we immediately start following all the tactical moves in precise detail without really knowing much about the “why”. This would have helped tremendously since most U.S. citizens had never even heard of Saddam Hussein until Kuwait was invaded.Then, this book was written very shortly after the conclusion of the war, so there really isn’t any opportunity to reflect back on the conflict, and see where and why things happened the way that they did, and what many of the post war effects actually were. This probably would have been a better book had it been written five or six years after the conclusion of the war.The author does give us some insights, however. He does talk in detail about the “goal” of the war – which was never to destroy Saddam Hussein and his evil regime, but to simply get them to withdraw from Kuwait. George Bush was very careful about minimizing U.S. casualties, and figured that ousting Hussein would be too costly, and wouldn’t be worth the battle. Plus, he earnestly believed that, after the war, Iraq would then dispose of their leader via a coup, and that would free the U.S. and its allies from having to do much of the bloody work. Of course, hindsight now tells us that such judgments were mistaken, but we don’t get to read too much of this here though because, again, this book was written so closely after the war ended.This book will tell you just about everything that happened during the war on the battlefield, so if that’s your thing, this book gives a great synopsis. I just wanted “more” of some things, and definitely “less” of others – such as all the meticulous detail.

Mr. Atkinson knows how to write an interesting and engaging story, and he does so pretty well in this book. Considering the broad subject and the length of the book it is a testament to the author's writing skills that the reader never gets bored or bogged down in unnecessary details. This is an interesting account of many facets of the Persian Gulf War (the first one), but by all means it is not the definitive nor the all-encompassing history of that war. The book mainly focus on the US side of the conflict, and particularly on the US Army and USAF contribution to the war. While there is a lot of evident research that went into this book, it still relies a lot on oral history.The strong points in the book are the engaging story telling, the looks behind the scenes of the preparation and war plans-making, the personal relations between the political and military leaders, and the accounts of most mayor US battles in the conflict. All of this is very skillfully webbed and presented to the reader in a very attractive format.Unfortunately, there is almost no mention, even less any meaningful recount of the contribution of the many other partners in the Coalition, with basically only the UK, France and the Arab Ground Forces being briefly mentioned. And the naval aspect of the war gets a very superficial treatment, besides a few rather anecdotal stories. The pictures are really not up to par with the text, and in some instances the date of the writing (just one year after the war finished in 1992-1993) clearly shines through as a lot of new and declassified information has since become available that is not included in the book (hint to the author and editor, an updated edition is needed!). Finally, being based a lot on oral history, there is an evident lack of own analysis and opinion.However, overall these negative points are minor when compared with the overall very positive reading experience. Simply don't expect to be presented with the final historical and complete analysis of the First Persian Gulf War. If you are looking for a interesting and engaging book (if there is such thing when dealing with war, death and destruction) about the US contribution in the Gulf War, this is it - recommended.

I bought this as a gift for my father as he really enjoyed the WW2 trilogy by the same author.He absolutely loved the book and took great pleasure in telling me how many pages he got through a day- he ended up having to limit himself so he didn’t finish it too quickly!

One of my favourite historians .Recently reread , well researched

Good

Atkinson's book is a well-researched piece of history written by a journalist. Atkinson is firstly a journalist, and writes as one. Like so many other books by journalists, its structure and pacing are uneven. Most of what we are expecting to see in the book is there, the choice of which information to tell was rightly done. Every paragraph taken separately is good.But my main issue is that the author will pass from one subject to another and have more flashbacks than an anime character. We can't focus properly on the narrative of the planning and beginning of Desert Storm because he will nearly always say ''oh and this guy, go back and tell his story'' and chop the pacing to talk about the history of a very important person, sometimes mid-book. So it is extremely hard to know what is the date, at what time does this happen, so it's hard to retain a structured picture of the war and it's planning.Some authors, like Ian W Toll in his Pacific War trilogy, succeeds well in stopping a narrative to go in a flashback. Rick Atkinson's book gives us good information, but put in a poorly done way, at least compared to most of the war history I read.