Desert Storm Unit Histories
Official Histories
What follows are a series of links that will take you to locations where the official histories reside. There are several repositories of Division history for Desert Shield/Storm.
First, there is the United States Army Center of Military History. The first “official” history of the VII Corps war effort is due out shortly from the Center.
Second, there is the “official” 3AD After Action Report, along with all the other VII Corps AAR materiel, on file at the Command and General Staff College Library at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Unfortunately, none of this materiel is available online. It would take a major effort to upload, convert to readable files, scan all the maps, overlays, and assorted other materiel and perhaps some day that will be done.
Third, the United States Army War College Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania has some holdings on which little work has been done.
Fourth, there are literally hundreds of web sites that have parts and parcels of individual and unit stories. Those, along with the several tens of locations where veterans or units have placed their memorabilia such as other unit museums, branch museums, and the like constitute another huge source of materiel that needs to be coordinated and catalogued. Please take the time to thoroughly visit these sites for more than just 3AD history. You will be pleasantly surprised at what they contain. Many of these sites can be found on the Links Page of this website.
Lastly, many units deployed during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm produced unit historical summaries, combat narratives, and after action reports. We have collected these for many of the units in 1st Brigade, and also have some from elsewhere in the division. In most cases, these summaries are in poor hardcopy form, but over time we will attempt to convert them to HTML web pages. For the time being, most will be the Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (*.pdf) because of its inherent ability to compress files and be access over multiple platforms without the time involved in converting image to editable text. Keep in mind that most of these are fairly large files, and make take some time to download. See below for the summaries currently available in electronic format.
An important note: these historical summaries were generally written within days or weeks of the actual events. As such, they were a very fresh account of events. The downside of this is that these accounts sometimes lack the objectivity that comes from more impartial third party evaluation and research into the same events as they were seen by other units and soldiers. In short, what you will read here is close but not necessarily completely accurate.
- 5th Battalion, 5th Cavalry – courtesy of the author Steven G. “Greg” Wyman
- 12th Engineer Battalion (including TF 33 Engineers in support of 3d BDE and some info on 23d Engineer Support to 2d BDE) – courtesy of the author, (then) Captain Joe Rasmus.
- 2d Battalion, 3d Field Artillery – this is an edited version of the original document. The editing takes the form of correcting spelling errors and some grammar errors. The content remains essentially unchanged. Notes have been added to explain some abbreviations, acronyms, etc. The photos are also an addition, and do not appear in the original document. To view the document as it appeared when written, we will eventually have an image of the original document available for download as an Acrobat *.pdf file.
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5th Battalion, 5th Cavalry
(PDF - 97 KB)
12th Engineer Battalion (PDF - 216 KB)
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