bridges do not have enormously strong abutments…… and we sent them floating rapidly down river towards the Persian Gulf (3).
Counter-air As the time for our land forces to move came closer, we were switched to attacking runways, taxiways and ammunition storage to prevent the Iraqi Air Force from getting airborne and intervening against our land forces attack; this was a much more difficult task than it seemed; the Iraqi airfields were vast.
We were also tasked with attacking their 
Hardened Aircraft Shelters, against which our LGBs again proved highly effective, as shown in this photograph (taken after the ceasefire) (4). The Iraqis were tried to decoy us away from our assigned HAS targets by painting large black circles on intact shelters to try to fool us into believing that they had already been hit by someone else. It worked on some occasions.
With no enemy fighter threat, and the proven superiority of our fighter escorts, we were able to dispense with our Sidewinder missiles and instead carry two LGBs on each Buccaneer. During 40 degree dive-bombing there were instances of DNCO due to some of the Navs, mainly the youngsters, inadvertently hitting the park (???) button whilst tracking under a 4G recovery from the dive, hardly surprising really, but then the bombs went unguided. Although most of out tasking was taxiways and runways we did catch 2 transport aircraft in the open at Shayka Mazar airfield on the 27th of February. They may have been the only two “kills” recorded by the RAF in the conflict, but being on the ground I suspect they did not satisfy the definition of “kills“. The ceasefire was announced the next day.
Actually we were being more effective than we knew. The Iraqis were using fibre optic cables to communicate with their troops in Kuwait and these crossed the rivers on the bridges. So we cut not only the supply routes, but also the
communication links: 2 for the price of 1!
The Iraqis tried to reinstate their supply routes by deploying pontoon bridges However, pontoon
