It’s July, 1942, and under cover of the dark desert sky, a column of 18 Jeeps winds through the treacherous North African landscape. Major David Stirling leads the British special forces on a mission to attack a critical German airfield, 230 miles northwest of Cairo, deep behind enemy lines. But even though Stirling has confidence in his team, he’s feeling anxious.
“Where’s the airfield? It should be right here”. Suddenly, the black of night is replaced by hundreds of bright lights. At first, Stirling thinks they’ve been spotted. But it’s only when the roar of an aircraft’s engines pierces the silence that he realizes what’s happening. One of the Luftwaffe planes is about to land at their target.
On Stirling’s left are SAS legends, Captain Paddy Mayne… “Aw, she’s a beautiful sight, sir.” and Leutenant Carol Mather. On his right a unit from the French SAS. The French leader aspirant Andre Zirnheld waits eagerly for Stirling’s command. “Time to go to work, boys.” The men take their positions on the guns.
On each jeep sits mounted twin Vickers K.303 machine guns, on front and back. Once the men signal they’re ready, Stirling starts the attack. “Who dares wins!” The engines roar to life, and the line of jeeps begin to move forward. They race over the desert sand, charging into battle. At around 800 meters from the airfield, the once messy fleet of jeeps forms into a neat line, with Stirling’s vehicle right in the middle, and Zirnheld and the others flanking either side.
Then, as one of the Commandos who was there, Stephen Hastings, said, there was: “First, one tentative burst, then the full-on chaos of 68 machine guns blasting away.” The power of the guns shake and rattle the jeeps as they spray the target randomly. The twin Vickers are now firing at 1,000 rounds per minute.
That’s 34,000 rounds of ammunition tearing across the illuminated runway every 60 seconds, tearing any aircraft they hit to pieces. From the Germans’ perspective, it’s just a wall of fire and noise, with red and white tracer bullets zipping towards them, tearing through anything they hit, while incendiary bullets light the planes on fire.
It’s a terrifying sight. The German Ju-52 that was coming in to land spots the tracer fire, but they’re already on their final approach and are forced to touch down. Right after they land, the German defenders cut the lights, plunging the airfield back into darkness. The attackers stop firing, but this is just the start of their plan.
Stirling pulls out a flare gun and shoots it into the sky. The flare arcs high, lighting up the desert in green. “Forward!” he calls as the jeeps rush onto the airfield. Stirling leads the charge, followed by Zirnheld, with their jeeps rolling onto the runway in a tight formation – two columns, each about 4.5 meters apart.
Stirling becomes the tip of a deadly arrowhead. They let loose their guns on the parked German planes. They blow Stuka dive bombers to pieces, and then turn their fire on the Bf 109 fighters. Nothing gets spared. Ju 88s, Bf 110s, Ju 52s – the pride of the Luftwaffe goes up in flames in the desert night. For the German troops it’s a total disaster.
They’re caught completely off guard and are in shock. Some of the men hide under the parked aircraft. It’s not a good decision. The crew of the recently landed Ju 52 scramble to switch off their cockpit lights and engines, trying to hide among the other planes. The jeeps crawl by at a slow 2.5 miles per hour, barely faster than a brisk walk.
They roll all the way down the runway without facing any resistance, leaving chaos behind them, and the Ju 52 and its crew are caught in the storm. The convoy hits the end of the runway and turns towards the taxiway where more parked aircraft are waiting. Stirling signals to stop and quickly checks that all his jeeps are in line.
Satisfied, he gives the go-ahead, and they continue their rampage of destruction down the taxiway. But that short break gives the German defenders a moment to regroup. A few Germans dash for a defensive position, grabbing a 20mm Breda anti-air gun and some portable mortars. One German soldier yells: “If we don’t stop them, all is lost!” They let loose a mortar.
Stirling hears a whistle overhead, and then the first mortar falls in the center of the formation, between the jeeps, almost taking out Zirnheld and the others. Then, the German anti-air guns and Italian Breda cannons begin to fire “wildly” at the British soldiers. Bullets whiz over the Commandos’ heads.
They duck as low as they can in the jeeps while the enemy barrage sweeps through their formation. A gunner, trooper John Robson, gets hit and slumps over his machine gun. They need to take out that Breda. Stirling shouts to his gunner, Sergeant Johnny Cooper “Get that gun!” As Johnny rounds on the Breda gun, one of its shells crashes through Stirling’s jeep missing his knees by inches.
Stirling’s jeep grinds to a halt. He shouts: “Why won’t it go!?” “We haven’t got an engine!” And another jeep pulls up for them. It’s Robson’s, and Stirling is met with the terrible sight of the young soldier lying on the back of his jeep. What little was left of his head is resting against his gun. “Go!’ Stirling’s new jeep rejoins the column, which is busy pummeling the enemy position.
Mortar rounds continue raining down, shaking the ground and sending shrapnel flying into the air. But the men of the SAS do not let up. Their fire rips through the enemy position. The Breda gunners and mortar crew are overwhelmed, and they fall one by one, with the survivors fleeing for their lives. When the column reaches the end of the taxiway, Stirling honks his horn and orders a complete stop.
The jeeps park around him, and he shouts for them to shut off their engines “Switch off!” so he can be heard. The airfield falls into ghostly silence, illuminated by the giant bonfire that used to be Luftwaffe squadrons. “Everyone okay?” “Oui.” “Yeah.” Stirling is relieved to find that Robson is their only casualty.
“How much ammo have you got left?” “Half drum.” “One drum.” “Two drums” They’ve still got plenty of ammo left. No point in leaving things half-done. “All right, we’ll have one more go over this side of the dispersal area, then beat it. and watch out for those bloody Breda guns.” The engines roar back to life, and they head toward the edge of the airfield.
They drive past the wreckage, with shredded and burning planes everywhere. Among the debris, they spot a Bf 109 that’s still intact, and they open fire, turning it into a pile of metal scrap. Stirling raises his flare gun one more time and fires. This time, it’s a red flare and it signals their retreat.
They’re done… or so they think. But under the glow, legendary officer “Paddy” Mayne spots an untouched Ju 52 transport among the wrecks. Without warning, Paddy jumps out of his jeep, “Paddy!” grabs a bomb and places it on top of the transport’s wing before going back to his men. “Come on, let’s go!” The Ju 52 explodes into flames as the SAS men speed off into the night.
The Germans will send planes to look for them, but the men have got a plan. Their jeeps split into four groups. One group is headed by Lieutenant Carol Mather. They drive through the night and then, as dawn breaks, they hide their jeeps in thick bushes and decide to cook breakfast. Over the sizzle of sausages and the rumble of boiling water, they hear something.
“Aircraft!” A German dive bomber passes overhead. As it circles by, sweat drips from the men. With the sigh of relief they realize the Germans haven’t seen them. So, they carry on cooking their meal, when, suddenly, they spot another, and another. Mather whispers: “It’s like a swarm of angry bees.” and then shouts to his men: “Take cover!” All twelve men duck under the bushes and hide.
By then, the French group is dangerously out in the open. They manage to find some cover under a small ridge, but it’s not enough. And they too hear the roar of engines in the distance. Zirnheld begins to scan the sky, and his eyes lock on the incoming aircraft. “Don’t move!” They all freeze as four German Stukas head straight for them.
They’ve been spotted. “Take cover!” In a flash, bullets rain down upon their positions, and the soldiers are caught in a deadly storm of lead and sand. While this is happening, Stirling’s team is burying their fallen comrade, John Robson. They don’t see any German planes, so they use the moment of calm to give him a military-style funeral, marking off his grave with a makeshift cross made from cans.
But the quiet service is interrupted by the sound of an engine. They freeze and, looking up, lock eyes with another Stuka bomber. Thankfully, it doesn’t spot them and flies on. Back at the French camp, it looks like they might have survived the attack. Despite the noise and the chaos, everyone’s fine. Then, the Germans turn back.
The Stukas keep attacking for several minutes until they run out of ammo. As the planes fly away, the desert wind is the only sound remaining. That, and a slow, labored breathing. Second-in-command, Francois Martin, stumbles back up. It’s carnage. Two of their three jeeps are wrecked, and a man is lying on the ground.
It’s Zirnheld. He’s been hit in the stomach and the shoulder. They lift him to the remaining jeep and speed away. Night falls at last, and Mather’s group pushes on through the desert. His men are thirsty, sunburnt, and desperate. But they’re alive. But it doesn’t take them long to find the rendezvous point.
Soon after they’re joined by Paddy Mayne’s unit, who didn’t face much resistance. Stirling’s men are also one their way back, but for them, the terrain is proving just as tough an enemy as the Germans. One jeep loses a tire, and the men have to abandon it and jump into another. From now on, their progress will be painfully slow.
To make things worse, they can’t find any of their landmarks. They’re lost, and food, water, and fuel are running low. If they can’t find the rendezvous point soon, they may never leave the desert. They decide to take a chance and keep moving during the day, but find themselves completely lost. Stirling stares at the endless, unrecognizable desert and fights to push back any negative thoughts.
According to the navigator’s calculations, they’re heading in the right direction. They just have to keep going and hope he’s right. They move all day under the scorching sun, but still can’t find anything they recognize. Before long, they come across a steep escarpment. They’re stuck. The navigator hops out of his jeep and heads to the edge of the cliff to find a way down.
When he gets there, his eyes light up. At the bottom are British jeeps, parked at the rendezvous point. He runs back, waving his arms in the air. “We made it!” Stirling’s group finally reaches their hideout on July 29, two days after the raid. But it’s not a joyous occasion. As the French speed across the desert, Martin tries to give Zirnheld first aid.
But it’s no use. With every second that goes by, his skin gets paler, his breathing slower, and his heart races faster. By the time they spot the rendezvous point, all hope is lost. And Zirnheld knows it. He pulls Martin close and whispers his final words: “I am going to leave you. I am at peace. ” before breathing his last.
David Stirling would be awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Order of the British Empire for his outstanding service. And just a few months later, L Detachment would officially become known as the “Special Air Service”. Martin would find a poem by Zirnheld while going through his belongings. Now it’s kown as the “Paratrooper’s Prayer”, and it’s the official poem of the French airborne forces.
“Did you hear about the small tanks that took on German Panzers?” “Click here and watch the story of when Cockroaches Hunted Panzers”
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
