June 1943, a proving ground somewhere in southern England. British engineers bolted a spinning drum carrying 43 heavy chains to the front of a Sherman tank, started the engine, and drove it into a live minefield. The chains whipped the earth at 142 revolutions per minute. Each steel ball struck the ground with over 150 kg of force.
Mines detonated in sequence, hurling geysers of dirt and shrapnel skyward. The tank kept moving. When it reached the far side, a path 10 ft wide beaten clean through ground that would have killed every man who tried to cross it on foot. Everyone who watched the demonstration thought the same thing. It looked completely absurd.
It also worked. The Sherman Crab would become the most effective mechanical mine clearing device of World War II. And its absence on one particular beach would become one of the war’s most costly lessons. To understand why the Crab mattered, consider what it was built to defeat. By May 1944, Germany had laid 6,508,330 mines across the western defenses alone.
That figure had quadrupled in just 7 months, driven by Field Marshal Rommel’s obsession with fortifying the Atlantic Wall. Rommel wanted between 50 and 100 million mines as his first line of defense. At El Alamein 2 years earlier, mine density had reached nearly 7,000 anti-tank mines per kilometer in what the Germans called their devil’s gardens.
The mines themselves came in devastating variety. The Teller mine packed 5 and 1/2 kg of TNT, enough to rip the tracks off any tank. The S-mine, which Allied soldiers called the bouncing Betty, was arguably the most feared anti-personnel weapon of the entire war. When triggered, a propellant charge launched it 1 m into the air before detonating 360 steel balls across a lethal radius of 65 ft.
Germany produced over 1.93 million of them. The Schuhmine 42 was a simple wooden box containing 200 g of explosive, cheap to build and virtually invisible to metal mine detectors. The Glasmine 43 used a glass body for the same reason. Perhaps most ingeniously, the Topfmine was constructed from compressed wood pulp and painted with a mildly radioactive substance called tan sand, allowing German Geiger counter detectors to locate their own mines while Allied equipment found nothing.
This was only discovered after the war. Before the flail, clearing a minefield meant soldiers crawling on their hands and knees, prodding the earth with bayonets angled at 30°. Feeling for resistance every few centimeters, the Polish mine detector invented by Lieutenant Józef Kosacki, who donated the patent for free and received only a thank you letter from King George VI, roughly doubled clearance speed, but that still meant about 200 square meters per hour.
And it could not detect wooden or glass-cased mines at all. Across the entire war, landmines killed an estimated 375,000 soldiers and caused over 20% of all American tank losses in Europe. The mine flail concept emerged from three independent sources that converged. The British Mechanisation Board first proposed the idea in 1939, attaching weights on spring steel strips to a spinning drum carried ahead of a tank.
Chains quickly proved superior to strips. Independently in Pretoria in 1941, Captain Abraham du Toit, a South African motor engineer serving as a sergeant in the artillery, built a test rig on a truck and demonstrated it on film. General Auchinleck saw the footage and dispatched du Toit to England under strict secrecy.
Meanwhile in North Africa, Captain Norman Berry conducted separate flail experiments along the Gazala Line in the spring of 1942. That same summer, Lieutenant Colonel Mill Coleman independently conceived the idea after watching wire tangled in a vehicle’s sprocket strike the ground with each rotation. A prototype nicknamed the Durban Mark I was assembled in 24 hours, completed by the 6th of August 1942.
Five weeks later, Generals Alexander, Montgomery, and Morshead watched a demonstration. A brigadier named Ray noted the device looked like a scorpion, and the name stuck. Montgomery demanded 25 units for his coming offensive. According to accounts from those present, his exact words were, “Do not bellyache. Order two dozen.
” The resulting Matilda Scorpion carried 24 flails driven by an external 105 horsepower Ford V8 engine bolted to the tank’s right side. 25 were rushed into service for El Alamein in October 1942. They proved the concept but exposed crippling flaws. The external engine broke down constantly. Dust clouds choked air filters and blinded drivers, forcing crews to wear gas masks.
The vehicles were too wide for Bailey bridges, and the exposed auxiliary engine operator had no protection whatsoever. One unexpected benefit did emerge, however. According to veteran accounts, the noise and terrifying appearance of the flails caused several Axis units to surrender without resistance. The breakthrough came when engineers at AEC Limited realized the M4A4 Sherman’s Chrysler multibank engine, producing roughly 425 horsepower, could power both the tank and the flail through a single power take-off from the main transmission.
This eliminated the external engine entirely. A drive shaft ran down the right side of the hull, and an additional gearbox maintained the correct rotation speed regardless of how fast the tank was moving. The first Sherman Crab prototype completed trials in September 1943. It solved every major scorpion problem.
No external engine. It retained its turret and 75 mm gun for conventional combat. Wire cutters on the drum ends prevented chain tangling, and sophisticated lane marking systems, including bins of powdered chalk, smoke grenade dispensers, and illuminated poles fired into the ground, ensured infantry could follow the cleared path even in darkness.
The Crab could not fire its gun while flailing because the turret had to face rearward to clear the boom arms, and the dust cloud eliminated all visibility. But the moment flailing stopped, it fought as a standard Sherman. Earlier designs had the gun removed entirely. In 1948, du Toit received £13,000 from the Royal Commission on awards to inventors for his foundational work on the concept.
Now, before we get into the Crab’s combat record, if you are finding this deep dive into British engineering interesting, consider subscribing. It takes a second and helps the channel grow. Right, back to D-Day. Approximately 70 Sherman Crabs were prepared for the Normandy assault, operated by three regiments of 30th Armoured Brigade within the 79th Armoured Division.
The Westminster Dragoons landed on Gold Beach. The 22nd Dragoons went to Sword and Juno. The 1st Lothians and Border Horse came ashore as reinforcements on D+11. Crabs were among the very first vehicles to touch the beach on all three British and Canadian sectors, landing between 0725 and 0750 on the 6th of June 1944. The most vivid surviving account comes from Private Martin Iseg of the German 726th Infantry Regiment.
Defending La Rivière on Gold Beach, he described the drum revolving with chains crashing onto the earth with deafening noise, raising clouds of dust and soil. The pounding felt beneath their position. He recalled a Panzerfaust rocket fired at the spinning chains being knocked harmlessly into the air.
When a PAK gun struck one Crab’s drum, the cylinder separated from the vehicle while still spinning at full speed, careening through the dunes and scattering chain fragments. At that same position, Captain Roger Bell of the Westminster Dragoons deliberately placed his Crab in the line of fire of an 88 mm gun that had already knocked out two AVREs, engaging it with high explosive and armor-piercing shells until it fell silent.
His lane was the only successful gap on the left brigade’s front. Bell received the Military Cross from Montgomery personally. A post-action report noted that Crabs cleared more than 50% of the required beach exit lanes and used their main guns to considerable effect. The contrast with Omaha Beach became the Crab’s most powerful argument.
On the British and Canadian beaches, the full complement of specialist armor supported the landings. On Omaha, American forces had only DD tanks, most of which sank in rough seas, some bulldozers, and no specialist armor. Casualties at Omaha reached between 2,400 and 3,600. Gold Beach saw roughly 400. Juno and Sword each saw around 1,000 with comparable troop numbers.
General Bradley had requested 25 flail tanks after a February 1944 demonstration, but the Churchill-based vehicles would have required retraining and a separate logistics chain. Bradley later acknowledged that had the specialist vehicles been adapted to Sherman tanks earlier, his forces likely would have used them. Eisenhower’s post-war verdict was unequivocal.
He credited the novel mechanical contrivances with the comparatively light casualties on every beach except Omaha, adding that it was doubtful the assault forces could have established themselves without these weapons. Germany never fielded an effective equivalent. Their experimental Panther Dreh Flagel flail broke its own chains during its only demonstration in January 1945.
At Kursk, the 653rd Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion lost 37 of 49 Ferdinands to mines before 5 in the afternoon on the first day. The Americans experimented with over 15 designs but never officially adopted a mine flail during the war. The Soviets relied on PT-34 mine rollers and massive manual clearance by combat engineers. After Normandy, the three Crab regiments were parceled out across British, Canadian, and sometimes American divisions for every major operation.
During Operation Goodwood in July 1944, Crabs cleared British minefields ahead of the armored corridor from the Orne bridgehead. Operation Stonewall, the battle for Le Havre in September 1944 was catastrophic with 34 Crabs destroyed in a single engagement, the heaviest loss of the entire campaign. In the Netherlands, the Westminster Dragoons cleared minefields during the brutal fighting at Overloon and Venray.
Lieutenant Sam Hollands’ Crab, knocked out by a Panzerfaust at Broekhuizen, now sits in the Overloon War Museum. Operation Veritable, the assault through the Reichswald in February 1945, saw crabs create lanes through extensive German minefields for both the 153rd Brigade and the 5th Canadian Brigade in appalling conditions of mud, flooding, and determined resistance.
For the Rhine crossing the following month, most crabs had their flails removed and fought as conventional gun tanks in the final advance toward Hamburg. When it was proposed to convert all surviving crabs back to standard Shermans, crews bitterly resisted. They considered themselves a specialist elite. The conversion never happened.
None of this would have occurred without Major General Sir Percy Hobart, known as Hobo, one of the most brilliant and difficult officers in British military history. A Royal Engineers officer who earned a DSO and MC in the First World War, Hobart transferred to the Royal Tank Corps in 1923 and became one of the earliest advocates of independent armored warfare.
His published writings were followed so closely in Germany that Heinz Guderian paid from his own pocket to have every Hobart article translated. In Egypt, Hobart transformed a ragtag unit mocked as the mobile farce into the 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats. But his combative personality made powerful enemies.
In 1940, General Wavell dismissed him into retirement. Hobart joined the Local Defence Volunteers as a lance corporal assigned to defend Chippenham in the Cotswolds. Churchill intervened directly writing to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that the high commands of the army are not a club and that exceptionally able men must not be prevented from serving.
Recalled to duty, Hobart was given command of the 79th Armoured Division in March 1943 and assembled the remarkable family of specialist vehicles known as Hobart’s Funnies. By war’s end, his division fielded nearly 7,000 vehicles and 21,000 personnel. Approximately 689 Sherman Crabs were ordered for conversion with total production across all marks reaching roughly 1,000 units.
The Crab’s direct modern descendant is the Aardvark JSFU, developed from 1982 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Carrying 72 chains in a blast resistant cab, a single Aardvark cleared 308 mines in one day at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The principle remains identical to what those engineers demonstrated in 1943.
Armor protected chains beating the earth so that human beings do not have to. The Sherman Crab was loud. It was slow. It left its crew blind and unable to fire during the very act they were designed to perform. It threw up clouds of dust visible for miles. It looked, by any conventional standard, ridiculous.
But the soldiers who walked through the lanes it cleared are the ones who came home. That was not luck. That was British engineering solving a problem no one else could solve with 43 chains and the stubborn conviction that there had to be a better way than sending men to crawl through minefields on their hands and knees. There was, and it worked.
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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