April 2022, somewhere in eastern Ukraine, a howitzer crew finishes a fire mission, then does something no Soviet era gun in the country could do. The crew folds in the trails, presses a switch, and the howitzer drives itself out of the firing position under its own power. No tractor, no prime mover, just a flat four Volkswagen engine in the carriage, pushing 9 tons of artillery into the treeine before the counter battery rounds arrive.
That gun was designed 45 years earlier to kill Soviet tanks on the North German plane. Britain led the program. West Germany and Italy built the components. The Royal Artillery accepted it into service in 1979. Then Britain sold every single one of them. Today, three nations have dug into their storage depots and pushed this gun back into combat against the army it was originally built to stop.
None of them are using it the way the Cold War planners imagined. All of them are using it anyway. This is the story of the FH70, a weapon designed under British leadership, abandoned by the British army, and now killing Russian armor through someone else’s hands. By the early 1960s, NATO’s medium artillery was a museum collection still in uniform.
The American M114 had entered service in 1942. The British 5.5 in medium gun had also entered service in 1942. Both were nearly 20 years old when the Alliance began looking at what would come next. The problem was straightforward. Soviet armored doctrine assumed mass. Hundreds of tanks moving through the ful gap.
Thousands of vehicles pushing across the north German plane. NATO needed a howitzer that could break up that mass at long range. Fire fast enough to matter and survive the counter battery duel that would follow every shoot. The existing guns failed on all three counts. Range was limited to roughly 15 km.
rate of fire was slow and the guns sat exposed in their positions, dependent on prime movers to relocate after every mission. In 1963, NATO codified the requirement. Basic military requirement 39 called for a new 155 mm close support gun, range 24 km with standard ammunition, roughly 30 km with rocket assisted projectiles, a burst rate of three rounds in under 15 seconds, and one feature no other gun in the Alliance possessed, a detachable auxiliary power unit that would let the gun reposition without waiting for a truck. The United States looked at the
requirement and decided to build alone. Rock Island Arsenal began work on what would become the M198. The Americans wanted lighter weight and helicopter portability. They were not interested in a self-propelling power unit on a towed gun. They left the program. Britain, West Germany, and Italy did not.
They saw something different in the requirement. A chance to build a single European artillery piece that all three armies could share. A weapon that would replace World War II era guns across the Alliance. a program that would keep European ordinance design alive against American competition. In 1968, Britain and West Germany signed the founding memorandum of understanding.
Italy joined the program in 1970. The three nations divided the engineering work according to industrial strength. Britain took the lead. Vicers Limited became the coordinating design authority for the entire program. Not a partner, not a contributor. the lead. According to the official program workshare documents preserved in Royal Ordinance Archives, Vicers controlled the carriage, the traversing gear, and the integration of every component built in Germany and Italy.
The British company effectively ran the gun. Underneath Vicers, the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment took responsibility for the most important piece of the entire weapon, the shell. The L15 high explosive projectile was a British design. According to Royal Ordinance specifications, the L15 weighs 43.5 kg and contains 11.
3 kg of high explosive filler. Standard reference sources note this remains the largest high explosive load ever packed into a conventional 155 mm shell. The gun could throw existing NATO ammunition, but the L15 was its purpose-built round, and it hit harder than anything in its class. Germany’s Rhin Metal took the barrel in the breach.
The 39 caliber monolock tube measured just over 6 m. The semi-automatic vertical sliding block brereech held a 12 primer magazine, allowing rapid loading without manually inserting a primer between each round. Rin metal also built the Volkswagen powered auxiliary power unit that would define the gun’s reputation. Italy’s Otto Malara built the cradle, the recoil system, and the elevating gear.
The Italian engineering allowed elevation from -5° to + 70° with 56° of traverse to each side. The specifications cross referenced across Jane’s publications, Royal Ordinance trial data, and manufacturer documents tell the story of what the three nations achieved together. Maximum range with the British L15 shell reached 24.7 km.
With rocket assisted projectiles, the gun reached approximately 30 km. Muzzle velocity at full charge hit 827 m/s. The burst rate achieved three rounds in roughly 13 seconds. Sustained fire ran at two rounds per minute. The gun weighed approximately 9.3 tons in firing position. It needed a crew of eight, reducible to four through British innovations, including one man laying and a flick ramming loading system.
But the feature that made the FH70 unlike any other towed howitzer in NATO was sitting between the trails. The auxiliary power unit was a flat 4 Volkswagen engine, approximately 1.8 L, driving a hydraulic pump and the main wheels. With it, the gun could move itself at 16 km/h, climb a 34% gradient, and reach firing positions no 6×6 tractor could pull it into.
The Royal Artillery called it the only toad howitzer in the world with its own engine. That phrase would follow the gun for the next four decades, and Ukrainian gunners would repeat it word for word in 2022. Britain also pioneered the logistics around the gun. The unit load container carried 17 complete rounds with fuses already fitted at the depot.
For 155 mm artillery in the 1970s, this was new. It cut resupply times dramatically and shaped how NATO would handle artillery ammunition for the next 30 years. The first British guns arrived in 1978. The FH70 entered Royal Artillery Service in December 1979 and reached full operational status in 1980. First regiment Royal Horse Artillery ran the troop trials and became the first unit to deploy the gun in support of 24th Airportable Brigade.
Total production drawn from Royal Ordinance and Jane’s records reached approximately 1,07 guns built across all variants. The United Kingdom received 67. West Germany received 150. Italy received approximately 162. Saudi Arabia bought 72. Oman, Malaysia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Lebanon, and Estonia all joined the customer list.
The largest single operator turned out to be Japan, which licensed built approximately 480 guns at Japan Steel Works. The 39 caliber ordinance from the FH70 would later form the basis of Japan’s type 99 self-propelled howitzer, a weapon built by three European nations, had become the standard medium gun across four continents.
Quick moment here. If you’re finding this interesting, a like on this video genuinely helps the channel reach more people who care about British engineering history. Now, back to what happened when the gun finally met its enemy. The first major combat use of the British FH70 came in 1991 during Operation Granby. The British contribution to the Gulf War.
Royal artillery regiments deployed the gun in the Western Desert against Iraqi positions. Performance matched the trials data. The guns shot, moved under their own power to alternate positions, and shot again with crews praising the auxiliary power unit for the first time in a real shooting war. Then Britain replaced it.
The AS90 self-propelled gun entered service from 1993. Built by VEL, the AS90 carried the same 39 caliber ordinance pattern that had served on the FH70, and it fired the same L15 family of shells. The British Army was not abandoning the engineering. It was placing the engineering on tracks. By 1999, the territorial army’s last FH70 regiment stood down.
Around 2003, Britain sold its remaining fleet. 15 guns went to Malaysia. 15 went to Oman. The rest scattered to museums and private collectors. The nation that had led the design, built the carriage, and developed the shell no longer operated a single example of its own howitzer. West Germany retired its guns by 2002, switching entirely to the self-propelled PZH2000.
Italy held on to roughly 160 examples, refurbishing them under contracts with Aerys and Leonardo as recently as January 2024. Then came February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukrainian artillery was almost entirely Soviet pattern. 122mm D30 guns, 152mm D20 howitzers and two S65 MRB systems. All of it depended on Russian and ex-s Soviet ammunition stockpiles that Ukraine could not replace.
Ukraine needed NATO standard 155 mm artillery and it needed it immediately. Italy responded first. According to La Republica reporting from May 13, 2022, Rome approved FH70 deliveries from its operational reserve. By late May, the guns were firing in combat, identifiable in Ukrainian footage by their Avico Astrotractor vehicles.
Italy never disclosed the exact number transferred, though estimates place it in the dozens. Estonia followed in January 2023. Estonian ambassador to Ukraine, Kaimokusk, announced on January 23, 2023 that Estonia would donate its entire 155 millimeter artillery park, 24 FH70 Howitzers, 36 D30 guns. As part of a package worth approximately 113 million, Kusk stated, according to Estonian government records, that the goal was to remove excuses for other nations to hold back.
Ukrainian crews started using the guns within days of arrival. The 44th Separate Artillery Brigade and the Hetman Danilo Apostal Artillery Brigade took the early deliveries. A Ukrainian gunner told Radio Liberty in October 2022 in a quote later carried by Militani that accuracy was determined by the first projectile landing within 50 to 60 m of the target and that the second projectile could hit the target directly.
A Ukrainian commander stated that the FH70 could destroy a target in two or three rounds where a D20 needed 10 or more. In July 2023, according to technology.org reporting, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hannah Malia said the gun had helped stop a column of 17 Russian tanks attempting to break through the front line in a single engagement.
The crews praised the auxiliary power unit most of all. One gunner described how the personnel barely strained because almost everything in the howitzer was hydraulic. The gun could fire a mission, withdraw under its own power, and reach concealment before the Russian counter response landed. The gun has paid a price for that work.
Russian Lancet loitering munitions have struck FH70 positions since late 2022, including verified strikes during the 2023 counteroffensive when guns were caught in treeine firing positions. The howitzer’s weight, approximately 9.3 tons, makes it slower to displace than the 4.2 2 ton American M777 howitzer that Ukraine also operates.
The Royal Ordinance L15 shell designed in the 1970s predates the precisiong guided artillery rounds that now dominate top tier NATO infantries, but the gun is still firing, still accurate. Still preferred by its crews over the Soviet patent alternatives that Ukraine inherited. The comparison with the American M198 tells the strategic story.
The M198 is lighter, around 7.3 tons, and reaches similar range, but it carries no auxiliary power unit, requires a 9-man crew, and cannot move itself off a fire mission. The trational engineering choice that Washington dismissed in the 1960s is now the feature keeping Ukrainian gun crews alive.
The verdict is harder to ignore the longer the war runs. Britain led the design of a 155 mm howitzer in the late 1960s to stop Soviet tanks attacking NATO positions in central Europe. 45 years later, that gun built by the triational program Britain coordinated, firing the shell Britain designed is killing Russian tanks attacking a European nation that was not even part of NATO when the program began.
The Royal Artillery no longer operates the FH70. The Bundesv retired it years ago and now ships PZH2000 systems east instead. Italy keeps refurbishing its fleet and keeps sending what it can. Estonia gave its share away in a single announcement. Japan still operates more of them than anyone, untouched by the war, but watching every afteraction report and Ukraine fires every round it can get.
The Cold War gun returned to do exactly what its British designers built it to do. The flag on the carriage is different. The target is the
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.
