Early 1945, Southport, Queensland. Australian engineers wheel a slow, squat infantry tank into position facing a Japanese style bunker built from coconut palm logs, packed earth, and corrugated metal. Bolted to the rear hull, where the auxiliary fuel tank used to sit, is a steel cradle holding seven stubby mortar tubes pointed at the sky.
The weapon looks wrong. It looks like someone raided a Royal Navy destroyer and welded the anti-submarine gear onto a tank. That is exactly what happened. The crew buttons up. The commander flips a switch inside the turret. Three bombs arc across 200 yd and slam into the bunker. The first strips the earth. The second blows the logs apart.
The third exposes the interior. In under 5 seconds, a fortification that had resisted artillery, air bombardment, and direct tank fire simply ceases to exist. This is the Matilda Hedgehog, a British-designed tank carrying a British-invented anti-submarine weapon adapted by Australian ingenuity to solve the deadliest problem in the Pacific War.
It worked and it never fired a single shot in combat. To understand why Australian engineers bolted submarine-killing mortars onto a tank, you need to understand what they were up against. Starting in 1942, Allied forces fighting through New Guinea encountered Japanese defensive positions that broke every weapon in their inventory. Japanese bunkers in the Pacific were not simple foxholes.
They were engineering nightmares. Walls consisted of interlocked coconut palm logs, typically two logs thick. Roofs used three layers of logs topped with timber or sheet metal. Then buried under 18 in of packed earth. The spongy coconut wood absorbed explosive energy with horrifying efficiency. Shells that would shatter concrete simply embedded themselves in the logs and detonated harmlessly.
Each bunker sat within the interlocking field of fire of its neighbors, creating kill zones connected by communication trenches. Rapid jungle regrowth made them nearly invisible within days of construction. At Buna Gona, from November 1942 through January 1943, these fortifications bled Allied forces white.
Machine gun carriers sent in frontal assaults were all disabled with six Australian crew killed. Four tanks were knocked out in rapid succession by a single concealed Japanese 75-mm anti-aircraft gun repositioned for ground defense. On another approach, three tanks were destroyed within 60 yd on a narrow jungle track. Artillery support was pitiful.
For one attack at Gona, only 250 rounds were allocated. For another, just 40. Testing at the School of Armor at Puckapunyal in early 1943 confirmed what combat had already proven. The 2-pounder tank gun and the American 37-mm were useless against log bunkers with either armor-piercing or high explosive ammunition. The 25-pounder field gun, the standard Australian artillery piece, was judged beyond the scope of the bunker destruction mission.
Air bombardment forced ground troops to withdraw to safe distances, giving Japanese defenders time to recover and reman their positions before infantry could close. The gap was lethal. No weapon could reliably destroy a Japanese bunker from a safe distance while keeping crews under armor protection. Into this gap stepped Brigadier Denzel MacArthur Onslow, commander of the Australian 4th Armored Brigade Group.
In early 1944, he issued requirements for specialized armored vehicles for Pacific operations, including one capable of completely destroying a Japanese bunker. His engineers identified an unlikely candidate, the Hedgehog anti-submarine spigot mortar, a British invention already proven devastating against U-boats in the Atlantic.
Through a 65-lb contact-fused bomb containing 30 to 35 lb of high explosive, that was roughly 30 times the explosive payload of a 2-pounder shell. The question was whether it could work on land. Fired from a moving tank, the base vehicle was the Matilda 2 infantry tank, a British design that had already proven itself the toughest machine in the Pacific theater.
27 long tons, 78 mm of frontal armor, 75 mm all around the turret, Japanese anti-tank weapons could not penetrate it at any range. Twin Leyland six-cylinder diesel engines producing 190 brake horsepower combined, the trade-off was speed, 15 mph on roads, 6 mph cross-country. But in the jungle, where engagements happened at close range and armor mattered more than speed, the Matilda was ideal.
The Fourth Armored Brigade Group Workshop built the first functioning mock-up by August 1944. The concept was elegant, seven spigot mortar tubes mounted on a transverse steel shaft between rotary bearings bolted to short girders welded to the rear track guards. The entire assembly sat inside a protective box of 11 mm Australian bulletproof plate with angled sides and mesh anti-bomb screens over the projector and engine deck.
Firing was electrical, controlled by a switchboard inside the turret. The crew could fire bombs individually or launch a salvo of six from the 12:00 position. The seventh tube at center position required traversing the turret to 1:00 to clear the radio antenna from the bomb’s flight path. Safety interlocks prevented firing when the turret blocked the projectile or when spigot elevation exceeded 75°.
Elevation was controlled by a hydraulic ram adapted from the Logan traversing mechanism used in M3 medium tank turrets operated by a hand pump. The critical engineering challenge was the fuse. The original naval Hedgehog contact fuse was designed to arm underwater and survive high-speed water entry. Completely useless against a land target.
Australian engineers replaced it with the number 152 direct action fuse from the 3-in mortar fitted with an adapter for immediate contact detonation against hard surfaces. According to trial reports from Southport in May 1945, a full salvo cleared jungle foliage in a strip of 135 by 27 yd and swept anti-personnel mines from a corridor 72 yd long by 6 yd wide.
The operational range confirmed by Major Alan Milner’s fixed coincidence rangefinder developed at 200 yards placed crews behind full armor protection at a distance no flamethrower tank could match. The weapon’s standard 2-pounder gun and coaxial machine gun remained fully functional. Australian provisional doctrine called the Hedgehog arrangement extra armament something for nothing.
The engineering firm A&P Ushinsky of Coorparoo, Queensland handled fabrication and fitting of six production vehicles throughout 1945. Tank serial numbers were 82136, 88344, 35307, 10194, 6908, and 35357. Now, before we get into how this weapon actually performed in testing, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British and Commonwealth engineering, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, back to the Hedgehog. The trials revealed both promise and problems. Against the test bunker, three hits achieved complete destruction, but the bombs wobbled in flight due to their blunt nose profile and cylindrical tail vanes, degrading accuracy at range. The blast effect was described as impressive, but fragmentation was judged unsatisfactory beyond 10 yards.
According to survivability testing against small arms fire, rifle grenades, 20-mm armor-piercing rounds, 37-mm armor-piercing rounds, 75-mm high explosive shells, and simulated Type 99 magnetic mines, the armored projector proved immune to small arms when closed, even when a full bomb rack was deliberately detonated, blast pressure readings indicated greater than 50% crew survival probability.
The fundamental limitation was ammunition, seven bombs, no field reload capability. Once expended, the Matilda Hedgehog reverted to a standard gun tank. To appreciate what the Hedgehog offered, consider the alternatives. American flamethrower Shermans were consistently rated the most effective bunker weapon in the Pacific.
Marines at Iwo Jima described flame tanks as the best weapon they had and the one weapon that forced Japanese defenders to abandon their positions. But flamethrower tanks required dangerously close approach between 87 and 150 yards and their exposed fuel systems created catastrophic vulnerability. Man-portable flamethrower operators suffered casualty rates as high as 92%.
The Churchill armored vehicle Royal Engineers used extensively from D-Day onward in Europe fired a 40-lb demolition charge from its 290-mm petard spigot mortar at an effective range of just 80 yards. Reloading required the co-driver to open a sliding hatch and manually reload the barrel while exposed to enemy fire. The Churchill traded its main gun entirely for the petard mortar.
The Australian Matilda Frog flamethrower tank, which actually saw combat at Balikpapan in July 1945, carried 242 gallons of flame fuel but operated at only 80 to 90 yards and replaced its main gun with the flame projector. The Hedgehog offered greater standoff range than any of these weapons, up to 245 lbs of high explosive in a full salvo, and retention of all standard armament.
No other weapon in the Pacific combined that payload, that range, and that crew protection. But the Hedgehog lost its race against time. By July 1945, only three of the six production tanks had been delivered. Six additional M3 medium tanks were being fitted with Hedgehog equipment but were never completed.
Some published sources claim six tanks were sent for field trials. According to archival research by Thomas Anderson for Tank Encyclopedia, drawing on Australian War Memorial records and National Archives of Australia files, all six vehicles were held at Southport, Queensland in September 1945. They never left the Australian mainland.
When Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, the Matilda Hedgehog became a weapon without a war. Australian War Memorial photograph 124796, dated January 16, 1946, shows troopers Hoskin, Lear, and Elton of the 2/4 Armoured Regiment sitting on the cupola of Matilda Hedgehog tank number 10194 at Wallgrove, Sydney.
Three young men atop a weapon that arrived too late for the war they trained to fight. While the Hedgehog never saw combat, Australian Matilda crews in the Pacific left vivid records of what these tanks endured. At Slater’s Knoll on Bougainville in March through April 1945, B Squadron of the 2/4 Armoured Regiment arrived to support the 25th Battalion surrounded by approximately 3,300 Japanese troops.
The tanks turned the battle. On Tarakan in May 1945, a Matilda was hurled 18 ft into the air by a Japanese improvised anti-tank mine. The crew suffered only minor injuries. At Balikpapan in July 1945, the largest Australian armored deployment of the war, three Matildas were destroyed by a Japanese 120-mm naval gun.
At Munga Airfield, Japanese forces found the Matilda’s frontal armor essentially impervious to their standard weapons. They responded with magnetic mines, adhesive demolition charges, buried explosive caches, and infantry suicide attacks. The Matilda Hedgehog left no direct descendants. Its concept died with the war, but the broader lineage of armored demolition vehicles thrived through the post-war Churchill armored vehicle.
Royal engineers rearmed with a 165-mm demolition gun. The Centurion variant that served through Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and modern successors operating today. One vehicle survived. Tank number 35357, call sign Bullpup, sits at the Royal Australian Armoured Corps Memorial and Army Tank Museum at Puckapunyal, Victoria. It stands alongside a Matilda Frog and a Matilda Dozer, relics of a remarkable family of Australian Matilda variants developed under MacArthur Onslow’s vision of purpose-built jungle warfare armor. Early 1945, Southport,
Queensland. Seven stubby tubes bolted to the back of an infantry tank, a weapon designed to kill submarines repurposed to kill bunkers. British technology, Australian adaptation, Commonwealth ingenuity under pressure. The trials proved it worked. The bombs destroyed the target, the armor protected the crew, the engineering was sound, the calendar was not.
The Matilda Hedgehog stands as one of World War II’s most compelling weapons that never fought. It solved a real and deadly problem, too late for the men who needed it most. British engineering was not luck, it was innovation under pressure, producing weapons that worked when they were tested. The tragedy of the Hedgehog is that it never got the chance to work when it mattered.
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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