The 15th of February 1942, Singapore. The most powerful British fortress east of Suez, surrenders in less than a week of serious fighting. 85,000 soldiers, British, Indian, Australian, lay down their arms to a Japanese force less than half their size. The great guns of the naval base are pointed out to sea.
Nobody has thought to turn them around. The invasion that was never supposed to happen has already happened. And now there is nothing between the Japanese army and the continent of Australia. In Canra, Prime Minister John Cirten does not mince the words. The fall of Singapore, he tells The Nation over the radio, opens the battle for Australia.
He has already turned away from Britain in print, writing in the Melbourne Herald barely 6 weeks earlier, that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom. The Empire’s promise, the Singapore strategy, is rubble. Darwin is bombed.
4 days later, Japanese aircraft appear over broom. In the deep files of Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo, a naval proposal to invade the Australian continent is under active consideration. Australians do not know it will be rejected. They prepare for the worst. Here is the thing they do not know yet.
Or rather, the thing that makes this story extraordinary. Before Singapore has even fallen, before the bombs fall on Darwin, a small team of engineers in New South Wales is already building Australia’s first tank. Not importing one, not borrowing a design, building one from nothing in a country that has never made a tank in its history.
And the machine they will eventually produce, upged, re-engineed, renamed the Thunderbolt, will be the most capable cruiser tank in the Pacific Theater. It will never fire a single shot in anger. To understand why Australia built it, you need to understand the particular kind of loneliness that fell on the country. In the winter of 1940, Britain was fighting for its own life in the skies over Kent.
every tank rolling out of a British factory was desperately needed on home soil. In North Africa, in the Middle East, there were none to spare for a dominion 12,000 mi away. And yet, general staff planners in Melbourne could read a map. Japan was mobilizing. The Pacific was heating. If war came south, Australia would face it with a handful of obsolete Bren carriers, some light tanks, Mark 6, and whatever the Americans might eventually get around to sending. That was not a plan.
That was a prayer. On the 12th of June 1940, Prime Minister Robert Menses convened a meeting with the director general of munitions, Essen Lewis, and the chief of the general staff. The agenda was blunt. Australia needed to build its own tank. By November, the general staff had issued a formal specification. 16 to 20 tons, a 2 lb gun, 50 mm of armor, 30 mph, a range of 150 mi, crew of five.
They wanted deliveries to begin by July 1941 at 70 vehicles a week. It was a wildly optimistic timetable for a country with no tank industry, no tank designers, and no tankrade steel production to speak of. They said it anyway. The man brought in to make it real was a British officer on succtories where the new American M3 medium was being developed.
He arrived in December 1940 carrying notes. The engine and drivetrain logic of the M3 would underpin the lower hull. The upper hull and turret would be styled on the British Crusader. A French connection entered through Robert Perry, an engineer who had been working in Japan for the French government, fled the collapse of the Pacific situation and made his way to Australia, bringing with him an intimate knowledge of the Hotchkiss suspension system used on pre-war French tanks, which Watson’s team adapted and found much superior to
the American pattern they had originally planned. The result was the Sentinel Australian Cruiser Mark1, and the engineering inside it was unlike anything built before. Because Australian welding technology in 1941 could not reliably join the type of thick, high hardness armor plate the hull required, the designers cast the entire upper hole as a single piece.
The first tank in the world with a one piece cast hull, the turret was cast in one piece, too. The armor itself, designated a BP4, was a locally developed alloy, substituting zuconium for nickel because Australia had nickel in the ground, but not the infrastructure to refine it fast enough.
And for the engine, there was nothing suitable in the country at all. The preferred radial aircraft engines were spoken for by the Air Force. So, the engineers took three Cadillac V8 automobile engines and arranged them in a triangular configuration feeding a common gearbox. Three car engines bolted together in a clover leaf producing 330 horsepower. It worked.
If you find that channel bookmark useful and want to keep following stories like this one, there’s a subscribe button below this video. It takes 1 second and it genuinely helps us keep going. The first prototype rolled out of the New South Wales government railways workshops at Chalora in January 1942, the same month the Japanese were advancing down the Malay Peninsula.
The same month the last reinforcements were sailing into Singapore. It was given a name, Sentinel. 65 production vehicles followed, completed between the middle of 1942 and June of 43. They were used for evaluation and crew training on Australian soil. They never left, but even as the Sentinels were rolling out of Julora, the men designing them were already making them obsolete.
The two pounder gun the First Sentinel carried was, in the words of the Australian officers who evaluated it, a pop gun, a peashooter. It had been adequate in 1940 against the tanks it might have faced then. By 1942 in North Africa, British crews with two pounders were watching their rounds bounce off the frontal armor of Panzer 4s and Tiger.
The problem was universal. The Australians identified it immediately. They began looking for the largest gun they could fit inside the turret ring. The six pounder was unavailable. The 17 pounder, Britain’s best anti-tank gun, was barely in production, and none had reached Australia. What Australia did have in large numbers was the 25p pounder gun howitzer, the standard British and Commonwealth field artillery piece, firing an 87.
6 mm shell with a 20 lb armor-piercing shot and heavy explosive capability alike. In June 1942, engineers fitted a modified 25p pounder to the second development hull and test fired it. The recoil was manageable. The accuracy inside the turret was, in the written verdict of the director of artillery, superior to that of a field mounting.
The noise, he wrote, was similar to that of a big air rifle. It worked better than anyone expected. Field marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, commander-in-chief of Australian forces, formally recommended the upg variant to the war cabinet in July 1942. The new design deleted the whole machine gun and its gunner. The 25 pounder ammunition was bulkier and something had to give, reducing the crew from 5 to four.
The Glacis was re-angled. The engine bay was redesigned around a more compact arrangement of the three Cadillac units, now fitted radially around a common crank case by Robert Perry himself, producing 397 horsepower. From a 24-cylinder power plant, displacing 17 L. The engineers called it the Pererry Cadillac.
It was among the strangest power plants ever fitted to a combat vehicle. This machine was given a new name, the Thunderbolt Australian Cruiser Mark III. The single completed Thunderbolt, serial number 80066, was delivered to the Australian Army on the 12th of June, 1943. A testing officer drove it, fired its gun, evaluated its handling, and wrote in his report that production models would be a good fighting vehicle with excellent armorament. Production was authorized.
Around 150 hulls were cast. The first batch of roughly 25 trial tanks was under assembly at Chulora. An order for a substantial further production run was on the table. And then 6 weeks later, the program was cancelled. The reason was not failure. The Thunderbolt had not been rejected on technical grounds.
The reason was that the war had moved. The Coral Sea and Midway fought in May and June of 1942 had broken Japanese carrier power. Guadal Canal and Cakakota had stopped the Southward advance. By December 1942, 757 M3 Grant and Lee medium tanks had arrived in Australia from the United States, equipping the armored division that had been raised to defend the mainland against an invasion that was no longer coming.
The first Australian armored division was disbanded in September 1943. There was nothing for a fast cruiser tank to do in the jungle fighting of New Guinea. The Matilda 2, a slower and older design, was better suited to the terrain and was already available in numbers. The government decided the factories at Cholora were more urgently needed building railway locomotives to move American equipment.
In July 1943, the order came down to stop. Every hull under assembly was broken up for scrap. The 150 cast hulls awaiting fitting were melted down or sold off. The 65 production sentinels went into storage. Their only operational deployment, if one can call it that, came in 1944 when the film director Charles Chau borrowed a number of them for a war picture called the rats of Tbrook.
Painted with iron crosses and fitted with mock German cupillas, the Sentinels drove through the Krenula sand hills pretending to be panzas, they were better equipped to fight actual panzas than their role suggested. Nobody in the film knew that. Compare the Thunderbolt to what it would have faced.
The Panza 4 hours FH, the primary German medium tank of the same period, carried 75 mm of frontal armor and an effective high velocity 75 mm gun. The Thunderbolts 25 pounder could penetrate it at combat range. The Sentinel’s armor of 65 mm was comparable against the M4 Sherman, then flooding into Allied infantries. The comparison is closer than the Sherman’s reputation suggests.
The Thunderbolts armament was at least its equal for versatility, and the singlepiece cast hull was structurally superior to the Sherman’s welded construction. Nicholas Moran, the American tank historian who crawled through the surviving Sentinel at Bovington, judged it ergonomically poor and noted that by mid 1942, it was already a little dated by European standards.
That is a fair verdict, but it was built for a Pacific war against Japanese armor that was lighter and less well protected than anything in North Africa. And for that specific threat, it would have been more than adequate. What happened to the Thunderbolt serial 8066, the only complete example ever built, survived.
It sits today in the Trielor Technology Center of the Australian War Memorial in Canra out of general public view. On its front hull, there is a brass plaque. The Bonathan family of Adelaide donated £25,000 toward the production of a cruiser tank. The tank they funded was the only one of its kind. Three production sentinels also survive.
One at the tank museum in Bovington in England, sent for British evaluation and never returned. One at the Royal Australian Armored Corps Tank Museum at Puka Punil in Victoria, still a runner and two partial examples reassembled from salvaged components at the Australian Armor and Artillery Museum in Canes. Back in the Chalora workshops on the 12th of June 1943, the test driver climbs out of serial 8066 and hands in his report, a good fighting vehicle with excellent arament.
Outside, Australia is building locomotives. The invasion fear has passed. The tank that Fear produced, the most capable cruiser in the Pacific, built by railway workers and Cadillac engines, and a French engineer who had nowhere else to go, is about to be told it is no longer needed. It will never be pointed at an enemy.
It will never fire a shot in anger. It will spend the next 80 years in a storage facility in Canra. One tank alone named Thunderbolt, waiting for a war that never came. Australia built it anyway. That is the part that deserves to be remembered.
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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