September 1943, Canadian Army Workshops, Borden, Great Britain. A team of Canadian engineers rolled out two solid steel cylinders, each weighing roughly 1 ton, bolted to a set of trailing arms and helical springs. The device looked crude, almost primitive. Two heavy rollers dangling in front of a Sherman tank like a pair of enormous training wheels.
Officers watching the demonstration were skeptical. Then the Sherman drove forward into a live minefield. The first tellermine detonated under the right roller. The steel cylinder launched upward in a violent arc, flipping over the side arm while the spade end of the trailing arm buried itself in the earth. The springs compressed.
The tank kept moving, and the roller swung back down, slamming into position as if nothing had happened. Then the left roller hit a mine. Same result. Up, over, reset, rolling. The Canadians called it the Canadian Indestructible Roller Device. The name was not modest. It did not need to be.
To understand why anyone would bolt 1-ton steel cylinders to the front of a perfectly good tank, you need to understand what German mines were doing to Allied armies in 1944. Field Marshal Rommel wanted 50 million mines planted along the Atlantic Wall. He managed roughly 6 and 1/2 million along the Normandy coast alone. By war’s end, Allied records showed that mines accounted for more than 20% of all tank losses in the European theater.
The German arsenal was designed to be unkillable through detection. The tellermine was the workhorse anti-tank weapon, a 30-lb steel disc packed with 11 lbs of TNT, triggered by 200 to 350 lbs of pressure. Over 3.6 million of the tellermine 43 variant alone were manufactured between 1943 and 1945. But the tellermine was detectable.
What terrified engineers were the mines that were not. The Schuhmine 42 was a wooden box barely 4 by 5 in containing 200 g of explosive with only a tiny metal detonator. It was virtually invisible to electromagnetic mine detectors. The Glasmine 43 had an entirely glass body. The Topfmine used compressed cardboard, tar, and wood pulp, so undetectable that the Germans themselves painted their own mines with radioactive sand and used Geiger counters to find them again.
Then there was the S-mine, the weapon Allied soldiers called the Bouncing Betty, a steel cylinder packed with TNT and hundreds of steel balls. It launched itself 3 to 5 ft into the air before detonating, scattering lethal fragments across a 20-m kill radius. Over 1.93 million were produced. Rommel ordered them planted around anti-tank mines in concentric circles, turning every tellermine into a death trap for the engineers trying to clear it.
According to wartime analysis of the Aachen minefields, roughly 221 mines costing about $3,700 total was sufficient to destroy a single tank worth $200,000. The economics were devastating. The Allies had options for dealing with this problem. None of them were good enough. Manual clearance was the most reliable method and the most lethal for sappers.
Engineers crawled forward on hands and knees, probing the earth with bayonets at a 30° angle, inching through minefields under direct fire. Polish-designed electromagnetic detectors helped against metal mines, but the Germans countered by scattering scrap iron to create thousands of false readings.
The catastrophic engineer casualties during the Dieppe raid in August 1942 were a direct catalyst for developing mechanical alternatives. The Sherman Crab Flail Tank was the most successful mechanical solution. A rotating drum with 43 chains beat the ground at 142 revolutions per minute, detonating mines across a 9-ft wide path.
It worked, but the Crab could only manage 1 and 1/4 to 2 mph while flailing. Its chains wore out and were blown off by repeated detonations. The rotating drum kicked up blinding dust clouds that obscured the driver’s vision, and the turret had to face rearward during flailing operations, meaning the tank could not fire its main gun forward while clearing mines.
American solutions were worse. The T1E3 Mine Exploder, nicknamed Aunt Jemima, used two sets of five enormous 10-ft diameter disc rollers. The assembly was heavier than a Tiger tank. It needed two to three football fields of space just to make a U-turn. It sank in soft ground. According to operational reports, it was highly disliked by every unit that received it.
The fundamental gap in Allied mine clearing doctrine was not about clearance. The Crab could clear a known minefield. The problem was finding the minefield in the first place. What was needed was a reconnaissance vehicle that could drive at normal speed, detect mines by detonating them, survive the blast, and keep rolling without stopping.
That was the problem the Canadians solved. The engineering of the CIRD was elegantly simple. Two heavy rollers of solid forged armor quality steel, each roughly 16 in wide and 26 in in diameter, were positioned ahead of the tank, one in front of each track. The rollers hung from trailing arms suspended from a substantial cross shaft that pivoted ahead of the vehicle.
Helical springs held the trailing arms in position, pressing the rollers firmly against the ground as the tank moved forward. The innovation was not in the rollers themselves. It was in what happened during a mine detonation. When a roller triggered a mine, the blast launched the roller upward in an arc over the side arm. As this happened, the spade end of the roller arm dug into the earth, absorbing the blast energy.
Then, through the mechanical arrangement of the springs combined with the tank’s forward motion, the roller swung back down and automatically returned to its operating position. No crew intervention, no stopping, no repairs. The tank simply kept driving. This was the core of the indestructible claim. Previous roller designs tried to be strong enough to withstand mine detonations through brute structural resistance. They failed.
The CIRD was designed to yield, absorb, and reset. It used the mine’s own energy to reset the device. Where other rollers fought the blast, the CIRD rode it. Two roller sizes were produced, a 15 and 1/2-in diameter version for the Sherman and an 18-in diameter version for the Churchill. The device was fitted primarily to the Sherman V, the British designation for the M4A4, but was also compatible with the Sherman III, the Churchill Mark IV, and experimentally the Cromwell IV.
The speed advantage over every competing system was commanding. The CIRD operated at 5 to 7 mph cross-country and could travel at up to 15 mph on roads. The intended tactical doctrine was straightforward. CIRDs for detection, Crabs for clearance. The roller tanks would lead, driving at near normal speed, detonating any mines in their path.
Once a minefield was located and its boundaries identified, the slower Crabs would move in to clear full-width lanes for following vehicles. The CIRD fell under the command of Major General Sir Percy Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division, the legendary formation whose specialist vehicles became known as Hobart’s Funnies.
Sherman CYRDs were issued as pilot tanks, one per troop, to the three flail regiments of the 30th Armoured Brigade. According to Royal Armoured Corps reports, the brigade received 36 pilot Sherman Vs with 12 roller equipments. 36 tanks were fitted with the distinctive hull-side mounting brackets, but only 12 complete roller sets were manufactured.
The rollers could be transferred between tanks as needed. Now, before we see what happened next, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British and Canadian engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, back to the CIRD. By June 1944, the devices were shipped across the English Channel.
They were present in Normandy. They were assigned to front-line units of the 22nd Dragoons, the 1st Lothians and Border Horse Yeomanry, and the Westminster Dragoons. Everything was in place for combat deployment, and then nothing happened. There are no records of the CIRD being used in action. Every source from David Fletcher’s authoritative Vanguard of Victory to the Royal Armoured Corps Half-Yearly Reports confirms the same fact.
The CIRD was never committed to combat. All units were withdrawn before the end of 1944. No single document provides a definitive explanation. The most likely factors are pragmatic ones. The Crab was already proving effective in the field. The CIRD only covered the width of each track rather than clearing a full continuous lane.
The Crab delivered a 9-ft wide safe path. The CIRD left untouched ground between its two narrow corridors, ground that could still conceal mines. In the life-and-death calculus of Normandy, commanders chose the proven system over the promising prototype, but the story did not end there. In February 1945, the CIRD was retested by F Wing of the 79th Armoured Division at Geel, Belgium, as part of preparations for the Rhine crossing.
The test were described as spectacular, likely a reference to the dramatic visual of 1-ton rollers launching skyward and slamming back into position. Despite this, the CIRD was again passed over for the Rhine operation. In May 1945, the CIRD was formally standardized for use with both the Sherman and Churchill. The war in Europe had just ended.
The Specialized Armoured Development Establishment continued testing the device through December 1945 before further development of roller systems was abandoned entirely in favor of the flail. The German experience with mine clearing tells you something about what the British and Canadians achieved. German engineers attempted their own mine flail for the Panther tank, a device they called the Minenräumgerät Dreschflegel.
When it was demonstrated in January 1945, the drive chains broke during the presentation. German engineers at their proving ground ultimately reached the same conclusion as the Allies, that the flail was superior to mine rollers, but they never produced anything approaching the CIRD’s self-resetting mechanism. Their roller systems were destroyed by the mines they were meant to clear.
The CIRD’s core innovation, a mine roller that survives detonation through mechanical yielding rather than structural resistance, became a foundational principle in all subsequent mine roller design. The evolutionary line runs through the Cold War era M1 mine clearing roller system to the remote controlled M60 Panther of the 1990s, which cleared 350 mines and over 800 km of road in Bosnia, to the modern self-protection adaptive roller kit used on armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. That system detonated more
than 70 anti-vehicle mines and proved thousands of kilometers of road. The logical conclusion of what the CIRD pioneered, a vehicle that drives through minefields so humans do not have to, was realized when the crew was removed entirely. The M1 Panther 2 is a remote controlled 43-ton tank variant that can clear a 5,000 square meter minefield in 1 hour.
No complete CIRD roller device is known to survive. Three Sherman tanks with the distinctive hull side mounting fittings have been identified in Canadian collections, including one at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The specific Canadian engineer who designed the device remains unidentified in all publicly available records.
September, 1943. Canadian Army Workshops, Borden, Great Britain. A 1-ton steel roller launches into the air on a column of smoke and fire. It hangs for a moment, then the springs pull it back. It slams into the earth. The tank keeps rolling. The engineers watch in silence. They have built something that works, something that absorbs everything the enemy can bury in the ground and resets itself to take the next blast.
They call it indestructible. The military will call it unnecessary. History will call it ahead of its time. The mines never got a vote.
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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