Why This ‘Backwards’ British Tank Destroyer Was The Most Feared Gun In Normandy –  Hww

1943, Vickers-Armstrong Workshops, Newcastle. British engineers unveiled their solution to Germany’s heavy armor. The gun was facing backwards, not slightly angled, completely backwards. Everyone who saw it thought there had been a mistake. There hadn’t. The vehicle was officially designated self-propelled 17-pounder Valentine Mark I.

Crews would later call it the Archer. It weighed just under 16 tons, stood barely 2.24 m tall, and carried the most powerful Allied anti-tank gun of the war pointing the wrong way. Military observers laughed. Artillery men wanted it rejected. But the Archer would become one of the most effective tank destroyers of the conflict, and the crews who used it would come to prefer it over every conventional alternative.

To understand why this strange machine existed, you need to understand how badly Britain was losing the anti-tank war. In 1939, the British Army relied on the 2-pounder as its primary anti-tank weapon. A 40-mm gun adequate against early Panzers, but completely outclassed by 1941. After Dunkirk, a painful decision was made.

Rather than retool factories for the 6-pounder replacement, Britain continued building the obsolete 2-pounder to rearm against a feared German invasion. One 6-pounder was estimated to cost the production of six 2-pounders, so the old gun stayed in production while German armor grew thicker. The 6-pounder finally reached North Africa in spring of 1942.

It arrived already under pressure. Panzer IVs now carried high-velocity 75-mm guns. Then came the shock that changed everything. On the 1st of December, 1942, Tiger I tanks went into action for the first time at the Battle of Tobruk in Tunisia. Allied troops lost 55 tanks and over 1,000 men captured in a single engagement.

Tiger phobia spread through the ranks. Tank crews started reporting Tigers everywhere, even when they were facing ordinary Panzer IVs. Open calls in the British Parliament demanded a counter. The 6-pounder could penetrate roughly 74 mm of armor at 500 m. The Tiger I carried 102 mm of frontal plate. The math was simple, and the math was fatal.

British Ordnance engineers had anticipated this crisis. Design work on the Ordnance QF 17-pounder had begun in late 1940 when the 6-pounder had not even entered service. The specification called for a 76.2 mm gun firing a 17-pound projectile at over 880 m per second. When Tigers appeared in Tunisia, 100 prototype 17-pounders were rushed to North Africa, mounted on 25-pounder gun howitzer carriages.

These improvised weapons, code-named Pheasant, first saw action in February 1943. According to post-war assessment, the Pheasant proved itself a potent tank killer and provided a significant boost to morale. The 17-pounder could defeat the Tiger frontally at combat ranges, but at 3 tons on its carriage, the towed gun was difficult to reposition under fire.

A crew needed minutes to limber up and move. In the fast-moving tank battles of North Africa and the coming invasion of Europe, minutes meant death. Britain needed a self-propelled mount, and needed it fast. On the 28th of July, 1942, the British Ordnance Office tasked Vickers-Armstrongs with developing a self-propelled 17-pounder.

The project fell to Leslie Little, Vickers’ chief designer, the same engineer who had created the Valentine tank in 1938. Little had been with the company since its Carden and Lloyd days, and became lead designer after John Carden’s death in 1935. Multiple chassis were evaluated. The Crusader was too narrow. The Bishop, a Valentine-based 25-pounder carrier, could not physically accommodate the massive 17-pounder barrel. Little chose the Valentine.

It was the most reliable British tank of the war. Production lines at the Elswick Works were already running, and the Valentine was obsolescent as a front-line tank, freeing chassis for conversion. The fundamental problem was fitting an enormous gun onto a very small hull. The 17-pounder barrel measured 4.

19 m long, nearly the length of the Valentine’s entire chassis. Little’s team made the pivotal engineering decision. They mounted the gun facing rearward. This was not a compromise. It was deliberate. A forward-facing gun would have made the vehicle dangerously nose-heavy, overloading the front suspension. The rearward orientation balanced the gun’s weight over the drive sprockets, kept barrel overhang to a minimum, and the Valentine’s layout, with engine transmission at the front in the Archer configuration, left a natural fighting compartment at the rear. Two prototypes

were completed in early 1943. According to trial documents, formal testing ran through the 24th of May to the 7th of June, 1943 at Shoeburyness and Larkhill Proving Grounds. Artillery men wanted a fully turreted gun with 10 to 15 degrees of depression. The Archer offered only 7 and 1/2 degrees depression and 11 degrees traverse to each side.

The fighting compartment was cramped. The 39-round ammunition stowage was judged insufficient. Top road speed of 32 km/h was described as faster than the Valentine, but slower than desired. The War Ministry was pragmatic. Even the larger A30 Challenger did not fully meet requirements and would take longer to produce.

In June 1943, the Ministry signed a contract for 800 vehicles. The Archer’s specifications told a clear story. A GMC 671M diesel engine, six cylinders, two-stroke supercharged producing 192 brake horsepower. A crew of four, commander, gunner, loader, and driver. Hull armor of 60 mm on the glacis with just 20 mm on the open-topped superstructure.

A Bren light machine gun for local defense. The vehicle was small, light, and carried the most lethal anti-tank gun in the Allied arsenal. That gun deserves its own examination. The 17-pounder firing standard APCBC ammunition achieved a muzzle velocity of roughly 884 m per second, penetrating 140 mm of armor at 500 m.

Against the Tiger I’s 102-mm frontal plate, this created a 38-mm margin of overkill. Then came APDS. Armor-piercing discarding sabot ammunition was developed by engineers including Ladislav Permeter, a Hungarian emigre working at the Armaments Research Department. The concept used a lightweight 3.5-kg tungsten carbide sub-projectile encased in an aluminum sabot.

When fired with the full propellant charge of the heavier standard round, the smaller projectile reached 1,200 m per second. Penetration jumped to over 200 m at 500 m. That was enough to defeat a King Tiger frontally, at least in theory. Early APDS suffered accuracy problems beyond 500 yd due to poor sabot separation at the muzzle break.

Field engineers were deployed to bore out muzzle breaks across Normandy. The rounds comprised roughly 6% of the typical ammunition load, about five or six rounds per vehicle. To put the 17-pounder in context, the Tiger I’s feared 88-mm gun penetrated approximately 110 mm at The Panther’s 75-mm L/70 managed around 124. The American 76-mm M1 achieved only 88 to 93.

Even the American 90-mm M3 on the M36 Jackson reached just 120 to 130. With standard ammunition alone, the 17-pounder matched or exceeded every gun on the Western Front except the Tiger I’s 88-mm L/71. Now, before we see how this performed in combat, if you’re enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe.

It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let’s get into the combat record. The Archer entered service in October 1944. It missed D-Day, Operation Goodwood, and the Falaise Pocket entirely. The first 13 vehicles reached the 21st Army Group in November. This late arrival concentrates the Archer’s combat record into the final six months of the European war.

Known units included the 20th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, attached to the 3rd Infantry Division. They began receiving Archers in January 1945, and by March fielded 18, alongside 18 towed 17-pounders. The 102nd Northumberland Hussars Anti-Tank Regiment received Archers in March with the 15th Scottish Division. In Italy, the 105th Anti-Tank Regiment operated two batteries of Archers, alongside two of M10s with the 8th Army.

The best-documented combat account involved the 314th Battery in Italy. According to unit war diaries, an Archer crew detected a Tiger tank and fired, narrowly missing. The Tiger reversed behind a building. A Lysander air observation post spotted the new position and relayed coordinates. The Archer fired again.

The 17-pounder round penetrated the building wall and struck the Tiger’s side armor, destroying it. During the Battle of Argenta Gap in April 1945, K Troop of 315th Battery destroyed three Panzer IV Specials without loss while employed in both direct and indirect fire roles, almost continuously, according to the regimental account.

Imperial War Museum photographs confirm Archers in action during Operation Veritable through the Reichswald Forest in February 1945. They fought near Nutterden on the 9th of February and in the flooded streets of Kranenburg. They crossed the Rhine in March and advanced into Germany, with a WM record showing 102nd Regiment Archer crossing a railway in Celle on the 12th of April 1945.

The backwards gun turned out to be a tactical masterstroke. Crews would drive forward to a concealed position, then reverse so the gun faced the enemy approach. After firing from a hull-down position, where only the barrel was visible above a rise or hedgerow, the driver, already seated facing the escape route, could immediately accelerate forward at full road speed without turning.

A conventional tank destroyer needed to either crawl backward at 8 km per hour or execute a multi-point turn under fire. The Archer simply drove away. This shoot-and-scoot cycle could be repeated across multiple pre-selected firing positions. The vehicle’s height of 2.24 m made it significantly lower than the M10 Achilles at 2.

9 m, the Sherman at 2.7 m, or the Panther at 2.99. Combined with its narrow profile when positioned front toward the enemy, the Archer was exceptionally difficult to detect. Crews developed a distinctive camouflage technique, painting a 50% white disruptive pattern on the barrel to disguise it as a standard 75-mm gun.

German forces specifically targeted 17-pounder vehicles as priority threats. The same trick was used on Sherman Fireflies. One persistent myth claims the driver had to leave the vehicle to fire. This is false. The driver remained inside, shifting left or right of the breech during firing, then returning to his seat to drive away.

The breech recoiled close enough to be alarming, but the driver stayed aboard throughout. The German StuG III Ausf. G was the closest equivalent in tactical role. It carried 80 mm of frontal armor and was fully enclosed, but its 75-mm L/48 gun penetrated only 85 to 90 mm at 500 m, roughly 60% of the Archer’s capability.

The American M10 Wolverine offered a full 360° turret, but its 3-in gun managed only about 100 mm. The Sherman Firefly carried the same 17-pounder with turret traverse and better protection, but weighed 33 tons, stood 2/3 of a meter taller, and was in desperately short supply. All Archers were manufactured at the Elswick Works in Newcastle.

Production began in May 1944 at a rate of 40 to 50 vehicles per month. The 200th rolled off the line by September. Production ended in May 1945 with a total of 655 completed, though Tank Archives calculate 665 based on serial number sequences. After the war, the Archer served with the British Army of the Rhine into the early 1950s.

Approximately 200 were supplied to Egypt and 36 to Jordan. Egyptian Archers saw combat during the 1956 Suez Crisis, performing adequately in defensive roles, but struggling when forced to attack. Israel captured roughly 40 intact and stripped some of their 17-pounders for installation in M10 hulls.

The vehicle that artillerymen nearly rejected outlasted every British tank destroyer designed to replace it, including the Challenger and the Avenger. About 10 survive in museums worldwide, with the most prominent at the Tank Museum in Bovington. 1943. Vickers-Armstrong Workshops, Newcastle. A gun facing backwards on an obsolete chassis, everyone thought it was a mistake. It was not a mistake.

It was the most effective anti-tank platform the British produced on a domestic hull. The 17-pounder outperformed the Tiger’s 88. The Valentine chassis proved the most reliable in the British inventory. The rearward-facing gun gave crews an escape capability no conventional design could m

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.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.

e Archer was not beautiful.

It was not fast. It was not comfortable. It was effective, and in war, effective is what matters. British engineering was not luck. It was innovation under pressure, producing a weapon that worked when it mattered most.