May 7th, 1945, the day the war in Europe ended. At the fighting vehicle proving establishment in Chzy Surrey, a strange new tank rolled out for its first test drive. It weighed 27 tons. It carried over 4 in of frontal armor. On paper, it was everything the British army had asked for.
13 mi later, trials were abandoned. The driver was physically exhausted. His wrist had nearly been broken by the gear lever. His heel was at risk of being trapped between the pedals. The officer in charge declared the test impossible and unsafe to continue. The tank was the A38 Valiant, and the British Army kept it, not as a weapon, but as a permanent lesson in how not to build a tank.
Students at the School of Tank Technology were invited to inspect it and find every fault. As historian David Fletcher later observed, one hopes they started early in the morning. To understand how the Valiant went so wrong, you need to understand the problem it was designed to solve. By mid 1942, Britain faced a growing challenge in the Far East.
Japanese forces had overrun Malaya, Burma, and Singapore with startling speed. When the time came to push back, British armor would need to operate in terrain that punished conventional tank design. Jungle bridges rated for 15 tons could not carry a 40-tonon Churchill. Tracks cut through dense vegetation were too narrow for standard hulls.
The canopy itself limited vehicle height. Japanese anti-tank weapons were lighter than German ones, but they were improving. The existing Valentine had served capably in North Africa, but it was showing its age. Its two-man turret forced the commander to load the gun himself, crippling the rate of fire and leaving no one free to direct the crew under contact.
The general staff wanted a replacement that corrected this flaw while maximizing armor protection at minimum weight. The specification designated A38 and formalized in December 1943 set a target of 23 tons. The tank needed a proper three-man turret, a climbing ability of 30°, a road range of 100 m, and side skirting plates.
Speed mattered less than protection. The tank board classified the project as urgent. In August 1942, the Ministry of Supply awarded the contract to Vicers Armstrongs. Vicas already had a promising design called the Vanguard, a proposed Valentine successor with an innovative independent wishbone suspension. The pike nose glacis, an angled frontal plate of the kind that would later become famous on the Soviet ES3, offered excellent ballistic protection for its weight.
The original concept was sound. What killed the Valiant was what happened after Vicers was pulled off and reassigned. The design passed through four companies in succession from Vicers to the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, then to Rolls-Royce’s clan foundry at Bulpa, who added extra armor around the transmission, pushing weight upward.
Finally to Rustin and Hornsby of Lincoln, experienced locomotive builders who had manufactured Matilda two tanks during the war, but had never designed an armored vehicle from scratch. Each company modified the design. None owned it. By the time Rustin and Hornsby completed the sole prototype in 1944, the original concept was barely recognizable.
A flat superructure sat on top of the angled pike nose, largely cancelling its ballistic advantage. The turret was enlarged. Car sections were bolted together instead of welded. The weight had ballooned by four tons beyond specification. No single designer’s name appears in surviving records. The tank board, the Ministry of Supply, and the Department of Tank Design all held pieces of the process with limited coordination.
Four companies, one tank, no clear ownership. The A38 Valiant measured 17 ft 7 in long, 9 ft 3 in wide, and 7 ft tall. Its crew of four comprised a commander, gunner, and loader in the turret, plus a driver squeezed into the narrow pike nose hole. Armor was the one area where the Valiant delivered on paper. The hull front carried 114 mm of cast armor.
The turret mantlet matched it, but everything built around that armor was a catalog of failures. The power plant was a General Motors 64 two-stroke diesel producing 210 brake horsepower. This was the same engine used in late model Valentine’s which weighed only 17 tons driving a 27 ton vehicle. It delivered a powertoweight ratio of roughly 7.
8 horsepower per ton. The predicted top speed dropped from 16 mph to just 12 on road and approximately seven cross country. For comparison, the German Panther managed 15.6 horsepower per ton. The independent wishbone suspension inherited from the lighter Vanguard design featured six rubber tired road wheels per side on individual transverse spring units.
This system had been tested on the Archer self-propelled gun chassis which was roughly 8 tons lighter. Every suspension unit had exposed external lubrication pipes, creating obvious vulnerability to combat damage. The 5-speed synchromish gearbox with clutch and brake steering had been designed for the far lighter Vanguard. It was wholly inadequate for a vehicle of the Valiant’s weight.
The armament consisted of the QF6 pounder, a 57mm gun, though the turret was designed to accept either the six pounder or the QF75 mm. Secondary armament included a 7.92 mm Beaser machine gun mounted coaxially, plus two 2-in smoke mortars with 18 smoke bombs. The turret’s massive cast front face was bolted rather than welded, and the base formed a dangerous shot trap.
an armor piercing round striking the underside of the turret bulge could deflect downward through thin armor directly above the driver’s head. Now, before we get into what happened when this tank was actually tested, if you are finding this interesting, hit subscribe. It takes a second, cost nothing, and helps the channel grow. Now, back to the Valiant.
When the sole prototype arrived at Churchy on May 7th, 1945, problems were obvious before anyone started the engine. The vehicle weighed 26 tons and,300 weights, unladen, without crew or ammunition. Extra armor plates welded beneath the transmission had reduced rear ground clearance from 16.9 in to just 9 in, creating a protruding lip that would catch on any rough terrain.
The exposed lubrication pipes on the suspension units were immediately noted as a combat vulnerability. Internal access to mechanical components was poor. The driver’s compartment in the Pike nose was so cramped that getting in and out required contorting through a hatch barely wide enough for an average man.
The tank was driven on an easy road course only. Cross-country trials were planned but never reached. The steering required up to 160 pounds of pull on the tillers, the driver’s full body weight. Engaging first gear pushed the lever behind the battery boxes, and it was physically impossible to disengage without using a crowbar. Fifth gear popped out with such tremendous force it could break the driver’s wrist against the steering lever.
The foot brake could only be operated with the driver’s heel due to the cramped hull layout, and if his foot slipped, it would become irretrievably trapped between the pedals. According to the tank museum’s own description, the driver was almost crippled by the cramped position and was in danger of being injured by the controls.
The FVP issued its damning trials report. The officer in charge stated that in his view, the entire project should be closed. The Valiant project was terminated. No endorsement from any participant was forthcoming. The sole prototype had traveled 13 miles on a paved road. There is no record of it ever firing its gun in an official trial.
Several myths have grown around the Valiant that deserve scrutiny. The most persistent claims, the driver faced foot amputation risk. According to Tank Encyclopedia’s analysis of the original trial documents, there is no mention of amputation risk in the official report. The real danger was heel trapping between pedals, which was serious, but not the amputation legend that has spread online.
The label of worst tank ever built also needs qualification. Tank Histori argues persuasively that this title is misleading. A prototype riddled with faults, but caught at the testing stage is a different category of failure than a production tank that reaches combat and gets crews killed. The Churchill, upon entering service, had an operational life of just 50 m and over 100 serious faults.
The Valiant was a mild steel prototype, lacking many internal fittings, never a finished production vehicle. Calling it the worst British tank design of the war, however, seems entirely justified. The Valiant was not an isolated disaster. It was the purest expression of systemic problems in British tank development. The infantry and cruiser tank dichotomy which split armored forces into slow heavy tanks and fast light ones was fatally flawed.
Both types fought the same enemies but carried the same inadequate guns. Design authority was fragmented across the war office. Ministry of supply, tank board, department of tank design and multiple private manufacturers. As the Imperial War Museums noted, tank policy was not properly synchronized between these bodies until the end of 1942.
British tanks were chronically underpowered because the Ministry of Aircraft Production restricted availability of the Rolls-Royce Meteor Engine for tank use. The Cromwell finally received it midw, but many designs continued struggling with inadequate power plants. Consider what the Valiant was supposed to achieve compared to what it actually delivered.
The Valentine it was meant to replace weighed 17 tons and managed 15 mph. It had earned a reputation for mechanical reliability across thousands of miles of desert warfare. Over 8,000 were built. The Valiant offered dramatically better armor. But at the cost of 10 additional tons that its engine, transmission, and suspension were never designed to carry.
It traded the Valentine’s proven dependability for a vehicle that could not complete a single afternoon on a paved road. The upgrade was supposed to be armor and a three-man turret. The cost was everything else. The Churchill Mark 7 carried 152 mm of armor on 40 tons with a 350 horsepower engine. Its powertoweight ratio of roughly 8.
75 horsepower per ton was not dramatically better than the Valiant on paper. The difference was everything else. The Churchill’s transmission was robust and proven. Its suspension was mature. Its crew ergonomics were functional. The Valiant borrowed drivetrain components designed for a vehicle 10 tons lighter and expected them to perform at loads they were never engineered to handle.
Raw horsepower tells only part of the story. Drivetrain suitability tells the rest. But here is what makes the Valiant story more than just a catalog of errors. At almost exactly the same time this disaster was being assembled. British engineers were designing the A41 Centurion. The Centurion abandoned the infantry and cruiser distinction entirely.
It combined 17 pound of firepower. sloped welded armor resistant to 88 mm hits and the 600 horsepower Meteor engine into a universal tank. Early Marks had their own teething problems and the design evolved substantially across its production life, but the core concept was sound from the start and successive improvements transformed it into one of the most successful tank designs of the 20th century.
It served from Korea in 1950 through Lebanon in 1982. Adopted by armies across the world, that Britain’s worst and finest tank designs were essentially contemporaneous. Tells you everything about the transition from institutional chaos to focused engineering excellence. The Centurion emerged from Sir Claude Gibbs reorganized Department of Tank Design, which concentrated authority in the hands of competent engineers with a clear brief.
One team, one design philosophy, one chain of command. The Valiant emerged from four companies answering to multiple overlapping bureaucracies. No one owned the design. No one could be held responsible for the outcome. The contrast is not subtle. After trials were abandoned, the Sole Valiant prototype was kept by the School of Tank Technology.
According to David Fletcher’s account in the Universal Tank, students were invited to inspect it and catalog its faults as a teaching exercise. It was in effect an open book examination where the subject was everything that could go wrong. When a nation builds a tank by passing it between four companies, like a parcel nobody wants to hold.
During the 1950s, the Ministry of Supply transferred the vehicle to the Royal Armored Corps Tank Museum at Boington, where it received accession number E1 1952.39. It spent time both indoors and outside in the car park before being placed in the World War II hall, where it remains on display today alongside other late war British design experiments like the Black Prince and the Tortoise.
Stand in front of the A38 Valiant at Bovington and you’re looking at 27 tons of institutional failure. A turret bolted together where welding would have been stronger. An engine borrowed from a tank 10 tons lighter. A suspension proven only on vehicles 8 tons lighter. Controls that could break bones. A gear lever that needed a crowbar.
And beneath the hull, those extra armor plates that reduced ground clearance to 9 in, ensuring the vehicle would have grounded itself on the first unpaved track it encountered. The Valiant did not fight a single battle. It never crossed a jungle track or faced a Japanese gun position. Its only enemy was itself.
Yet, it may have served Britain better as a teaching tool than it ever could have as a weapon. Every fault in the Valiant was a lesson. Every design failure was a warning. The students at the School of Tank Technology, who cataloged those faults, carried that knowledge forward. The generation of British engineers who designed Centurion upgrades, the Chieftain and the Challenger, understood what happened when design authority was fragmented, when weight targets were ignored, and when components were expected to perform beyond their
engineering limits. British engineering was not defined by the Valiant. It was defined by what came after it. The Centurion service record across three decades and multiple wars confirms it. The Valiant sits at Bovington not as a monument to failure, but as proof that Britain recognized its mistakes, preserved them, studied them, and built something better.
One tank, 13 miles, every fault a lesson. That is the story of the A38 Valiant.
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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