June 1940, somewhere in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, inside a converted wool shed that Ford Motor Company calls a factory. Workers are bolting armor plate onto a truck chassis. The steel came from Pretoria. The engine came from Canada. The four-wheel drive kit came from Indianapolis. The guns will come from Britain if the convoy dodges the U-boats.
The finished product looks like someone built an armored car out of spare parts, because that is exactly what happened. Military observers from London take one look and privately declare the thing impossible. It cannot work. It is too thin. It is too lightly armed. It is built from three countries leftovers on a fourth country’s factory floor.
By 1944, South Africa will have built 5,746 of them. They will fight from the Ethiopian Highlands to El Alamein. Their crews will rip out turrets and bolt on captured enemy cannons. They will serve for six decades, from East Africa in 1940 to the Greek Islands in the 1990s. The Marmon Herrington armored car was never supposed to exist.
It exists because in 1940, Britain had nothing left. At Dunkirk in May and June of 1940, the British Expeditionary Force abandoned roughly 700 tanks on the beaches of France. 60% of all two-pounder anti-tank guns were lost. 45% of all light tanks gone. According to assessments from the period, the equipment remaining in the United Kingdom was barely sufficient to equip two divisions.
The Royal Army Service Corps resorted to pulling obsolete buses from scrap yards to move troops. Britain’s armored car fleet was pitiful even before the evacuation. It consisted of about 150 Rolls-Royce armored cars, a design from 1914, and 99 Guy armored cars built in 1938. The Daimler would not enter production until April 1941.
The Humber was not ready either. When Italy invaded Egypt in September 1940, the cupboard was bare. South Africa declared war on September 6th, 1939, 3 days after Britain. The man leading the country was Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, himself a former Boer guerrilla, who had fought against the British Empire in 1899.
Smuts expanded the Union Defence Force from almost nothing to over 400,000 volunteers, and as historians have noted, built a thriving war industry where nothing had existed before. He became the only non-British person to hold the rank of British Field Marshal during the war. Development of a South African armored car had begun in August 1938.
Once war broke out, the first prototype was completed in 28 days. South Africa had three critical industrial advantages. ISCOR, the South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation, could produce armor plate. Dorman Long, a British structural steel firm with a South African branch, could handle fabrication. And Ford Motor Company of South Africa in Port Elizabeth could manage final assembly.
The vehicle’s name came from the component that made it work, the Marmon Herrington Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, founded in 1931, had evolved from luxury automobiles into four-wheel drive truck conversions after the depression killed the luxury car market. They supplied transfer cases, front-driven axle assemblies, and four-wheel drive conversion kits to South Africa.
From Canada, Ford Motor Company of Canada in Windsor, Ontario, shipped Ford 3-ton truck chassis and the Ford flathead V8 engines. The early marks used a 221 cubic inch version, producing 85 horsepower. Later marks received the larger 239 cubic inch engine, producing 95 horsepower. These arrived as completely knocked-down kits. From Britain came the weapons.
Vickers .303 machine guns, the Boys .55 caliber anti-tank rifle, Bren light machine guns, and for the final mark, the QF 2-pounder, a 40 mm anti-tank gun. In South Africa, ISCOR produced armor plate by trial and error, working 24-hour shifts. According to records from the South African Military History Society, the Pretoria Steel Works comprised 57 coke ovens, two blast furnaces, and three open-hearth steel furnaces.
Dorman Long fabricated the armored bodies, skeletons of angle iron to which armor plate was welded or riveted. Ford handled final assembly. Over 1,000 South African factories eventually participated in the war effort. Shipping routes were perpetually threatened. German U-boats sank 114 Allied merchant ships off South African waters during the war.
Any vessel carrying Ford chassis or drive kits that went down could directly impact production. The vehicle evolved through four major marks. The Mark 1, built in 1940, was crude. 113 units produced. Rear-wheel drive only. 85 horsepower. Riveted armor of just 12 mm on the front and 6 mm on the sides. Armed with two Vickers machine guns.
It weighed approximately 6 tons, reached 80 km/h on roads, and carried a crew of four. It was unpopular with crews due to poor off-road capability and armament that could barely threaten a truck. The Mark 2, produced from 1940 through 1941, was the first true four-wheel drive armored car in Commonwealth service.
887 units built. The Marmon Herrington conversion kit gave it proper cross-country mobility. The Middle East variant carried a Boys anti-tank rifle and coaxial Bren gun in an octagonal turret. The Mark 3 became the workhorse. 2,630 units built between May 1941 and August 1942. Its key improvement was a shortened wheelbase, down from 134 in to 117 in, giving dramatically better agility.
The more powerful 95 horsepower engine went in. Combat weight sat at 5.9 tons with self-sealing tires. The Mark 4 was a complete redesign. 2,116 units from March 1943 onward. The engine moved to the rear. The hull became fully welded. A proper two-man turret carried the QF 2-pounder anti-tank gun. Top speed reached 84 km/h.
Range extended to an impressive 579 km, but it arrived too late for North Africa. Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into improvised engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, back to the desert.
The darkest joke among Marmon Herrington crews captured the problem perfectly. The only armor the Boys anti-tank rifle could penetrate was that on the Marmon Herrington itself. The Boys could theoretically punch through 21 mm at 300 m, making it useless against everything except the lightest Italian tank heads. Crews developed a culture of hunting for captured enemy weapons after every engagement.
Every overrun Axis position became a weapons bazaar. The most common modification was the Italian Breda Model 35, a 20 mm auto cannon. According to accounts from the 11th Hussars, these Breda cars were formerly allocated to squadron headquarters. Other captured weapons bolted onto the vehicles included the German 3.7 cm Pak 36 anti-tank gun, the German 2.
8 cm squeeze bore gun, the Flak 38 20 mm auto cannon, and the Italian 47 mm Breda anti-tank gun. The Marmon Herrington’s baptism of fire came in East Africa from December 1940. South African armored car companies deployed Mark 1s and Mark 2s against the Italians. The vehicles earned the Swahili nickname Gary Kifaru, meaning rhinoceros.
They spearheaded flying columns through Italian Somaliland, capturing Mega on February 18th, 1941, and entering Addis Ababa on April 6th. In the Western Desert, the Mark 2 entered British service in January 1941, when the first King’s Dragoon Guards received approximately 50 vehicles. According to unit histories, the first encounter between a King’s Dragoon Marmon Herrington and a German Sd.
Kfz 231 eight-wheeler came at dusk on a desert track. The two cars scraped past each other so close that the only damage was a bedroll torn off. Both crews too surprised to fire. When Rommel encircled Tobruk in April 1941, C Squadron of the King’s Dragoon Guards, 30 Mark 2s, was trapped inside the perimeter for the entire 230-day siege, providing reconnaissance and anti-aircraft defense with Breda armed cars.
Operation Crusader, launched November 18th, 1941, was the biggest test. On the 21st of November, the British Eighth Army launched Operation Crusader. The first major offensive of the war in North Africa ’41 was the biggest test. On November 21st at 0805 hours, the Fourth South African Armored Car Regiment delivered critical intelligence, reporting 150 tanks and over 250 motor vehicles approaching Sidi Rezegh from the southeast.
Two days later, the Fifth South African Brigade was destroyed at Sidi Rezegh, going in with 5,800 men and emerging with fewer than 2,000 after encirclement by the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions. At the Battle of Gazala in May and June of 1942, a notable achievement occurred. According to wartime reports, the first Sturmgeschütz III seen in the desert was stopped by up-gunned South African Marmon Herringtons near Bir Hakeim, testament to those field modifications.
The fall of Tobruk on June 21st, 1942, was the darkest day for South African arms. 10,772 South Africans were captured. Photographs show captured Mark 2s bearing 21st Panzer Division markings. Rommel’s forces prized captured Marmon Herringtons for reconnaissance. At the Second Battle of El Alamein, October 23 to November 4, 1942, the Fourth and Sixth South African Armored Car Regiment and the Third South African Armored Car Regiment fielded 110 Mark 3s between them.
After the Axis lines collapsed, two squadrons of the Royals and the Fourth South African Armored Car Regiment were the first troops to break through, spending days creating havoc among enemy rear echelons. Montgomery’s signal to General Dan Pienaar followed. “Tell your South African division they have done well.” Against purpose-built rivals, the Marmon-Herrington’s truck origin showed.
The Daimler armored car at 7.5 tons carried 16 mm of frontal armor and a factory-fitted 2-pounder gun in a proper enclosed turret. Germany’s SDKFZ 222 carried a 20-mm autocannon firing up to 480 rounds per minute with 30 mm of frontal armor on the later variant. The American M8 Greyhound mounted a 37-mm gun with well-sloped armor reaching 19 mm.
The Marmon-Herrington was last in firepower, last in protection, and middle of the pack in mobility, but it was first in availability. It was the only armored car present in sufficient numbers when Commonwealth forces needed reconnaissance vehicles most desperately. Its Ford V8, according to surviving crew accounts, started first go every time, a vital attribute when you might need to flee from a Panzer 3.
The post-war career was astonishingly long. Transjordan’s Arab Legion received Mark 4s and modified them with 6-pounder guns. Greece replaced the Ford engines with Perkins diesels and kept them in service into the 1990s. On Cyprus in July 1974, Greek Cypriot National Guard Mark 4F saw combat during the Turkish invasion, believed to be the last operational use, 31 years after they were built.
The Marmon-Harrington’s deepest legacy is not the vehicle itself, but the philosophy it planted in South African military thinking. Wheeled vehicles over tracked, speed and range over heavy armor, local design born from wartime necessity. The Eland of the 1960s successfully engaged Cuban-crewed T-54 tanks in Angola.
The Ratel infantry fighting vehicle carried forward the same wheeled reconnaissance philosophy. The Rooikat, an 8×8 wheeled tank destroyer with a 76-mm gun, represents the ultimate expression of a tradition that began with bolting armor plate onto Ford trucks in Port Elizabeth. DCD Protected Mobility, the direct corporate descendant of Dorbyl, still produces armored vehicles today.
An unbroken 85-year lineage from those first riveted hulls. Back in 1940, observers said building an armored car from three countries’ spare parts was impossible. South Africa built 5,746 of them. Their crews strapped captured enemy cannons to the roof and were back in the fight by afternoon. A country that started the war with two armored cars ended it having built nearly 6,000.
The Marmon-Herrington was never the best armored car of the war. It was the one that was there, reliable and adaptable, when the British Empire had nothing else. That is how you fight a war with improvisation, and that is how you win one.
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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