June 1941, Montreal Locomotive Works, Quebec. Canadian engineers unveil their country’s first homegrown tank. It has a cast hull, a fully traversing turret, and bolted to the left side of the glacis, a small rotating sub-turret housing a single machine gun. The thing looks like it grew an extra head. Military observers from London stare at it and wonder what exactly Canada thinks it is doing. The tank is called the Ram.
It will become the only Canadian-designed tank of the entire war. It will also never fire its main gun in combat, not once, not a single round. By the time it ships to England, the Sherman has made it obsolete. Roughly 500 Rams will sit in British storage depots gathering rust, dismissed as monuments to wasted industry.
The official Canadian military historian will compare them to the Ross rifle, the most notorious failed weapon in Canadian history. That is where this story should end. It does not. Because a Canadian general will strip the turrets off those pointless tanks, stuff 11 infantrymen inside each one, and send them crashing through German lines across Northwest Europe.
The vehicle that never fired its gun will slash infantry casualties by a factor of seven, and father every armored personnel carrier built since. To understand why Canada built the Ram, you need to understand the crisis of 1940. After Dunkirk, Britain lost most of its tank fleet and could not supply the Dominions.
American production was pre-committed to Lend-Lease. Canada’s armored core needed roughly 1,200 cruiser tanks, and no one was going to give them any. They would have to be built at home. The Canadian Joint Committee on Tank Development met in September 1940, and ruled out British designs as too slow to get into production. That left an American basis.
The available M3 Lee medium was rejected for good reason. It was too tall. Its hull was riveted. Its Its 75-mm gun sat in a sponson with limited traverse, and its armor was inadequate. The compromise reached in early 1941 was elegant. Keep the M3’s lower hull and running gear, but design an entirely new cast upper hull with a full traverse turret.
Montreal Locomotive Works, already experienced in heavy steel castings, got the contract. A federally funded plant at Longue Pointe, Quebec was built around it. The key figures were L. E. Carr of the British Tank Mission, who designed the new hull and turret. C. D. Howe, Minister of Munitions and Supply, who championed the program politically, and Major-General Frederick Worthington, founder of the Canadian Armoured Corps, whose family crest gave the tank its name.
Worthington argued for a turret ring large enough to accept the American 75-mm gun. He was overruled. That decision doomed the Ram as a fighting tank. Only 50 Mark I Rams were built, armed with the Ordnance QF 2-pounder as an interim weapon because Canadian 6-pounder mounts were not yet available. Production switched to the Mark II in February 1942, mounting the Ordnance QF 6-pounder.
The Mark II weighed 29 long tons, carried a crew of five, and was powered by a Continental R-975 radial engine producing 400 horsepower. Armor ranged from 25-mm at the rear to 87-mm on the turret and glacis. Road speed was 25 mph. The Mark I’s most distinctive feature was its auxiliary machine gun sub-turret.
A small cast housing bolted to the left front of the hull, operated by the co-driver, it held a .30 caliber Browning with roughly 120° of left traverse. The idea descended from British infantry tank doctrine, where dedicated hull guns were supposed to provide close-in suppression. In practice, the sub-turret weakened the cast hull, complicated production, added negligible tactical value over a simpler ball mount, and was obsolete by 1942.
On late Mark II production, it was deleted and replaced by a standard bow-mounted Browning. The fatal blow came in March, 1942. The Combined Chiefs agreed to standardize all British and Canadian medium tank production on the M4 Sherman. The Sherman’s 75 mm gun fired a serviceable high explosive round, critical for infantry support.
The Ram’s 6-pounder was an armor-piercing weapon with weak high explosive performance. The Sherman also had upgrade headroom the Ram lacked. Its turret ring could accept the 76 mm gun, the 17-pounder in the Firefly variant, even a 105 mm howitzer, the Rams could not. Production continued until July 1943 because idling Montreal Locomotive Works was politically unacceptable while Sherman lines were not yet at full output.
According to Canadian production records, the final tally was 50 Mark ones, 1,899 Mark twos, and 84 observation post variants. 2,032 hulls total. None would see combat as gun tanks. The transformation began in late July 1944. Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, commanding the Second Canadian Corps, was planning Operation Totalize, a breakthrough toward Falaise across open ground swept by German anti-tank guns and mortars south of Caen.
Infantry marching beside tanks were being cut to pieces. Simonds needed to get his men onto objectives alive and he needed to do it inside armored vehicles. In his covering letter to divisional commanders on August 2nd, 1944, he wrote what became the founding document of armored personnel carrier doctrine. He ordered that infantry accompanying armor must go straight through in bullet and splinter-proof vehicles to their actual objectives.
The first vehicles chosen were 76 surplus M7 Priest self-propelled guns whose guns had been removed. The conversion was assigned to Major George Wiggam with an impossible deadline. About 250 men from 8 RCEME and five British REME units worked shifts from 4:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night in fields near Bayeux.
Guns and ammunition bins were ripped out, gaps welded over, bench seating fitted. According to the RCEME Museum at Kingston, armor plate ran short almost immediately. Captain Burt Hargrave improvised by sandwiching two half-inch mild steel plates with sand between them. A solution later confirmed in veteran correspondence. 72 vehicles were finished in 3 and 1/2 days. Major Wigan received an MBE.
The vehicles were code-named Kangaroo. Now, before we see how these combat, if you are enjoying this deep dive into Commonwealth engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right. Let us get into the combat record. At 2300 hours on August 7th, 1944, over 1,000 RAF bombers dropped 3,462 tons of explosives south of Caen.
Six columns, four vehicles wide, rolled down the Caen-Falaise road under artificial moonlight. Searchlight beams bounced off cloud. The 36 Priest Kangaroos allocated to the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade carried the Royal Regiment of Canada, the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, and the Essex Scottish.
Parallel battalions attacked on foot. The casualty contrast on August 8th is the most powerful number in the Kangaroo story. The carried battalions and the marching battalions fought the same battle on the same day against the same enemy. The three battalions riding in Kangaroos suffered a combined seven killed and 56 wounded.
The four battalions advancing on foot suffered 68 killed and 192 wounded. That is a roughly sevenfold reduction in killed in action for the carried troops. According to after-action reports from the 2nd Canadian Corps, 61 of the 76 Priest Kangaroos were still battle-worthy at the end of the 6-day operation. Most losses were mechanical, not enemy action.
The Priests were borrowed American property, mechanically tired and tall-silhouetted. A better donor was sitting across the channel. Roughly 500 surplus Ram tanks occupied British depots. Conversion was simpler and yielded a superior vehicle. The turret and basket were lifted off, dropping the silhouette by 3 ft. The hull machine gun was retained and a second Browning mounted on the turret ring.
Each Ram Kangaroo could carry two crew and 11 infantry. On October 24th, 1944 at Tilburg in the Netherlands, the 1st Canadian Armoured Personnel Carrier Squadron was expanded into the 1st Canadian Armoured Carrier Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Churchill. A British twin, the 49th Armoured Personnel Carrier Regiment joined alongside.
Both came under Major General Percy Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division, the famous Hobart’s Funnies. The cap badge was an erect kangaroo over the Latin motto “Armatos Fundit”, meaning it pours forth armed men, a reference Churchill drew from book two of the Aeneid and the Trojan Horse. The regiment’s combat record stretched across every major Commonwealth operation from Le Havre to Oldenburg.
At Le Havre in September 1944, the regimental history records only one infantry casualty among troops carried. At Bologna, the casualty figure for infantry inside the Kangaroos was zero. The story goes that during the Calais operation, a Canadian Kangaroo driver rammed and captured a German Tiger tank and earned a military medal.
That account appears in several unit histories, though it has never been confirmed by official records. Operation in January 1945 made the regiment the 1st Canadian unit entirely on German soil. Operations Veritable and Blockbuster pushed them through the Siegfried Line, across the Reichswald, through Moyland Wood and the Hochwald Gap.
On March 26th, 1945, the regiment became the 1st Canadian Armoured unit across the Rhine. The Ram Kangaroo’s superiority over contemporary infantry carriers was built on protection. The German Sd.Kfz. 251 halftrack carried eight men behind 6 to 14.5 mm of open-topped armor. The American M3 halftrack offered 6 to 12 mm, also open-topped.
The Ram Kangaroo wrapped 25 to 87 mm of steel around all sides. Its glacis was six to eight times thicker than either halftrack. It was fully tracked and could follow Shermans and Churchills through any ground they could cross. Unlike halftracks whose unpowered front axles bogged in mud, the regiment’s last lift was at 700 hours on May 5th, 1945, northeast of Oldenburg.
According to the regimental war diary, it ended with the complete surrender of an Austrian infantry battalion without a shot fired. The 1st Canadian Armored Carrier Regiment was disbanded on June 20th, 1945, at Penheim, Germany. It remains the only Canadian regiment both raised and disbanded on foreign soil. Over 9 months, it carried infantry from 20 Canadian and 38 British regiments at a cost to itself of 18 killed and 71 wounded.
The Kangaroo did not end with the war. The Canadian Encyclopedia draws the direct line from Simon’s as field conversion to every tracked APC that followed. The canceled Canadian Bobcat program of the 1950s was explicitly designed to replace the Ram Kangaroo. The American M113 entered service in 1960. The British FV432 followed in 1963.
Both institutionalized what the Kangaroo had improvised in a field nearby you. The purest modern descendants are the Israeli heavy APCs, vehicles that take the Kangaroo philosophy of tank grade armor around an infantry compartment to its logical conclusion. The Namer, built on the Merkava 4 chassis, weighs 66 tons.
It is the most heavily protected personnel carrier ever constructed. The Ram Kangaroo’s central insight, that the safest way to move infantry into an assault is in a turretless tank, is now mainstream doctrine worldwide. Picture it again. June 1941, Montreal. A strange tank with an extra turret growing out of of hull, built by locomotive engineers who had never made a weapon before.
It looked wrong. It was outgunned before it could fight. It never fired a round. And stripped of everything that was supposed to make it a tank, it became one of the most consequential armored vehicles of the 20th century. Not because of what it was designed to do, but because Commonwealth engineers gave it a welding torch, 3 and 1/2 days, and a completely different job.
Lieutenant Colonel Churchill’s farewell address to his regiment at Pennheim captured it cleanly. They had been instrumental in saving the lives of countless soldiers who, without the kangaroos, would have had to advance on foot, unprotected from enemy fire. The pointless tank carried an army. British and Commonwealth engineering was not luck.
It was innovation under pressure, producing solutions that worked when nothing else could.
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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