The ‘Borrowed’ American Truck That Hauled Every British Tank From The Desert To Berlin –  Hw

Late 1942, a supply depot somewhere behind the Eighth Army’s lines in Egypt. A column of trucks unlike anything the British Army has ever operated rolls through the wire. Each one is 23 ft long, weighs 12 tons empty, and is towing a 45-ton trailer carrying a 32-ton Sherman tank. The drivers are Royal Army Service Corps men.

The trucks are American, and without them, the armored divisions about to fight at El Alamein will arrive at the start line with their tracks worn out, their engines overheating, and their fighting capability halved before a single shot is fired. The vehicle is the Diamond T-981 tank transporter, built in Chicago to a British specification, and it will carry every major British tank from the Western Desert to Berlin.

It is, according to historian Pat Ware, possibly the only example of a vehicle designed for the British Army that was also adopted by the Americans. It is also one of the few classes of equipment for which Britain was wholly dependent on the United States. Here is the problem it solved. A tank is a weapon designed for the battlefield, not for the road.

Every mile a tank drives on its own tracks to reach the front is a mile of wear on sprockets, bogies, suspension, and engine that cannot be spent fighting. During World War II, Sherman tracks lasted between 1,400 and 3,000 mi before they needed replacing. The M4A4 variant managed only 500 to 600 mi. Churchills wore through their tracks in 600 to 1,000 mi.

In the rocky terrain of North Africa and Italy, American rubber block tracks could disintegrate in as few as 250 mi. A 100-mi road march to the front could burn through 10 to 25% of a tank’s useful track life before it ever saw the enemy. Germany had it worse. Panther engines averaged 1,000 km of life. King Tigers reportedly broke down every 50 mi on average.

The arithmetic was brutal. If your tanks drove themselves to the fight, they arrived half broken. If you could carry them there on wheels, they arrived factory fresh. Every diamond saved on track wear was a diamond banked for combat. Multiply that saving across hundreds of tanks over thousands of miles, and the economics of a dedicated road transporter became overwhelming.

One truck costing about $18,500 could preserve the fighting life of dozens of tanks across years of service. Britain entered the war with a single type of tank transporter, the Scammell Pioneer, purchased in 1932 and limited to 30 tons. After the British Expeditionary Force abandoned almost all of its mechanical transport in France in May 1940, the situation was dire.

The Scammell works at Watford produced just 459 transporter pioneers across the entire war. The Pioneer sat too tall to clear British rail bridges with American tanks aboard, and the new generation of tanks, the Churchill at 40 tons, the Sherman at 32, exceeded its safe operating limits. Britain needed something bigger, something built at scale.

And British industry could not deliver it in time. In August 1940, the British Purchasing Commission approached five American truck manufacturers, Mack, FWD, Ward LaFrance, White, and Diamond T. Only Diamond T, a Chicago firm founded by Charles Tilt in 1905, could meet the schedule. Tilt was a man who believed trucks did not have to be ugly.

His company’s peacetime advertising slogan was “The handsomest truck in America.” Now his engineers would build the most important logistics vehicle of the British war effort. The British specification demanded a vehicle able to carry cruiser tanks and the American M3 medium, turn within a 28-ft road, sit under 150 in when laden, and develop between 175 and 200 brake horsepower.

Crucially, Britain did not require all-wheel drive. The tractor would be 6×4, not 6×6. That decision kept the vehicle cheap and mechanically simple, though it would cause headaches in Italian mud. A pilot model was completed in September 1941. Production began at the Diamond T factory in Chicago in October 1941 and ran until May 1945.

The result was one of the most capable heavy haulers of the war. Under the hood sat a Hercules DFXE naturally aspirated in-line six diesel of 895 cubic inches, that is 14.7 L. Bore was 5 and 5/8 inches, stroke 6 inches. It produced 201 brake horsepower at 1600 rpm and a massive 685 pound feet of torque at 1150 rpm. Behind the engine, a Fuller four-speed main gearbox mated to a three-speed auxiliary gave 12 forward ratios and three reverse driven through Timken Detroit double reduction rear axles.

The whole package topped out at about 23 miles per hour laden, drank fuel at 2 miles per gallon from a 150 gallon tank, and gave a range of roughly 300 miles. A Garwood winch behind the cab delivered 40,000 pounds of pull, roughly 18 tons. The 981 variant carried 500 feet of cable and added fairlead rollers in the front bumper, allowing the cable to be paid out forwards for self-recovery.

The British War Office ordered drivers to use this front winch only for recovering the transporter itself. Patware notes that this command was widely ignored. Empty, the tractor weighed about 26,500 pounds. With concrete or sand ballast loaded into the rear box for traction, it climbed to 45,000 pounds.

Hitched to its trailer with a Churchill aboard, the whole train weighed up to 79 and 1/2 tons. The trailer completing the system was designed in Britain by Cranes of Dereham in Norfolk, then mass produced in America by Rogers Brothers of Albion, Pennsylvania. Rated at 45 short tons, the M9 trailer rode on 24 tires across 12 wheels with a steerable dolly axle at the front and hinged loading ramps at the back.

In British service, additional trailers came from Dyson of Liverpool, Shelvoke and Drewry, and the British Trailer Company. By the time production stopped, 6,554 tractors had been built. Britain received more than 2,000 under Lend-Lease. Canada took 677. The Soviet Union received 471 via the Persian Corridor. The Americans designated the truck-trailer combination the M19 and used the remainder themselves, though they never loved it.

Now, before we get into the combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into the logistics that actually won the war, consider subscribing. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Now, let us see what happened when the Diamond T went to war. First deliveries reached Egypt in early 1942 and equipped 372 and 373 tank transporter companies, Royal Army Service Corps, before Second Alamein in October 1942.

Eighth Army staff used the Diamond T fleet to shuttle tanks of First Armoured Division and 23rd Armoured Brigade forward to their assembly areas without burning track life. Operation Bertram’s deception scheme depended on transporter movement to mask the armored build-up. The pursuit after Alamein covered 778 miles from El Alamein to Agedabia in 19 days, averaging 39 miles a day.

Without transporters, armored formations would have lost their fighting strength to mechanical attrition before they could engage the retreating Africa Corps. In Italy, the Diamond T’s limitations emerged. During Operation Husky in July 1943, the slow assault convoy lost three vessels carrying around 500 vehicles. The Royal Canadian Army Service Corps, whose 65th Tank Transporter Company operated 99 Diamond T’s, ended up with only 43 of the 225 transporters it needed.

According to Canadian after-action reports, the survivors ran almost continuously, about 22 hours out of 24, with routine maintenance performed at convoy staging points, where relief drivers took over in relays. On narrow mountain roads, the wide turning radius and the M9 trailers rolling resistance on 24 tires became serious obstacles.

Northwest Europe was where the Diamond T became indispensable. Companies including 16, 143, 451, 860, and 862 tank transporter companies landed in Normandy from late June 1944. After the breakout, they shuttled fresh Shermans, Cromwells, and Churchills forward and recovered battle casualties to rear workshops.

During Market Garden in September 1944, 143 company moved to Sint-Gillis bij Dendermonde in Belgium and ran continuous tank deliveries to the front. In March 1945, Diamond T crews hauled Churchills and Buffaloes forward for Operation Plunder, the Rhine crossing on March 23. Imperial War Museum photograph BU 2043 shows a Diamond T980 carrying a Churchill to the riverbank.

In Burma, terrain and weak bridges limited use, but Diamond Ts ferried Grant armored recovery vehicles and gun tanks along the Tamu Road in January 1945 supporting 14th Army’s breakout into central Burma. The single best surviving driver account comes from the diary of a man known as Grandpa Graham of 143 company.

In January 1945, five officers, 180 men, and 62 transporters were tasked with lifting 57 Sherman tanks from Sluiskil on the south bank of the Scheldt to Mechelen near the front. Freezing rain set in. The truck sank into the road surface. For most of the journey, the spare driver in each transporter walked alongside the vehicle throwing down sand, ashes, sacks, and anything they could find to give the wheels grip.

6 miles took 5 hours. They unloaded that night in Mechelen to the sound of gunfire from across the river. Germany never built a comparable vehicle. The Wehrmacht’s heaviest prime mover was the Sd.Kfz.9 FAMO half-track powered by a Maybach HL towing a single Tiger in Russia. Germany relied on railways for road trailers and 80-ton flat wagons for the final leg.

That system worked inside German gauge Europe but collapsed under Allied air interdiction and failed entirely against the Soviet broad gauge. The Americans had their own alternative, the M25 Dragon Wagon built by Pacific Car and Foundry. It was bigger with a Hall-Scott 440 petrol engine producing 240 horsepower, 6×6 all-wheel drive, an armored cab, and three winches with a combined 60-ton pull.

But only 1,372 were built. Fuel consumption dropped to 1 to 3 miles per gallon and range was under 200 miles. The US Army preferred the Dragon Wagon for front-line recovery and relegated the Diamond T to rear area logistics where its reliability earned the official verdict of tremendous for ammunition hauling.

Britain, having standardized training, spares, and bridge classifications around the M19 from 1942, had no reason to switch. The Soviet evaluation confirmed the design’s merit. In late 1943, Lieutenant Colonel Dorofeev and Engineer Captain Zakartsev of the GBTU tested the Diamond T at the NIBT proving grounds.

They concluded, “I consider it necessary to import Diamond T transporters with trailers and use them in the Red Army. T-34 and KV tanks fit on the trailer comfortably. Loading took 10 to 15 minutes.” The powerful winch allowed recovery of tanks with non-functional suspensions. The Diamond T’s British career did not end in 1945.

Around 700 of Britain’s roughly 1,000 tank transporters in 1954 were still Diamond T’s. A further 150 new examples arrived between 1950 and 1953 under the Mutual Defense Assistance Program. In British Army of the Rhine, 16 Tank Transporter Squadron at Fallingbostel operated Diamond T’s manned partly by Polish drivers from the Mixed Service Organization.

Many of them former prisoners of war unable to return to Soviet controlled Poland. From 1956, most British examples received Rolls-Royce C6N FL diesel engines, extending service life into the 1960s. The Thornycroft Antar progressively replaced them through the 1950s, but a small core survived until 1971. The last four Diamond T’s were finally retired from British military service in 1975.

Civilian heavy haulage absorbed the surplus eagerly. Robert Wynn and Sons of Newport bought their first in 1947 and eventually ran 30, re-engineering many with Meadows 15.9 L diesels. Pickfords operated 12. On one celebrated job, a convoy of five Pickfords Diamond T’s moved a 245-ton gross load from Sheffield to Liverpool Docks.

Scurrah Brothers of Northallerton acquired their first in 1962. Surplus Diamond T’s pulled fairground trailers, served as breakdown wreckers, and powered Australian Outback road trains. In 1948, two Diamond T’s were double-headed to tow the 78-ton of 39 Tortoise Super Heavy Tank during BAOR trials.

A load no single Allied vehicle could manage alone. The Diamond T sits at the head of the modern British heavy equipment transport family tree. The Thornycroft Antar that replaced it used a Rover built Meteorite V8 derived from the Rolls-Royce Merlin aero engine. The Scammell Commander followed in 1984. Today, the Oshkosh heavy equipment transporter carries the role forward.

Every one of those successors inherited a principle the Diamond T established. A tank transporter is a purpose-built long-distance road prime mover, not a recovery vehicle pressed into service. Late 1942 again, that supply depot behind the Eighth Army lines. The Diamond T column has delivered its Shermans.

The tanks roll off the trailers with full track life, cold engines, and crews who slept while their vehicles traveled. Tomorrow, they will fight at El Alamein. The truck that carried them was designed to a British specification, built by a Chicago firm that believed trucks should be handsome, shipped across the Atlantic under Lend-Lease, and driven by RASC men through sand, mud, and freezing rain from Egypt to the Rhine.

It never fired a shot. It carried no armor. And it may have done more to win the war in the west than any single fighting vehicle in the British arsenal. The Diamond T 981 is proof that armored warfare was a logistical achievement before it was a tactical one, and that the most important British vehicle of 1942 was not British at all.

It was borrowed, and it was brilliant.

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.