The ‘Canadian’ Gun That Fired More Rounds On D-Day Than Any Other British Vehicle –  Hw

June 6th, 1944, 06:45 hours, 7 miles off the coast of Normandy in the heaving gray waters of the English Channel. On the pitching deck of a landing craft, a crew of six British gunners crouched behind something that made no sense. A 25,000 lb armored vehicle bolted to the deck of a flat-bottomed boat, its gun barrel pointed at a coastline nobody on board could see.

The order came over the tannoy loudspeaker, “Fire.” The gun roared. 25 lb of high explosive barked toward Gold Beach while the landing craft lurched through 4-ft swells. The crew reloaded, fired again, and again. They were still 7 miles from France, and this vehicle, built in a Canadian locomotive factory using a tank chassis nobody wanted, was about to deliver one of the most extraordinary artillery performances of the entire invasion.

This is the story of the Sexton self-propelled gun. By 1942, Britain had a problem that was costing lives. The standard British field gun, the Ordnance QF 25-pounder, was the finest gun howitzer of the war. It could hurl a 25-lb shell over 13,000 yards using its highest charge. It could fire five to eight rounds per minute in the hands of a trained crew.

Its unique charge system, using separate red, white, and blue cloth bags that matched the Union Jack, gave gunners up to seven different charge levels for any range or angle. Every division in the British and Commonwealth armies used it. Every supply depot stocked its ammunition. The entire logistics chain revolved around one caliber, 87.6 mm.

But the 25-pounder was a towed gun. In the fast-moving desert war of North Africa, towed artillery could not keep pace with armored advances. Tanks would push forward, outrun their fire support, and face German counterattacks without artillery cover. The solution was self-propelled artillery, guns mounted on tracked chassis that could move with the tanks.

Britain’s first attempt was catastrophic. The Bishop, built by the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, mounted the 25-pounder in a fixed steel box on top of a Valentine tank hull. The cramped superstructure limited the gun’s elevation to just 15°. This cut maximum range to 6,400 yards, less than half the gun’s true capability.

Crews resorted to building earth ramps and driving onto hillsides just to gain extra elevation. The Valentine’s weak 131 horsepower diesel engine was overloaded by the added weight. Speed dropped to 15 mph. The fighting compartment held only 32 rounds. About 100 were built before the War Office admitted the Bishop was a failure. So, Britain turned to America.

The M7 Priest, an American 105-mm howitzer mounted on an M3 chassis, arrived in British service by October 1942, just in time for Second El Alamein. The Priest worked. It was mobile, reliable, and its crews could keep pace with armor. Britain ordered 2,500 for 1942 and 3,000 more for 1943. There was one devastating flaw.

The Priest fired American 105-mm ammunition. Every other gun in a British division fired 25-pounder rounds. Suddenly, Royal Artillery supply officers had to maintain an entirely separate logistics chain, sourcing American ammunition through American depots, and funneling it through British supply lines, just for one vehicle type in each division.

In the chaos of a mobile campaign, this was not merely inconvenient. It was dangerous. If 105-mm stocks ran dry, the Priest became 23-ton paperweights while mountains of 25-pounder shells sat in nearby dumps, completely useless to them. Britain needed a self-propelled 25-pounder, and the answer came from an unexpected place.

In Canada, a locomotive factory in Montreal had been building tanks that would never see combat. The Ram was Canada’s first domestically designed cruiser tank, developed because after Dunkirk, Britain could not supply its dominions with armor. Montreal Locomotive Works, a subsidiary of the American Locomotive Company, produced 1,948 Rams between November 1941 and July 1943.

But in March 1942, the decision was made to standardize all British and Canadian armored units on the M4 Sherman. The Ram was outclassed. Official Canadian war history would later compare it to the infamous Ross rifle as an example of unsuccessful Canadian weapon design. Not a single Ram ever fired a shot in anger as a tank.

This left Montreal Locomotive Works with production lines, tooling, skilled workers, and a tank chassis that nobody wanted. The strategic logic was irresistible. On June 23, 1942, the first Sexton prototype rolled out of the Montreal factory. Canadian engineers had taken the Ram chassis, opened up the top, and mounted a 25-pounder gun howitzer in a low, open-topped fighting compartment.

The vehicle weighed just under 26 tons. A Continental R975 radial aircraft engine producing 400 horsepower gave it a top road speed of 25 mph and a range of roughly 125 miles. It carried 105 rounds of 25-pounder ammunition, more than three times what the Bishop could hold, and significantly more than the Priest’s 69 rounds of 105 mm.

According to British Army trial reports from early 1943, the Sexton was found highly satisfactory. No significant complaints, no skepticism. After the Bishop disaster, the War Office was simply relieved to have something that worked. The T51, a parallel American attempt to mount a 25-pounder on a Priest chassis, had its riveted gun cradle destroyed during the very first live-firing test.

It was canceled in March 1943. The Sexton was approved for mass production. The naming was pure accident. The British had stumbled into an ecclesiastical convention. The Bishop was named for its tall turret resembling a bishop’s miter. The Priest earned its nickname because its machine gun station looked like a pulpit.

When the Canadians initially designated the new vehicle Deacon on April 29, 1943, they quickly discovered that name was already assigned to an armored lorry with a 6-pounder gun. The replacement name, Sexton, a church custodian who rings bells and digs graves, continued the unplanned tradition. Montreal Locomotive Works produced 2,150 Sextons between 1943 and 1945.

The first 120 Sextons were produced in 1943-45. The first 124, designated Mark I, used the original Ram tank hull. The remaining 2,026, designated Mark II, were built on the Grizzly hull, Canada’s version of the Sherman M4A1. The Sexton entered combat in September 1943 with the British Eighth Army in Italy.

Now, before we get into the extraordinary combat record, if you are enjoying this deep dive into a weapon most channels have never covered, hit subscribe. It takes a second and helps the channel grow. Now, let us talk about D-Day. The run-in shoot was one of the most audacious artillery innovations of the entire war.

Self-propelled guns bolted to the decks of landing craft would fire on German beach defenses during the final approach, filling the critical gap between the naval bombardment lifting and the infantry hitting the sand. At Gold Beach on the morning of June 6th, three field regiments equipped with Sextons, roughly 72 guns in total, prepared for the run-in shoot.

The 86th Hertfordshire Yeomanry Field Regiment, the 90th City of London Field Regiment, and the 147th Essex Yeomanry Field Regiment. According to the war diary compiled by Lieutenant Sydney Beck of 341 Battery, the 86th Regiment had pioneered this technique during experiments at Studland Bay beginning in July 1943. The mechanics were ingenious.

Two guns sat forward on each landing craft, two aft, all aligned with the bow. Direction was controlled by swinging the ship’s heading. Range was managed by a motor launch equipped with radar sailing 200 yards ahead, feeding corrections over loudspeakers down to the gun decks. Mechanical instruments called Coventry clocks ticked down range at a rate matching the landing craft’s speed.

Corrections dropped 100 yards at a time. The 86th Regiment opened fire at 06:45, still 7 miles from the French coast. Their shells struck the Larivière causeway, targeting machine gun nests dug into the seawall. The war diary records the fire doing great work on the causeway before shifting to a lighthouse area suspected of housing a German observation post.

By 08:45, a troop went into action directly on the narrow beach strip with water lapping on their tracks, engaging enemy positions threatening the 7th Green Howards as they attacked the Mont Fleury battery. The Green Howards rushed the demoralized garrison and overpowered it. On the western end of Gold Beach, the 511th Battery of the 147th Essex Yeomanry knocked out two German anti-tank guns at Le Hamel using direct fire, open sights at close range.

The 90th City of London Regiment was the first artillery to land on Jig sector, supporting the 231st Brigade’s advance toward Bayeux. According to veteran accounts, the volume of fire from Sexton batteries on D-Day was staggering, with 72 guns each capable of sustained rates of five rounds per minute, and engagements running throughout the entire day.

These batteries expended thousands of rounds between the run-in shoot and nightfall. The often-repeated claim that the Sexton fired more rounds on D-Day than any other British vehicle has never been verified by official records, and it is worth noting that M7 Priests, not Sextons, supported Sword and Juno beaches with roughly 168 guns between them.

What is verified is that at Gold Beach, Sexton batteries provided continuous fire support from 7 miles out at sea all the way through the inland advance, a feat no towed gun could have achieved. The Normandy campaign that followed revealed the Sexton’s true value. During Operation Epsom in late June, 450 guns supported the 15th Scottish Infantry Division, with Sexton batteries delivering rolling barrages that helped repulse counterattacks by the 12th SS Panzer division.

During Operation Goodwood in July, 760 guns were allocated with nearly 300,000 rounds of ammunition. The 13th Royal Horse Artillery directed fire onto 88 mm flat guns at Cagny. And crew accounts record destroying at least six Panther tanks with concentrated high explosive fire. Battery Sergeant Major Ernest Powdrill, who earned the Military Cross, left one of the most vivid surviving accounts of Sexton combat.

On August 3rd, 1944, his battery found itself deep in enemy territory in the Normandy bocage, literally surrounded by roaming German tanks and infantry. Captain Peplow engaged three Tiger tanks with high explosive shells at close range. A desperate act given that the 25-pounder’s armor-piercing round could only penetrate roughly 70 mm at point-blank range, nowhere near enough for a Tiger’s 102-mm frontal plate.

The Sexton fought across every major campaign in Northwest Europe. During Operation Market Garden in September 1944, batteries supporting the 30th Corps fired 150 rounds per gun in a single engagement supporting the 7th United States Armored Division’s canal crossing in the Netherlands. During Operation Veritable in February 1945, over 1,000 guns fired in the largest British barrage since El Alamein, and the Sexton’s tracked mobility proved decisive on flooded terrain where wheeled vehicles could not move.

The 147th Essex Yeomanry earned the distinction of being the first Royal Artillery unit to fire its guns on German soil on November 21st, 1944. For the Rhine crossing in March 1945, over 4,000 Allied guns fired for 4 hours. 12th Corps alone allocated 1,500 rounds per 25-pounder gun. A total of 225,061 rounds were fired in just 3 days.

Now, consider the German equivalent. The Wespe mounted a comparable 10.5 cm howitzer on a Panzer II light tank chassis. Its range was nearly identical to the Sexton’s, roughly 12,300 m, but it carried only 32 rounds, less than a third of the Sexton’s 105. This shortage was so severe that the Germans had to build 159 dedicated ammunition carrier Wespes with the gun removed just to keep their batteries supplied.

Only 676 gun-armed Wespes were ever produced. The Sexton outnumbered it more than three to one. The American M7 Priest fired a heavier shell, 33 lb versus 25, with nearly two and a half times more explosive filler per round, but the Priest’s sustained rate of fire was only three to four rounds per minute compared to the Sexton’s five to eight.

In terms of total weight of metal delivered per minute, the Sexton matched or exceeded the Priest. And critically, it fired the same ammunition as every other field gun in the British Army. That single advantage, ammunition commonality, was the entire reason the Sexton existed. And it was enough. The Sexton remained in British service with the Army of the Rhine until 1956.

Portugal operated them into the 1980s, more than 35 years of continuous service. India, South Africa, and the Netherlands all fielded Sextons after the war. At least 15 to 20 survive in museums worldwide, including a reportedly running example at the Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson. On that gray morning off Gold Beach, a gun built in a Canadian locomotive factory using a tank chassis declared obsolete before ever saw combat, mounted with a gun designed in the 1930s, proved something that British military engineering demonstrated again and again

throughout the war. The best weapon is not always the biggest, the newest, or the most technically advanced. Sometimes the best weapon is the one that fires the right ammunition from the right place at the right time. The Sexton did exactly that, from 7 miles out at sea, through the hedgerows of Normandy, across the Rhine, and into the heart of Germany. The numbers confirm it.

The war diaries recorded British engineering solved the problem others could not.

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.