The ‘Forgotten’ British Armoured Car Where Only 4 Went To War (And All Were Captured) –  Hw

1938 Guy Motors factory, Wolverampton. British engineers are assembling what will become the most consequential armored car nobody remembers. The vehicle weighs just over five tons. Its engine produces a modest 55 brake horsepower. The War Office has classified it not as an armored car, but as a tank lightw wheeled Mark1, a name so clumsy it practically guarantees obscurity. Only 101 will ever be built.

Of those, just six will cross the English Channel. All six will be lost in France by June 1940. And yet, this forgettable little vehicle will pioneer a manufacturing revolution that saves countless British lives, spawn over 5,000 successes, and carry a secret mission to protect the royal family from Nazi invasion.

This is the guy armored car, and it changed everything to understand why Britain needed the guy. You have to understand how badly the British army had neglected wheeled reconnaissance vehicles throughout the 1930s. For most of that decade, military doctrine held that light tanks should handle battlefield scouting. Armored cars were relegated to longrange road patrols, a colonial policing role filled by aging machines designed in the late 1920s.

The six- wheeled launcher was obsolete. The Morris CS9, the most common British armored car at the start of the war, was a converted commercial truck with an open topped turret and just 7 mm of riveted steel for protection. Those rivets were a death sentence. When a bullet struck riveted armor plate, the rivets sheared off and became secondary projectiles inside the crew compartment.

Meanwhile, Germany was fielding purpose-built armored cars with enclosed turrets, autoc cannons, and four-wheel independent suspension. France had the Panhard 178 with a 25mm anti-tank gun. Britain had converted lorries with open tops. By 1938, the War Office finally recognized this was no longer acceptable. The requirement called for a purpose-built four-wheel drive armored car with an enclosed turret, proper protection, and a radio as standard.

The specification went out to several manufacturers, including Guy, Carrier, Morris, and Alvis. Each submitted a 4×4 chassis carrying an armored body designed by Wulitch Arsenal. Guy Motors entered their quad antart artillery tractor chassis, a proven design already in production, it was not the most advanced option, but in a rearmament program racing against the clock, it was the one that could get armored cars rolling off the assembly line fastest.

Pragmatism won the contract. Five prototypes were built in mild steel during 1938. Two went through troop trials with the second dragoon guards. One was shipped to Egypt where it overheated badly, an early sign of the mechanical limitations that would follow the design. Despite those cooling problems, the War Office approved serial production.

The first vehicles rolled off the line in January 1939. The Guy was a compact three-man vehicle with its engine mounted at the rear, making it the first British rear engine four-wheel drive armored car. The Meadows 4 ELA inline 4-cylinder petrol engine displaced 3,686 cm. Power reached all four wheels through a four-speed manual gearbox with a transfer box to rigid front and rear axles on semi-eleptical leaf springs.

Top speed on a paved road was 40 mph. Cross country range was roughly 99 mi. Road range reached 210 mi. The crew consisted of a driver seated centrally in a raised forward compartment and a commander and gunner sharing a two-man turret with full 360 degree traverse. A number 19 wireless set came standard, a genuine tactical advantage over many German and French armored cars that lacked factory fitted radios.

The internal volume was surprisingly generous for a vehicle of this weight class with stowage capacity for roughly 560 kg of equipment. Vision was provided through slotted visors and an episcope for the driver, giving reasonable situational awareness for the period. Production split into two marks. The Mark1 carried a Vicar’s50in water cooled machine gun and a coaxial vicar’s 303in machine gun.

50 were built. The Mark 1A replaced both weapons with a 15 mm bezer aircooled machine gun and a coaxial 7.92 mm baser. 51 of this improved variant were produced. According to ordinance trials data, the 15mm Bessa could penetrate 25 mm of armor at 100 meters. A meaningful improvement over the water called Vicar’s guns.

Armor protection across both marks was 14 mm of rolled steel plate. The hull front was sloped at 40°, giving an effective thickness against incoming fire of roughly 18 mm. This stopped small arms fire and shell splinters at combat ranges. But the real innovation was not the thickness of the armor. It was how the armor was joined together.

The War Office contract specified riveted construction, the standard for British armored vehicles in the late 1930s. Guy Motors refused. They understood that rivets killed crews and they proposed welding the entire hull and turret instead. The War Office dismissed the idea as impractical. Guy pressed ahead anyway, funding the research out of their own pocket.

Their engineers developed special rotating jigs that held the hull during assembly and positioned the plates at the optimal angle for the welder. Individual 15 mm plates were thin and fragile on their own, but once welded into a complete structure, the hull became rigid, sound, and free of the lethal rivet problem.

This made the guy the first British armored fighting vehicle with an all-welded hull. It was a milestone in military manufacturing achieved not by a government arsenal, but by a private company in the West Midlands, spending its own money. The production run totaled 101 vehicles between January 1939 and October 1940.

All assembled at Guy’s falling park factory in Wolverampton. By autumn 1940, Guy could not scale output further without sacrificing their other critical war work. The design was transferred to the roots group for mass production as the Humber armored car. Guy supplied the first 140 welded holes and turrets along with their rotating jigs and welding patents completely free of charge.

Now, before we see where these vehicles actually fought, if you are enjoying this deep dive into forgotten British engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let us get into the combat record. Of the 101 guys produced, only six ever left Britain for a combat zone.

Those six were assigned to the Phantom Armored Car Squadron, part of number three British Air Mission, a GHQ liaison unit commanded by Captain Ja W of the 12th Royal Lancers. Phantom was not a conventional fighting unit. Its mission was to patrol close to the front lines, observe the battle’s progress, and radio intelligence directly to the commander-in-chief’s headquarters, bypassing the slow, normal communication chain.

The squadron comprised two mobile troops of armored cars, plus a motorcycle platoon from the Queen Victoria rifles. They were based at Valencian in northern France near the Belgian border. When Germany invaded the Low Countries on May 10th, 1940, Phantom received the code word Azra and immediately crossed into Belgium. According to the unit’s operational records, armored car patrols confirmed that Tongas had been occupied by 11:30 on the first morning.

They reported disorderly Belgian withdrawals west of Hassel. Over the following days, Phantom relocated four times in 15 hours through the chaos of the Allied retreat. By the 18th of May, the squadron was supporting McForce. General Mason McFarland’s composite formation along the Escort River.

On the 23rd of May, Phantom received orders directly from the commander-in-chief to investigate the situation west of Hayesbrook. Patrol supported the fourth division at Burks and covered the withdrawal of the 144th Infantry Brigade from Wormhound, pulling out just an hour before SS troops committed the infamous Wormhound massacre.

The only documented direct engagement of a guy armored car took place on May 27th, 1940 near Escalbeck. A guy from Phantom Squadron approached a cafe called Hunter Rest on the road to Zigga Chappelle. As the vehicle pulled out of a Tjunction, a German anti-tank gun fired. The round struck the car, which rolled forward into a shallow ditch and was hit again. It caught fire.

One crew member died instantly. The other two reached the cafe where SS troops closed in. A brutal hand-to-hand fight followed. Second Lieutenant Piers Richard Edge of the 12th Lancers, 25 years old, and Lance Corporal Leonard Frank Weber of the Queen Victoria Rifles, 19 years old, were both killed. Their bodies were buried in a hasty roadside grave.

Edgecom’s identity remained unconfirmed for 80 years until amateur historian Andrew Nuome tracked down the evidence. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission officially rededicated his headstone on May 27th, 2022. Air Marshal Barrett praised Phantom’s intelligence work. A staff officer at British Air Forces in France wrote on May 28th, 1940 that when Phantom closed down, the main source of information in the north was gone.

All six guys sent to France were lost. The remaining 95 vehicles served across Britain in home defense, airfield protection and training roles. 14 guy Mark 1 went to the first Belgian armored car squadron in October 1941. The Dutch armored car squadron of the Princess Irene Brigade received four or five Mark 1’s. Four more guys received perhaps the most extraordinary assignment of any British vehicle in the war.

These were allocated to the coats mission, a top secret contingency plan to evacuate King George V 6th, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret if Germany invaded. The guns were removed and extra passenger seats fitted under left tenant W. A Morris of the 12th Lancers. These modified guys stood ready at Windsor from July 1940 to March 1941 with evacuation routes plotted to Liverpool or Hollyhead for a sea crossing to Canada.

The plan designated a chain of country houses as safe refugees along the route, including Newbie Hall, Pitchford Hall, and Madressfield Court. If the Germans had pushed as far as the Midlands, the royal family would have been driven to the coast and evacuated to Hatley Castle on Vancouver Island. The mission was led by Major James Coats of the Cold Stream Guards and eventually disbanded in 1942 when the invasion threat receded.

So, the guy barely fought. Why does it matter? Because its welding revolution cascaded through the entire British armored vehicle industry. When Guy handed their design to the roots group, the Humber Mark1 that resulted was essentially a Guy Hull on a more powerful carrier chassis with 90 horsepower instead of 55.

Over 5,400 Humber armored cars were built between 1941 and 1945. They served in North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and the final drive into Germany. Every single one traced its welded hull directly back to the little guy from Wolverampton. In 1953, the Royal Commission for Awards to Inventors recognized Guy Motors for their contribution, awarding a token £5,000, acknowledging that the freely shared welding innovation, had saved a considerable number of lives and the country money.

How did the guy compare to its enemies? The German SDKZ22, its closest counterpart, was faster at 80 to 90 km/h. It carried a 20 millimeter autoc cannon with both armor-piercing and high explosive rounds, giving it anti-armour capability the guy’s machine guns could not match. But the SDKFZ 222 had an open topped turret covered only by wire mesh, leaving crews exposed to grenades and overhead bursts.

The guy’s fully enclosed turret and standard wireless set were genuine advantages in the confusion of fast-moving battle. The French Panhard 178 was the finest armored car in Western Europe in 1940 with a 25 mm gun capable of penetrating 40 mm of armor. According to captured equipment assessments, it outclassed the Guy in firepower, protection, and mobility.

But the Panhard had a riveted hull, and the Germans captured roughly 190 of them and pressed them into service. The Guy’s welded construction was the more forward-thinking design philosophy. The Guy also proved the concept of a dedicated 4×4 armored car for the British army. Before the Guy, British reconnaissance vehicles were either converted trucks or colonial era six-wheelers.

The guy established the template rear-mounted engine, four-wheel drive, sloped welded armor, enclosed turret that every subsequent British armored car would follow. The Dameler armored car, often wrongly described as the guy’s direct descendant, was actually a parallel development from the BA Dingo Scout car program. But the Dameler inherited the same tank lightw wheeled classification the guy had pioneered.

It carried a two-p pounder gun capable of destroying enemy armor, making it the war-winning vehicle the guy was too early and too lightly armed to become. Today, one guy armored car survives. It sits at the tank museum in Bovington. A Mark 1 in static display. No other example exists anywhere in the world.

Guy Motors itself never recovered its wartime position. The company entered receiverhip in 1961, was bought by Jaguar for £800,000, absorbed into British land, and the Fallings Park factory closed permanently in August 1982. 101 built, six sent to war, all six lost, but the welded hull they pioneered became the foundation of thousands of armored cars that fought from Elamagne to the Rine.

The Phantom Squadron’s intelligence work delivered from those guy turrets in the chaos of France was described by the commander-in-chief’s own staff as irreplaceable. The Coats mission guys stood ready to carry a future queen to safety. And at a roadside cafe in Fllanders, a crew fought to the death in a vehicle history chose to forget.

The guy was underpowered, undergunned, and built in tiny numbers. It was also the vehicle that taught Britain how to build armored cars for a world war. That is British engineering under pressure. Innovation when it mattered

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.