Why Britain’s WW1 Tank Designers Built A ‘Monster’ That Belonged In The Last War –  Hw

September 1939, two days after Britain declared war on Germany. A group of elderly men gathered in London. They were not retired. They were not delusional. They were the men who invented the tank. And the War Office had just asked them to do it again. Their instructions were simple. Build the biggest, heaviest, most heavily armored tank Britain had ever seen.

Build it to cross trenches, smash bunkers, and survive direct hits from field artillery. Build it for a war everyone believed would end exactly like the last one. Bogged down in mud along a fortified western front, they built it. An 80-tonon monster, 33 feet long, powered by a 600 horsepower diesel engine, driving electric motors.

It looked like it had crawled straight out of 1916. And by the time it was finished, the war it was designed for had already ceased to exist. This is the story of the TOG heavy tanks, the most spectacular dead end in British armored engineering, and the hidden innovations buried inside machines the world wrote off as jokes.

The committee called itself the old gang. The War Office gave it the formal title Special Vehicle Development Committee, but the men who sat on it preferred the acronym TOG, and they wore it as a badge of honor. Every single member had personal direct involvement in creating the world’s first tanks during World War I, Sir Albert Stern chaired the group.

A banker by profession, educated at Eaton and Oxford. Stern had served as secretary of the original landships committee in 1915 and later ran the entire mechanical warfare supply department. According to his own memoir, a senior official once asked him what qualified him to oversee tank production.

Stern answered that he was a banker. The official replied that this made it still more mysterious. Sir Eustus Tennyson Dangor had chaired the landships committee itself, appointed by Winston Churchill in February 1915. He was the Royal Navy’s director of naval construction, the man who designed HMS Hood.

Major Walter Gordon Wilson and Sir William Triton had been officially recognized by the 1919 Royal Commission on awards to inventors as the co-inventors of the tank. Wilson suggested extending the tracks around the entire vehicle to create the romboidal shape of the Mark1. Triton as managing director of William Foster and Company in Lincoln built every World War I tank prototype.

Sir Harry Ricardo designed the engines. His 150 horsepower six-cylinder motor powered all British heavy tanks from the Mark 5 onward. Over 8,000 Ricardo tank engines were manufactured during the Great War. Major General Sir Ernest Swinton originated the concept of a tracked armored fighting vehicle in October 1914 and coined the word tank as a code name.

In December 1915, these were the most qualified tank designers alive. The War Office assembled them because Britain feared a repeat of the Western Front stalemate. That fear was not irrational. France had built the Magino line. Germany had constructed the Sief Freed line, a 400-mile defensive system of bunkers, anti-tank ditches, and concrete obstacles.

The general staff expected the two armies to entrench between these fortifications exactly as they had in 1914. The specification coded RBM17, which some believe stood for really big machine, demanded extraordinary capabilities. The tank had to cross a 16t wide anti-tank ditch unaded. It had to climb a 7 ft wall. It had to survive hits from 47 mm and 37 mm anti-tank guns and from 105 mm howitzers at 100 yd.

Maximum speed was set at just 5 mph. Estimated weight was 70 to 75 tons. This was a siege engine, not a cavalry weapon. And the committee’s initial response was a modern turreted design. The military rejected it. The War Office demanded a more conservative World War I style vehicle with wraparound tracks and side sponssons.

The common narrative that outofouch old men imposed great war thinking on a modern conflict has it backwards. The retrograde specifications came from the generals, not from the designers. TOG 1 was built at William Foster and Company in Lincoln, the same factory that produced Little Willie and the Mark1. Construction began in February 1940.

The first trial took place on September 27, 1940. The machine was unmistakably a child of the Great War. Its tracks ran up over the top of the hull and back down in the classic romboidal layout identical to British tanks from 1916 through 1918. The hull had no suspension at all, riding directly on the tracks. It stretched 33t 3 in long, 10t 3 in wide, and 10 ft tall.

Designed weight with full armor was between 80 and 90 tons. Though the prototype tested lighter at around 65 tons because its cemented armor plates were never fully fitted. The engine was genuinely innovative. Harry Ricardo designed the Paxman Ricardo 12TP, a 59 liter V12 diesel producing 600 horsepower. The transmission was diesel electric.

Two generators fed two English electric traction motors, one per track. Steering worked through a potentiometer connected to the steering wheel that varied voltage to each side. Ferdinand and Porsche independently pursued an almost identical diesel electric concept for his Tiger prototype. The first official demonstration followed on October 6th, 1940.

Though notably without the two-p pounder gun installed in the turret, the results were discouraging. The electric motors overheated and burned out. They could not handle the generator’s full output. Top speed reached only 7 mph against the hoped for 8.5. The tank was three times longer than it was wide, making directional changes a constant struggle.

Trials continued through June 1941 before testing was halted for a transmission redesign. An SSS synchro self-shifting gearbox was installed by August 1941. By May 1943, a complete conversion to hydraulic drive was fitted. The tank reddes designated tog 1A. The hydraulic system also proved unsatisfactory, suffering from excessive time lag between the drivers inputs and the track response.

The prototype was sent to Chobam in early 1944 and vanished from records, presumably scrapped. Only one TOG 1 was ever built. TOG 2 authorized in May 1940 and first running on March 16, 1941 represented the committee’s preferred modern design. The most significant change was the tunnel track arrangement. Instead of climbing over the hull, the return track dropped below floor level in a recessed channel.

This freed space for a 70-in turret ring 10 in wider than a Cromwell’s. That turret ring would prove critical. The twin generator electric drive solved the overheating problem by using two separate generators side by side rather than cramming both into a single casing. After torsion bar suspension replaced the original unsprung rigid rollers in April 1943, the modified TOG 2 star, according to Paxman Company records, performed faultlessly in trials and became a reliable vehicle.

Now, before we look at how this monster compared to the tanks that actually fought the war, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let’s get into the numbers. TOG two star weighed 80 tons. 80.

According to contemporary reports, the prototype was so heavy they could only weigh half of it at a time. Hull length was 33t 3 in. Overall length with the gun was 37’9 in. Front armor was 76 mm. Side armor was 76 mm. The engine remained the same, 600 horsepower Paxman Ricardo diesel. Here is something almost every source on the internet gets wrong.

The TOG twoar does not carry a 17p pounder gun. The Tank Museum at Boington confirmed this in a December 2024 video. The weapon is a 28 pounder composite gun, a 28 pounder barrel based on the QF 3.7 in anti-aircraft gun mated to a 17 pounder breach and muzzle brake. It fires a 94 mm round, not the 76.2 mm shell of the standard 17 pounder.

This weapon sat on the developmental path toward the 32p pounder, eventually fitted to the A39 tortoise heavy assault tank. The turret itself used a metadine electromechanical traverse system, providing smooth, precise power rotation. This turret design built by Stoert and Pit was later adapted for the A30 Challenger cruiser tank in December 1941 when the tank board discussed mounting the 17 pounder in a tank.

The TOG 2 was the only British design with a turret ring large enough to accept it. The comparative numbers explain why the project died. The Churchill Mark 7 weighed 40.6 tons, roughly half the tog, yet carried 152 mm of frontal armor, double the tog 76. The Tiger 1 weighed 57 tons with 100 mm of frontal protection and a road speed of 45 kmh, more than three times the TOGS 14.

The Soviet East 2 weighed 46 tons with 120 mm of sloped frontal armor and a 122 mm gun. Even the American M26 Persing achieved 102 mm of frontal armor at just 42 tons. The TOG’s critical flaw was that every plate of armor was flat and vertical, providing zero ballistic advantage from angling. A sloped plate of equal thickness deflects far more energy because the shell must travel through more metal.

Every competitor exploited this principle. The TOG did not. Where it held a genuine edge was firepower. The 17 pounderclass weapons were among the finest anti-tank guns of the war. The standard 17 pounder achieved roughly 130 mm of penetration at 500 m with APCBC ammunition and over 200 mm with a PDS rounds available from mid 1944.

The 28 pounder on the TOG 2 star was at least as capable. But mounting a superior gun on an immobile platform is a questionable design philosophy when the enemy can simply drive around you. The American parallel is instructive. The M6 heavy tank weighed 57 tons with 83 to 100 mm of armor and a 76 mm main gun. It suffered an almost identical fate.

General Divas declared in December 1942 that due to its tremendous weight and limited tactical use. There was no requirement in the armored force for a heavy tank. 40 M6s were built. None saw combat. The TOG and the M6 were twin victims of the same realization. The heavy breakthrough tank was a concept without a mission.

The Soviets persisted with heavy tanks, fielding the KV1 and later the IS-2, but even they kept weights under 50 tons through disciplined use of sloped armor. The project had been effectively dead since late 1941. The Blitzkrieg conquest of France in May and June 1940 shattered every assumption about static warfare.

The trench stalemate never materialized. Mobile combined arms warfare was the new reality, and an 80ton tank that crawled at walking pace had no role in it. Making matters worse, Churchill’s accession as prime minister reactivated a 23-year personal grudge against Stern dating from their 1917 dispute over tank production.

The committee was systematically sidelined. The supreme irony is that the tank which ultimately filled the infantry support role the TOG was designed for was named the Churchill. On May 27, 1943, according to Paxsman Company records, the old gang assembled to watch a late trial. The TOG two star performed flawlessly. Six elderly pioneers stood watching their creation do everything it was designed to do in a war that no longer needed it.

The project was formally abandoned in 1944. Yet elements of the TOG program survived. The Paxman Ricardo 12TP engine became hugely successful powering British tank landing craft. Over 3,500 were produced during the war. The Stoett and Pit turret design influenced the A30 Challenger.

The 28 pounder gun evolved into the 32 pounder fitted to the Tortoise. Harry Ricardo went on to work with Frank Whittle on jet engines. The committee’s struggle with Britain’s restrictive railway loading gauge, which limited turret ring diameter and thus gun size throughout the war, contributed to the decision to disregard it entirely for the Centurion, Britain’s revolutionary postwar main battle tank.

The TOG 2’s 70-in turret ring had demonstrated that bigger rings meant bigger guns, and that Insight shaped every British tank that followed. The committee also designed an amphibious underwater tank concept. Stern, an amateur sailor, proposed launching tanks from converted whailing vessels. The idea went nowhere, but it proved that even in failure, these men never lacked imagination.

The sole surviving TOG 2 star has sat at the tank museum Boington since the 1950s. At 80 tons, it remains the heaviest tank in the entire collection. For decades, most visitors walked past without a second glance. Then, the video game World of Tanks turned it into one of the most beloved memes in gaming history. Players nickname platoon of three togs the Royal Navy.

The Tank Museum now sells extensive TOG merchandise and credits the game with launching the tank into viral popularity. Legend has it that the old gang chose their acronym knowing full well what it implied. Aging veterans having one last crack at the problem they solved a quarter century earlier. Whether true or not, the name stuck and the machine they created proved something important about military engineering.

The TOG tanks were a rational answer to a specific military problem. The specification came from the War Office. The designers were the most qualified tank engineers alive. The technology was genuinely innovative. Diesel electric drive, tunnel tracks enabling larger turret rings, experimental composite guns. The 28 pounder could destroy any tank in the war.

What killed the TOG was history itself. 6 weeks of Blitzkrieg rendered its fundamental concept obsolete. No amount of engineering brilliance could save an 80 ton siege engine in a war of 45 km perh Panzer thrusts. You can build the perfect weapon for the last war, but the next war will not cooperate. British engineering was not at fault.

The question was, and the men of the old gang, the inventors of the tank itself, built the finest possible answer to a question the battlefield had already stopped asking.

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.