Why This ‘Flat’ British Carrier Could Vanish Behind A Hedge Then Rise Twelve Feet To Kill – Hww

1943, County Commercial Cars Workshop, Fleet, Hampshire. A man who builds truck conversion kits for a living has just finished something that does not look like it belongs on a battlefield. It does not look like it belongs anywhere. The vehicle is a flat steel box on tracks, barely waist-high. Two men lie face-down inside it.

And when a hydraulic pump activates, the entire front end of the machine rises into the air like the head of an insect, pushing a pair of Bren guns nearly 12 ft off the ground. The man who built it is Dennis James Tap. He patented this idea 6 years earlier. The British Army told him to keep going.

They called it the Praying Mantis. It would become the strangest armored vehicle Britain ever produced, and one of the most forward-thinking designs of the entire war. To understand why Tap built this machine, you need to understand what killed soldiers behind walls. The problem was ancient and unsolved. Anytime a defender needed to fire over a wall, a hedgerow, or an embankment, he had to expose his head and shoulders above the obstacle.

That exposure, even for a few seconds, was lethal. Tap knew this firsthand. He had served as a machine gunner in the British Army during World War I. In the trenches, raising your head above the parapet to fire meant offering it to a sniper on the other side. At Gallipoli, the casualties from this exposure grew so severe that Lance Corporal William Beach invented the periscope rifle in May of 1915, allowing soldiers to aim and fire without lifting their heads above the trench line.

But periscope rifles were fragile, inaccurate, and limited to one man at a time. Captain Leslie Vickers of the Seaforth Highlanders wrote in 1917 that his men quickly learned it was unhealthy to put their heads above the parapet any more than necessary. The fundamental problem remained. If you wanted to deliver concentrated fire over an obstacle, somebody had to be exposed.

Suppressive fire from a Vickers gun required a crew of three men, all visible above the parapet. A Lewis gun needed at least two. The more firepower you wanted over the wall, the more men you lost getting it there. After the war, Tap and his brother Percy went into the transport business, hauling meat from Smithfield Market.

Finding standard trucks too small, they converted a vehicle to a twin rear axle design that could carry 2 tons. That mechanical talent led them to found County Commercial Cars Limited in 1929, converting Ford trucks from two-axle to three-axle configurations. Ford eventually adopted their kits for factory production.

Tap was an engineer by instinct, not training. And the idea he had carried since the trenches, a machine that could raise weapons over cover without exposing anyone, never left him. In 1937, he filed a patent for an elevating armored fighting vehicle. The concept was simple. A tracked carrier would drive up behind a wall or hedgerow.

A hydraulic system would then raise the weapons above the obstacle. The crew would fire from behind the cover, protected by both the obstacle and the vehicle’s own armor. When finished, the weapons would lower, and the vehicle would withdraw, never having shown more than a gun turret above the wall. No nation on Earth had anything like it.

Tap built his first prototype on a custom chassis with Carden Loyd suspension, thin tracks, and four road wheels. It carried a single crewman. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, he demonstrated it to the War Office. According to the Tank Museum’s official account, the War Office rejected the single crew design because it asked too much of one person, but they saw enough promise to authorize a second prototype with two crewmen.

This was critical. In 1940, with the German invasion of Britain appearing imminent under Operation Sealion, the War Office was entertaining every unconventional idea it could find. Britain had abandoned over 400 tanks and 2,400 heavy guns at Dunkirk. Only 167 anti-tank guns remained in the entire country. Ammunition was so scarce that regulations forbade wasting a single round on training.

In this climate of desperation, Tap’s strange machine got a second chance. The second prototype appeared in 1943, built on the chassis of the Universal Carrier. This was a natural choice. The Universal Carrier was the most produced armored fighting vehicle in history, with roughly 113,000 manufactured across Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

It was proven, reliable, and available. Tap kept the carrier’s Ford flathead V8 engine, a 3.9 L unit producing 85 brake horsepower. He kept the distinctive track-bending steering system, which warped the tracks laterally for gentle turns instead of braking them. Everything else, he replaced. The new superstructure had three components, each named after parts of the insect it resembled.

The control chamber was a long armored box where both crew members, driver and gunner, lay face-down with their heads toward the front. At their feet sat the hydraulic system. Above the control chamber was the head, a section that could pivot independently up and down for fine elevation adjustments. On top of the head sat the helmet, a small rotating turret housing .

303 caliber Bren light machine guns mounted side by side, plus a small grappling gun. From the enemy’s perspective, the helmet presented a target not much larger than a man’s head. The hydraulic system could elevate the entire control chamber to roughly 55°, pushing the helmet turret to a maximum height of 11 and 1/2 ft, or 3.

48 m, above the ground. When fully lowered, the Mantis sat low enough to hide behind tall grass. According to one detailed account, the vehicle weighed 5.2 long tons and could reach 25 mph on road. It could drive in any position, fully lowered, partially raised, or at maximum extension. The original design also called for the control chamber to traverse left and right, giving the gunner a wider firing arc.

Whether this lateral movement functioned on the final prototype is unclear from surviving records. Picture the experience from the crew’s perspective. You’re lying face-down in a sealed metal box roughly the width of a coffin. You cannot see outside except through small vision slits. The Ford V8 engine rumbles directly below you.

When the hydraulic pump engages, the entire box you’re lying in tilts upward, pressing your body weight backward toward your feet. At full elevation, you’re angled at 55°, head up, feet down, swaying with every movement of the tracks beneath you. Your job is to aim and fire two Bren guns at targets you can barely see while the whole structure pitches and rolls.

The Mantis demanded that its crew fight gravity, nausea, and the enemy simultaneously. Now, before we get into what happened during trials, if you’re enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Right, let us get back to the Mantis. The trials were a disaster.

The Tank Museum’s official summary states plainly that the design proved impractical. The controls were difficult to use, and the motion made the crews ill. The specific problems were devastating. Motion sickness was the primary failure. Lying face-down inside a narrow steel box while it swayed and bounced across rough terrain was physiologically unbearable.

Multiple accounts from crew members described severe nausea. The elevated compartment amplified every bump and vibration from the tracks below, swinging the crew through arcs that the human inner ear simply could not tolerate. No amount of training or acclimatization solved this. Control difficulty compounded the problem.

Operating driving controls, elevation mechanisms, and weapons while lying prone demanded unnatural body positions. Even with two crew members splitting the workload, the arrangement was too awkward for sustained use. The first prototype had already proven that one man could not manage everything. The second proved that two men in this configuration could not manage it either.

Armor protection was minimal. With only 6 to 9 mm of steel, the Mantis could stop small arms fire and shrapnel, but nothing heavier. If caught in the open without an obstacle to shelter behind, the vehicle and its crew were exposed. The project was officially abandoned in 1944.

By a brutal coincidence, the exact tactical problem the Praying Mantis was built to solve erupted in Normandy that same summer. The bocage, the hedgerow country of northern France, consisted of massive earthen embankments averaging 4 ft high, but reaching up to 15 ft, topped with centuries-old hedges and tangled root systems.

Norman farmers had packed rocks into these banks for generations, creating walls that were half earth, half living fortification. Each field was enclosed on all sides, rarely more than 300 ft across, turning the countryside into a maze of natural fortresses. The Germans had occupied this terrain for 4 years and knew every sight line.

They dug fighting positions directly into the embankments, pre-registered their mortars on every field opening, and turned each hedgerow gap into a kill zone. General Omar Bradley called it the damnedest country he had ever seen. Allied infantry trying to fire over these embankments took catastrophic losses.

Every time a soldier raised his rifle above the hedgerow, he became a target. American casualties in the bocage fighting around Saint-Lô reached an estimated 40,000 for a gain of barely 20 miles. Infantry rifle companies averaged 60% casualties among enlisted men, and 68% among officers. The solution that eventually worked was nothing like the Mantis.

Sergeant Curtis Culin Jr. of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron welded scrap metal from German beach obstacles into cutting blades on a Sherman tank’s bow. These Rhino tanks sliced through hedgerows rather than trying to rise above them. General Bradley held the device a secret until Operation Cobra on July 25th, 1944, for maximum surprise.

The British equivalent, called Prongs, was fitted to Churchill tanks during Operation Bluecoat. The Mantis never reached Normandy. No evidence exists that it was considered for the campaign, but the hedgerow nightmare validated the exact problem Tap had identified 7 years earlier. Firing over obstacles without exposing the crew was not a theoretical concern.

It was a life-and-death tactical challenge that cost tens of thousands of casualties. The Praying Mantis failed as a vehicle, but Tap’s core idea, separating the weapon from the hull to fire from behind cover proved remarkably durable. According to Tank Encyclopedia, Tapp’s concept of raising weapons above cover without exposing the vehicle would later be employed by various armored vehicles.

The most direct descendant was the FV1620 Humber Hornet, developed in the 1950s. Built on the Humber Pig armored truck chassis, it mounted two Malkara anti-tank guided missiles on a hydraulically operated retractable boom. The boom stayed lowered during movement. When a target appeared, it raised for firing.

Once the missile launched, the boom dropped again, reducing the vehicle silhouette. This was Tapp’s concept applied to guided missiles. Around 250 were produced, and the Malkara carried a 26 kg warhead, the largest ever fitted to an anti-tank guided missile. The Soviet Union arrived at the same principle independently. The BRDM-2 reconnaissance vehicle spawned multiple variants with retractable missile launchers.

The 9P148 mounted five Spandrel anti-tank missiles on a rail that lowered flush during travel and raised for combat. Over 4,000 were built, serving more than 40 countries. No German or American vehicle of the 1940s attempted anything comparable to the Mantis concept. The Germans addressed the defilade firing problem through conventional hold-down tactics, reversing tanks into prepared positions where only the turret showed above a ridge.

This required pre-planned positions and offered no ability to fire over vertical obstacles like walls. The standard German approach to hedgerow fighting in Normandy was to dig into the embankment itself, not to rise above it. The Americans relied on overwhelming firepower and numbers, eventually solving the hedgerow problem by cutting through obstacles rather than firing over them.

Neither nation attempted a vehicle that could elevate its weapons independently of its hull. Tapp’s approach was unique, and it stayed unique for over a decade until the Humber Hornet proved the principle could work with guided missiles instead of machine guns. The first Praying Mantis prototype was scrapped. The second survives at the Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset.

The Tank Museum considers it the strangest vehicle in their collection, and it regularly draws crowds who cannot quite believe what they are looking at. Its hydraulic pivoting mechanism still functions after eight decades, a testament to the build quality of County Commercial Cars engineering, even when the tactical concept itself could not work.

Visitors can see the narrow vision slits, the cramped prone positions where the crew once lay, and the twin Bren mountings in the tiny helmet turret. The museum featured it in Tank Chats number 13, presented by the late David Fletcher, their legendary historian. A comment preserved on Tank Encyclopedia from a former County Commercial Cars employee provides a rare personal connection.

The commenter wrote that he had worked for the company and met Mr. Ernest Tapp shortly before Tapp died, around 1964, and was amazed to later see footage of the vehicle’s development testing. Tapp spent his final decades building tractors. County Commercial Cars produced over 30,000 of them before manufacturing ended in 1995.

Modern armored vehicles have finally achieved what Tapp envisioned in 1937. Remote weapon stations across NATO armies allow crews to fire without any exposure at all. The Israeli Namer infantry fighting vehicle demonstrated a Spike missile pod that erects from and lowers flush into the turret roof. The Canadian Coyote reconnaissance vehicle carries a 10-m telescoping sensor mast that rises above cover while the hull stays hidden.

These systems accomplish through electronics and automation what Tapp tried to achieve through hydraulics and steel. They proved the concept was right. The technology of 1943 was not ready to deliver it. The Praying Mantis sits in Bovington today. Its control chamber still capable of that insectoid rise. It looks absurd.

Every visitor who sees it for the first time thinks the same thing the War Office officials thought in 1939, that cannot possibly work. They were right about the vehicle, but they were wrong about the idea. Ernest James Tapp, a butcher’s son turned truck engineer turned inventor, looked at the deadliest problem in positional warfare and designed a solution that was decades ahead of what any other nation attempted. The hydraulics still work.

The concept still works. The only thing that failed was the century. British engineering did not always produce weapons that reached the battlefield, but it produced ideas that reached the future. The Praying Mantis is proof.

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.