Why This ‘Swimming’ British Tank Sank 27 Times On D-Day — And Saved Thousands On Every Other Beach –  Hw

June 6th, 1944, 0540 hours. The English Channel, 6,000 yards off Omaha Beach. Yellow flags snap up on eight landing craft. Ramps drop 33-ton Sherman tanks wrapped in canvas screens that make them look like oversized bathtubs roll forward into the heaving gray sea. The first tank off LCT 600 paddles toward shore for about 100 yards, then it vanishes beneath the surface.

Within 30 minutes, 27 of 29 tanks launched from the 741st Tank Battalion have sunk to the bottom of the channel. Crews claw at waterlogged canvas, fight suction from sinking steel, and gasp for air through emergency breathing sets designed to give them 5 minutes of oxygen. Some make it to the surface, some do not.

Here is what makes this disaster unforgivable. On the same morning, in the same sea, using the same tanks built to the same British design, crews at Sword Beach put 31 of 34 DD Shermans onto the sand. At Utah, 27 of 28 made it ashore. The technology worked. British engineering had solved the impossible problem of making a tank float.

What failed at Omaha was not the invention, it was the decision-making of the men who used it. The problem was simple to describe and devastating in practice. Every amphibious invasion in the war faced the same lethal gap. Infantry hit the beach with rifles and grenades. Tanks arrived later on landing craft.

In the minutes between, soldiers had no armored support against fortified positions, concrete bunkers, and machine gun nests. At Dieppe in 1942, Canadian infantry crossed open beaches without tank support for agonizing minutes. The result was a massacre. Over 900 Canadians died and nearly 2,000 were captured.

The Germans understood this vulnerability and built their Atlantic Wall defenses around it. At Omaha specifically, the bluffs overlooking the beach contained eight concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, 18 anti-tank guns, and 85 machine gun positions. Every one of those positions was designed to slaughter infantry in the open during those first minutes before armor arrived.

The question that British engineers needed to answer was this: How do you get a tank onto a beach at the same time as the infantry without a landing craft that makes an enormous target for shore batteries? Nicholas Straussler, a Hungarian-born British citizen, had been wrestling with this question since 1927. His early designs used collapsible floats bolted to the sides of tanks, but they were as big as the vehicle itself, impractical.

By 1934, he abandoned that approach entirely and conceived something far more elegant, a collapsible canvas screen attached to a steel platform welded around the tank hull at mudguard level. When inflated by compressed air, the screen rose to a height of 12 ft 6 in, displacing enough water to float 33 tons of steel.

36 rubber tubes exerted roughly 600 lb of upward pressure each, producing about 12 tons of total lift. Two brass propellers, around 28 in in diameter, bolted to the rear and driven by the tank engine through crown wheel gears, pushed the vehicle through water at four knots. That is walking pace. The name Duplex Drive referred to this dual propulsion, propellers in the sea and tracks on land.

Soldiers nicknamed it the Donald Duck after the DD initials. According to Straussler’s own engineering notes preserved at the Tank Museum in Bovington, the system was designed for a maximum sea state of force three with waves no higher than 2 ft. The freeboard, meaning the distance between the waterline and the top of the canvas screen, was approximately 3 ft.

Anything higher than that poured straight into the tank. Major William Duncan, who ran the American DD training school in Devon, wrote in a classified assessment dated April 30th, 1944 that any force four sea with waves of 2 ft or more were, in his words, “very dangerous.” The system was a marvel of British engineering.

It was also unforgiving of overconfidence. Major General Percy Hobart, recalled from the Home Guard by Churchill himself, took command of the 79th Armoured Division in March of 1943 and turned it into the parent unit for every specialist assault vehicle Britain would field on D-Day. Hobart did not invent the DD tank, that was Straussler’s achievement entirely.

What Hobart did was train 10 regiments in its use and develop the doctrine that would determine whether the tanks lived or died. His training pipeline ran crews through fresh water trials at Fritton Lake in Norfolk, then salt water exercises at Stokes Bay on the Solent. British regiments had their DD Shermans from mid-19 43.

They trained for a full year before Normandy. Now, before we see what happened when these tanks met the real channel, 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 us get into the disaster at Omaha Beach. Two American tank battalions carried DD Shermans.

The 741st was assigned the Eastern Sector. The 743rd covered the Western Sector. Both carried 32 DD tanks each. Rear Admiral Hall’s operation order set launch distance of 6,000 yd. The order acknowledged that seas might be unsuitable, but it failed to establish who had the authority to cancel the launch or at what point that decision should be made. This was the fatal flaw.

British doctrine gave local commanders clear authority to adapt on the spot. The American plan had no such mechanism. At around 0505 hours, two conversations happened simultaneously on parallel lines of landing craft. On the western side, Captain Ned Elder of the 743rd looked at the 4-6 ft swells pounding his LCT and made a decision.

He told his naval counterpart, Lieutenant Dean Rockwell, that his tanks would not swim. All 32 would ride their landing craft directly to the sand. On the eastern side, Captain James Thornton of the 741st radioed Captain Charles Young. According to the 741st’s after-action report, both commanders agreed that the advantage to be gained by launching justified the risk.

At 0540, 29 tanks rolled into the channel. The sea conditions were roughly double the design limit. Waves averaged 3 to 4 ft with occasional crests of 6 ft. Wind blew 10 to 18 kn from the northwest, directly on shore. A strong lateral current pushed the swimming tanks eastward, forcing them broadside to the waves, the most dangerous possible orientation.

The first tank sank within 100 yd. Ensign Henry Sullivan, commanding LCT 600, watched it disappear and made the decision to stop launching his remaining three tanks. He carried them to shore instead. Across the other seven craft, tank after tank went under. Broken struts, torn canvas, engines choked with salt water. Of 29 launched, 27 sank.

Only two reached the beach under their own power. Commanded by Sergeant George Geddes and Staff Sergeant Turner Shepherd, the crews were equipped with emergency breathing apparatus, life vests, inflatable rafts, and large knives for cutting through canvas. Most men stood on deck during the swim rather than inside the hull, which gave them a fighting chance to escape.

The 741st’s after-action report states that the majority of crews reached the surface and were rescued by small craft. The exact number who drowned during the sinkings, as opposed to later combat on the beach, remains disputed. The battalion lost 45 killed across the entire day, but how many died in the water versus on the sand is genuinely unclear.

The image of five men sealed inside a steel coffin sinking to the bottom is largely inaccurate as a general description, since most crew were topside, but the driver, enclosed in the hull, was the most vulnerable, and the collapsing canvas could trap anyone it tangled around. While 33 tons of sinking metal created suction strong enough to drag a swimmer under.

Now, compare Omaha to what happened on the British beaches. At Sword, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars launched from 5,000 yd after their flotilla officer closed the distance from the originally planned 7,000. Major Derek Wurmald reported that all tanks were launched after closing to 5,000 yd, and that the sea looked alarming from the craft, but the decision to float proved correct.

Over 90% reached the sand. They arrived 5 to 7 minutes before the infantry, exactly as designed. Lance Corporal Patrick Hennessy described the swim as an hour of battering through rough seas. Then, within a minute of dropping the screen, his crew fired their first shot. At Juno, the Canadian 1st Hussars launched 19 tanks from 4,000 yards.

14 reached shore ahead of the Regina Rifle Regiment. Five sank, including Major Duncan’s tank. Sergeant Leo Gariepy watched it vanish. With four heads bobbing in the water, the crew survived. The Fort Garry Horse refused to launch at sea entirely, and all their tanks were landed directly. At Gold, the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards abandoned the 5,000-yd plan due to choppy conditions and landed directly on the beach.

At Utah, the 70th Tank Battalion, combat veterans from North Africa, launched 28 tanks from just 1,000 yards. 27 made it. The pattern is undeniable. Where commanders adapted, the tank survived. Where rigid planning met reality and nobody had authority to override, men died. Captain Elder, who saved the 743rd, had been an instructor at the DD training school itself.

He understood the limits of the canvas screen the way a pilot understands a stall speed. Captain Thornton lacked that intimate knowledge. Elder was killed in action less than 2 weeks later, leaving behind a new bride and a son he would never meet. The aftermath revealed the full cost of the decision gap.

Omaha Beach suffered an estimated 2,400 to 3,700 casualties on D-Day. The loss of armored support during the critical first hour was a major contributing factor. German machine gunner Heinrich Severloh at position WN62 fired throughout the morning with virtually no Allied tanks suppressing him. He only retreated in the afternoon when Shermans from Elder’s 743rd, the battalion that had landed directly, appeared from the west.

At Sword Beach, Würmhold’s DD tanks suppressed the defenses so effectively that, in his own report, the two assault infantry companies crossed the beach without being fired on by small arms. The Canadians at Juno credited the first Hussars with making possible the overwhelming of the defenses. Beyond D-Day, DD tanks proved their worth repeatedly.

They crossed the Western Scheldt in October of 1944. They swam the Rhine in March of 1945 during Operation Plunder. The Staffordshire Yeomanry made the last combat swimming operation of the war at the River Elbe on April 29th, 1945. The design was improved after Normandy with a strengthened Mark II version featuring an extended screen, better bilge pumps, and self-locking struts.

Over a thousand Sherman DD conversions were produced across Britain and America. A tribute to the manufacturing simplicity of Straussler’s canvas and rubber system. Today, at least 22 confirmed DD tank wrecks rest on the seabed off Omaha Beach. Their gun barrels still point toward the shore they never reached. At the Tank Museum in Bovington, a single M4A2 DD Sherman sits with its original canvas screen intact.

The only surviving example with its flotation system preserved. At Courseulles-sur-Mer in Normandy, the Canadian tank Bold, recovered from the sea in 1971, stands in a square named after Sergeant Gariepy. The DD Sherman was not a failure. It was a British invention that worked exactly as designed when operated within its limits and by commanders given the authority to adapt.

On four beaches, it delivered tanks ahead of the infantry and saved lives. On one beach, rigid planning, inadequate authority structures, and a launch into seas double the design maximum turned a British engineering triumph into an American tragedy. The canvas held when the commanders did their jobs. 27 tanks sit on the bottom of the channel because on one stretch of Norman coastline, nobody had the power to say no.

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.