The ‘Borrowed’ American Glider Tank Britain Dropped Behind The Rhine In Operation Varsity – Hw
March 24th, 1945. Just before 11:00 in the morning, 10:50 hours, over the east bank of the Rhine, eight General Aircraft Hamilcar gliders cast off from their Halifax tugs at 3,000 ft and began the silent descent into Germany. Inside each one sat an American light tank with its engine already running.
Exhaust fumes vented through special ducts. The crew strapped in for whatever the landing would bring. The tank was the M22 Locust. The Americans had built 830 of them. The Americans had decided after testing the design at the US Armored Board in September 1943 that they would never send their own paratroopers into combat with it.
260 crossed the Atlantic under Lend-Lease anyway. And now, on the largest single day airborne lift of the Second World War, eight British crews were about to do what no American airborne unit had ever attempted. They were going to land an American tank from the sky and fight in it. Britain had wanted an airborne tank since the summer of 1940.
The Germans had taken the Belgian fortress at Eben Emael with glider troops. They had taken Crete with paratroopers. In every case, the Fallschirmjäger had landed with no armor at all, and Churchill watched the lesson land. By June 1940, he had ordered Britain to build airborne forces of its own. The first answer was the Vickers Tetrarch.
It was a pre-war private venture light tank with a 2-pounder gun, never designed for the airborne role. Pressed into it because nothing else fit inside the new Hamilcar glider. Britain wanted something purpose-built. The trouble was British industry had no spare capacity to build it. So, in early 1941, the British Air Commission in Washington made a request to the US Ordnance Department.
They wanted a 9-to-10-ton tank, a 37-mm main gun, a coaxial Browning, three crew, 40 mph top speed, 40 to 50 mm of armor on the front and turret. Three American firms competed. General Motors offered a twin-engine welded design. The submission from J. Walter Christie failed the size requirements. The contract went in May 1941 to a small Indianapolis manufacturer called Marmon-Herrington, which had built the CTLS series of light export tanks for the Dutch.
A popular myth still circulates that General Motors designed the Locust. Per Hunnicutt’s 1992 reference work, that is wrong. GM lost on cost. The trials in 1942 were held at the GM proving grounds, and the location appears to be the source of the confusion. Marmon-Herrington designed it. Marmon-Herrington built every one of the 830 production tanks.
The British named it the Locust. The Americans never officially did. By the time the production tank rolled out of Indianapolis in March 1943, the war had moved on. The 37-mm gun could not penetrate a Tiger or a Panther frontally at any range. The side armor could not reliably stop a .50 caliber armor-piercing round, and the only American transport plan hauling the tank under slung from a C-54 Skymaster with the turret stowed inside the hull required a captured airfield and 24 minutes of work by six men to reassemble. In September 1943, the US
Armored Board declared the design inadequate. The tank itself weighed 7.4 metric tons combat loaded, three crew with the driver alone in the front of the hull, and commander, loader, and gunner sharing a small turret. The armor maximum was 25.4 mm on the turret front. The gun shield and the lower hull sloped at 30°.
The minimum was 9 and 1/2 mm on the roof. The engine was a Lycoming O-435-T air-cooled flat-six aircraft engine, 7.1 L producing 162 hp at 2800 revolutions per minute. Top speed on a road 40 mph. Range on a 57-gal tank around 110 mi. Though some sources push that to 135. The main gun was the 37-mm M6 in an M53 mount, 50 rounds stowed, semi-automatic, 360° of manual traverse in 15 seconds.
Per Honeycutt’s homogeneous armor tables at a 30° meet angle, the M51 armor-piercing capped round penetrated 53 mm at 500 yd, 46 mm at 1,000 yd, and 35 mm at 2,000. Against the 80-mm glacis of a Panther, that meant nothing. Against German infantry positions, light vehicles and field guns, it was usable. What made the Locust go to war was not the tank. It was the glider.
The General Aircraft Hamilcar Mark 1 first flew on March 27, 1942. 344 were built. 110-ft wingspan, 68-ft long, 36,000 lb maximum takeoff weight, a payload around 17,600 lb. The hold ran roughly 32-ft long, 7-ft 10-in wide, and just over 6-ft high. It was largely birch and spruce wood with fabric-covered plywood skin.
A Halifax bomber towed it at 100 mph. The two pilots sat in a tandem cockpit perched 15 ft above the ground on top of the fuselage. The fit between the Hamilcar and Locust was tight to the point of comedy. Per Flint’s 2006 study of British airborne armor, the tank crew stayed inside the tank for the entire flight.
The nose of the glider opened sideways. Just before landing, the driver started the tank engine inside the glider, vented through the ducts, and waited for the bump. On touchdown, the driver pulled a lanyard that released the holding shackles. Driving forward pulled a second line that swung the nose open.
If that nose jammed, and at Operation Varsity it did jam, the tank was expected to drive straight through the wooden front of the aircraft. Compare that to the American plan. According to David Fletcher of the Tank Museum at Bovington, the time it took to unload an M22 from a C54 on a battlefield meant that both tank and aircraft would make excellent targets for enemy fire.
A purpose-built American transport, the Fairchild C-82 Packet, was designed around the M22 and did not enter service until after the war ended. The Hamilcar was the only delivery system on earth that could put a fully armed M22 onto a German field ready to fight in seconds, and only Britain owned it. The British added their own touches, a wireless set number 19 mount welded into the turret, 4-in smoke grenade dischargers, a Bren light machine gun strapped to the outside of the turret for anti-aircraft work because there was no internal stowage left. Quick moment
here. If you’re finding this interesting, a like on this video genuinely helps the channel more than you would think. The algorithm pays attention. Now, let us see what these tanks actually did when the gliders cast off over the Rhine. Operation Varsity was the airborne component of the Rhine assault by Field Marshal Montgomery, launched alongside Operation Plunder on the night of March 23, 1945.
Over 1,500 troop carriers and 1,300 glider tug aircraft delivered the British 6th Airborne Division and the US 17th Airborne Division in daylight. Roughly 19,600 airborne troops landed in a single morning. The largest single day airborne lift of the war, the 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel G. R. D.
Stewart, a transferee from the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, contributed eight Locusts to the airlift per the regimental war diary. The airborne element was three officers and 24 enlisted men, two troops of three Locusts each, plus a two-tank headquarters troop. They loaded at Tarrant Rushton in Dorset between March 17 and 20, then ferried to RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk to shorten the flight.
Take off 0730 hours, cast off 1050 over landing zone P, east of the Diersfordter Wald and west of Hamminkeln. The after-action report by Stewart, transcribed by the Pegasus archive, is the cleanest contemporary account that exists. Eight gliders departed. Seven reached the landing zone. The Hamilcar of Sergeant Dawson, in the exact words of the war diary, was reported to have been shot out of the air.
The crew was killed. Of the seven that arrived, one somersaulted on touchdown and landed inverted, crew unhurt. One drove out through the wall of a house, a runner with its main gun and machine gun out of action. One was damaged on the way to the rendezvous and fought from a static position in front of the 12th Parachute Battalion all day.
And one, the rear link tank commanded by Lieutenant Kenwood, landed cleanly and was in action immediately, supporting American paratroopers clearing a farm building. The war diary records that the tank of Kenwood was brewed up by an 88 mm self-propelled gun. Regimental tradition, repeated by veterans afterwards, says the duel was actually with a Panther tank at point-blank range, and that Kenwood fired a dozen 37 mm rounds with no visible effect before being knocked out.
Tank Encyclopedia plausibly suggests a Sturmgeschütz III from Brigade 394. The records disagree. But every version agrees that the crew of Kenwood rammed the jammed nose door of the Hamilcar, broke straight through the wooden front of the glider, engaged enemy armor within minutes, and that Kenwood and at least one crewman survived.
Four tanks reached the rendezvous on a hill marked on military maps as feature 1847, alongside the railway embankment. They came under medium machine gun fire and heavier artillery almost immediately. A platoon from the 12th Devons reinforced them. The platoon commander was killed. A regimental troop sergeant was wounded. By dusk, of those four tanks, only two were still fully fit for action.
One had a damaged 37 mm gun. One had a damaged machine gun. What they held mattered. Per the report by Stewart, the position was vital because it commanded 6th Airborne Division Headquarters from a range of 800 yd. Through the night, glider pilots dismounted and reinforced the tank positions. German infantry tried to infiltrate, took casualties, and pulled back.
At dawn on March 25th, the regiment linked up with the 8th Parachute Battalion. The position held. There is a moment in this engagement that comes from a single first-hand account by Trooper K.W. Dowsett, preserved in the Illustrated History of the 6th Airborne Division by Peter Harkleroad.
The glider of Dowsett was hit by light flak and crashed inverted. He crawled out with his Sten gun bent useless from where it had been strapped to the outside of the turret. As he walked toward the rendezvous on foot, the tank of his commanding officer passed him, and according to Dowsett, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart rode by behind enemy lines wearing his brightly colored cavalry forage cap, standing upright in the turret, blowing a hunting horn. It is a single-source story.
Label it as anecdotal, but the regimental records confirm the cavalry background of Stewart, and no one has ever claimed it did not happen. Two days later, on March 26th, the surviving Locust was swapped out for the seaborn Cromwell tanks of the regiment for the advance to the Baltic. The Locust had fought for 1 day.
In January 1946, the Director of Air at the War Office issued a report concluding that the Locust design was obsolete and that any future British airborne armor would come from completely new designs. The Airborne Assault Museum recorded its verdict on the Varsity tanks as follows: Like the Tetrarch before them, they were found wanting in survivability and lethality, completely outmatched by German armor and vulnerable to infantry anti-tank weapons.
The stocks dispersed quickly. By the end of June 1945, 82 Locusts sat in 21st Army Group depots. Two were sold at Rock Island Arsenal for $100 each to an Illinois farmer named Camille DuPray, who tried to use them as agricultural tractors and found them, in his own words to Life magazine in June 1946, in poor condition and difficult to maintain, the most operationally significant afterlife was Egyptian.
Per the 1996 study of the Arab-Israeli arms race by Amit Zurilan, 26 demilitarized Locusts were purchased in July 1948 from an American liquidation depot in Cairo through a civilian front company. At least nine were remilitarized. During Operation Assaf in December 1948, Egyptian Locusts repulsed an Israeli attack at Khan Yunis, then failed in their counterattack against British 6-pounder anti-tank fire.
All nine were captured by the Israeli Defense Forces. By 1952, they were retired everywhere on Earth. The lineage forward runs straight from the Locust through the canceled T92 through the M551 Sheridan of 1966 through the canceled M8 Buford to today’s M10 Booker. Every American airborne armor program after 1945 descends from what the Locust failed to do.
Hill 1847 is a low rise of farmland east of the Diersfordter Wald. Today, there is no monument on it. The Hamilcars are gone. The Halifax tugs are gone. The eight crews who flew that morning have nearly all gone, too. What survives is the M22 at the Tank Museum at Bovington, identified by the museum as one of the Locusts that saw action with the 6th Airborne at the Rhine Crossing, still wearing the divisional Bellerophon and Pegasus flash.
Britain did not invent the Locust. Britain did not even like the Locust. The Regimental Gunnery report from March 13, 1945, 11 days before Varsity, recorded that the burst of the 37 mm high explosive round was so slight as to render observation difficult. They knew what they were taking. They took it anyway because the Tetrarch was extinct, and the Hamilcar was the only glider on Earth that could land a tank ready to fight, and the position above the river had to be held. They held it.
With a borrowed tank no one else would use.
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.
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