The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of “bullwhip,” the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with “dose,” as in quantity, with a “z” thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it’s fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.

Wearing black masks or black face paint, and, on occasion, goggles, they brutally whipped, beat and sometimes murdered their victims. In June of that year, a Louisiana newspaper reported that bulldozers took a Black Republican voter named W. Y. Payne from his bed in the night and hung him from a tree two miles away. Later that month, in nearby Port Hudson, a Black preacher named Reverend Minor Holmes was hung from the wooden beams in a Baptist church by bulldozers, but they cut him down before he died. 

“The good people have been cowed down, brow-beaten, insidiously threatened, forced to silence or worse, the countenancing of outrages, blackmailed and their contributions made the lever for future extortions, their tongues muzzled, their hands tied, their steps dogged, their business jeopardized and themselves living in continual fear of offending the ‘bulldozers,’” read an article in the New Orleans Republican in June. By the following year, the association of “bulldozer” with rampant voter suppression during the election made it a common term across the U.S. for any use of brutal force to intimidate or coerce a person into doing what the aggressor desired.

It’s hard to trace when the word first became a label for machines. For decades, it floated around the language tree, resting a while on branches where some instance of terrific violence needed a novel and evocative label. A handful of arms manufacturers marketed various “bulldozer” and “bulldog” pistols in these years. As the 19th century came to a close, it popped up in a Kentucky newspaper as a term for a towboat used to smash through heavy ice and in an Illinois court case to describe a manufacturing machine that had ripped off a worker’s left arm.

The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land. Other manufacturers like Holt, Caterpillar and R. G. LeTourneau were working on similar devices, technological descendants of scraping tools developed in the American West and associated with Mormon farmers. In time, animals were replaced with tractors (on either wheels or continuous tracks) powered first by steam, then gasoline and eventually diesel. The word, which at first referred only to the blade itself, started to mean the entire machine, one that was unrivaled in its ability to rip, shift and level earth.

The origins of many technologies have a somewhat spiritual dimension, and so it is with the Vermont-born industrialist Robert G. LeTourneau, who had the greatest impact on the development of the bulldozer. LeTourneau was an eccentric evangelical Christian who believed that he created his machines in collaboration with God. “God,” he declared, “is the chairman of my board.” A gifted engineer, he was responsible for hundreds of innovative advances in bulldozer design. Thanks to his ideas, wrote William R. Haycraft in “Yellow Steel,” “[T]he bulldozer blade would evolve from a simple plate of flat steel to the hydraulically controlled, scientifically curved, box-section-reinforced, and heat-treated steel structure in use today.” 

LeTourneau wore trilby hats and flew up and down the country in a private plane — clocking, according to TIME, around 200,000 air miles per year. He sought to spread the word of the Lord Almighty and the bulldozer in tandem, and would sometimes fly with a quartet of professional singers so they could deliver gospel performances in the communities he visited. His bulldozers aided in the frenetic transformation of the 20th-century American landscape and were deployed to major construction sites all over the country, from the Boulder Highway to the Hoover Dam, helping to create the infrastructure that modern life has come to depend on. 

In 1952, before a shipment of LeTourneau equipment left the docks of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the direction of West Africa, Reverend Billy Graham — one of 20th-century America’s most influential pastors — said a prayer and blessed the machines. The locals called the ship “The Ark of LeTourneau”; it carried $500,000 worth of earthmoving machinery, a year’s worth of food and 500 copies of the New Testament. LeTourneau flew ahead on his plane and waited on a wild and sandy beach at Bafu Bay, Liberia, for his ark to appear on the horizon. 

The flame of 20th-century techno-utopianism burned inside him, and bulldozers were just one of the many solutions he provided for a world that he felt needed to be cleared away, rebuilt and illuminated by the light of Christ. As his influence grew, so did his machines, in both size and stature. “There are no big jobs; only small machines,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Mover of Men and Mountains.” An enormous device he called the “Tournalayer” could raise an entire two-bedroom concrete home in just over a day. He designed experimental offshore oil platforms for George H. W. Bush’s mysterious, CIA-linked Zapata companies and developed 750-pound bombs for the United States military. But razing the land was LeTourneau’s ultimate passion — he was a flat-earther in the most literal sense. As a staunch capitalist, he believed that free markets thrived on terrains graded and cleared for the onrush of development. 

Inevitably, almost magnetically, he was drawn toward that ultimate nemesis for those who wish to experience an epic showdown with the Earth: the jungle. In exchange for helping to build a section of the TransAndean highway for the Peruvian government, LeTourneau was given a large sweep of rainforest stretching from the Andes to the mouth of the Amazon. Flying over the area in 1953, he thought the gently rolling hills looked like waves in a vast green sea and felt giddy with excitement. “The thought of tackling it even with my biggest machines was awesome,” he wrote. Following in the footsteps of Henry Ford, who tried to build a model colony in the Brazilian jungle called Fordlândia, LeTourneau embarked on the construction of his own capitalist utopia in the Peruvian jungle. It would be a Protestant metropolis where he could spread the gospel while also exploiting the local oil industry. He called it Tournavista. 

Soon after they were first introduced into the Amazonian rainforest, modern bulldozers spread like a virus, transmitting far and wide in a fluster of flattening that included loggers, ranchers and colonists. The 1950s marked the dawn of widespread machine-led deforestation that has blighted the rainforests of South America ever since.

In Tournavista, the jungle became a marketing arena where LeTourneau could both test and advertise the effectiveness of machines he claimed to be capable of demolishing over an acre of wilderness in half an hour, clearing in days what would have taken months for men with hand tools. Like any good foe, the rainforest challenged and inspired him. His dozers were like ants when confronted by 200-foot-tall shihuahuacos and other colossal trees. So he created bigger, more ferocious machines to fell the ancient hardwoods. In came the “jungle crusher,” a 74-foot-long and 280,000-pound behemoth that was similar to a steam roller. (The U.S. military later brought them to Vietnam to assist with the fight against the Viet Cong.) “The whole machine just rears up like a dinosaur, the back roller pushing and the front roller pressing forward with all its power and weight,” LeTourneau wrote. “Something has to give, and so far it has always been the tree. Slowly and grudgingly, and with a terrific crashing noise, but down it comes.”

Through LeTourneau’s eyes, the wild was devoid of purpose; his dozers and crushers were the paintbrushes to give it form and meaning. “In the short span of six years we have proved that the jungle, unconquered for centuries, can be put to work, and its extravagant wastefulness turned into extravagant production,” he wrote. And wherever the bulldozers went, God followed. LeTourneau built a church and bible school in Tournavista and helped translate the New Testament into Indigenous languages. Tournavista was quickly populated with people LeTourneau called “technical missionaries” — those who could “handle a bulldozer as well as a Bible.” LeTourneau believed that “machinery in the hands of Christ-loving, twice-born men can help [Peruvians] to listen to the story of Jesus and His love.” 

The victory of any human over nature is almost always a momentary illusion. Much like Fordlândia — where only 2,000 or so impoverished residents reside today, and relics of Ford’s machines rust in the derelict shells of old factory buildings — Tournavista was a failure. Political instability, heavy rains and the rapid regrowth of vegetation on cleared lands dogged LeTourneau’s holy city. By the time of his death in 1969, his interest in Tournavista had faded. The town still exists but now distances itself from the industrialist, celebrating its founding year as 1984, long after his death. When I contacted the municipal authority to see if anyone would be willing to speak about its prehistory, no one replied. As for Tournata, a similar colony he tried to build next to that wild and sandy beach on Bafu Bay, it’s hard to find any trace online today. According to a 2013 blog post by a Christian missionary, all that remained of it was an overgrown airstrip, an abandoned medical facility and the ruins of a church.

Though not the only visionary to take the bulldozer global, LeTourneau was indicative of a certain bulldozing state of mind that swept through American society following the machine’s rapid evolution during World War II. It’s not commonplace to associate bulldozers with war, and yet they were as important to the Allied victory as the aircraft engine, the radar or the atomic bomb. “Of all the weapons of war,” wrote Colonel K. S. Andersson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1944, “the bulldozer stands first. Airplanes and tanks may be more romantic, appeal more to the public imagination, but the Army’s advance depends on the unromantic, unsung hero who drives the ‘cat.’” The war was largely defined by control of the air, and airplanes needed airfields within operating range of their targets. If dispatched from seafaring aircraft carriers, then those ships needed docks and dry docks. And those airfields, docks and dry docks needed bases and road systems. In essence, for airplanes to stay mobile as the front shifted across the planet, an entire network of ordinarily immobile infrastructure had to become mobile too. Bulldozers move wars.

In the U.S. Armed Forces, the troops most often operating bulldozers were in the Naval Construction Battalions — the Seabees. Many were engineers and construction workers who’d been trained to fight, and accounts of their wartime experiences were captured in detail in the historian Francesca Russello Ammon’s seminal 2016 book, “Bulldozer.” Their machines roared onto islands all across the Pacific, transforming large swathes of tropical environments into concrete fortresses. The bulldozers were being shipped to islands in such large quantities that, one soldier recounted, when one broke down they simply bulldozed it into the ocean and continued working with a fresh one. Often, the Seabees didn’t even wait for the fighting to stop and set to work flattening land as bullets ricocheted around them. 

In 1943 on the island of Mono in the South Pacific, Japanese soldiers inside a pillbox fired on a 28-year-old bulldozer operator named Aurelio Tassone. Under the orders of his lieutenant, Tassone drove his bulldozer toward the pillbox, lifted his blade in the air and then dropped it with such force that it almost stalled the machine. 

“The blade bit through the obstructions as if they were snowdrifts,” he recounted in an interview unearthed by Ammon. “The gun mount toppled over and chunks of logs and Jap bodies flew up in the air. Everybody and everything was crushed and buried underneath that rip-roaring machine,” said Tassone. Afterward, he methodically bladed earth over the wreckage, leaving behind a flat, smoothed surface. Investigators later found the remains of 12 bodies buried beneath. It may be the first recorded instance of a bulldozer being used to intentionally kill people.

Tassone was celebrated as a hero. But that same year, Theodore Sturgeon — an aspiring writer who would go on to become a key figure in the 1950s golden age of science fiction and an inspiration for Stephen King and Ray Bradbury — began to see something inherently mysterious and sinister about the bulldozer. Stationed with the Navy in Puerto Rico, he was working 70-hour weeks in 120-degree weather clearing the land with a bulldozer to make way for an airfield, dry dock and shipyard. “I fell in love with that machine,” he later recounted, yet something about the experience unnerved him. It’s unclear whether or not he’d heard about the bulldozer attack in Mono. But when he returned home to New York the following year, he entered a nine-day writing frenzy. The novella he produced was the story of eight men alone on a remote island who were clearing the land to make way for an airstrip when one of the bulldozers became possessed by a demonic force and ran amok in a murderous rampage. Titled “Killdozer,” it was published in the sci-fi magazine Astounding. “The thing wrote itself!” he exclaimed in a letter to his father, “and after it I could write nothing else.”

As WWII progressed, stories of the conquests of bulldozers began to permeate Western media coverage, and operators came to be seen as contemporary icons. As Ammon noted, the idea of the “Bulldozer Man” was born: a hyper-masculine all-action American cowboy refitted for an era of technological modernity. In the heroic stories that abounded, operators would leap into bulldozers and shove their dead comrades aside to keep the machines moving and pushing, scraping and grading. John Wayne, the quintessential cultural icon of the American West, appeared in the Hollywood war film, “The Fighting Seabees” (1944), as a military hero who saves the day on his mighty dozer. An illustrated Coca-Cola advertisement from 1945 portrayed muscular Seabees sitting around their muscular machine, sipping cokes and showing off to Pacific Islanders depicted in headdresses and carrying drums. 

In an article for Life about the occupation of Guam, a full-page portrait showed a topless grunt grinning in the sunshine as he pulled the levers of his dozer. The article read: “Having taken the island from the Japs, they promptly started to demonstrate another of their military specialties: high-speed conversion of a quiet little island into a huge war base. Even before fighting had stopped the battered island shook to the pounding rhythm of rock crushers and heavy engines and echoed with the sound of tractor treads crunching on coral. … Cats and Macks and bulldozers puffed and backed and hacked, shaving away the jungle growth. Guam became alive and bustling with roads and road builders. The peanut-shaped piece of land, a thousand ocean miles from anywhere, began to glitter at night like a continental metropolis.”

The bulldozer in this view was a creator, not a destroyer. Yet the legacy of that period still scars Guam, where the rainforest has fallen silent. The ships that brought the machines during and after World War II may have also accidentally carried with them an invasive species: the brown tree snake. With no natural predators, its population exploded, turning Guam into one of the most snake-infested places on Earth, wiping out 10 of its 12 native forest bird species by the 1980s and nearly erasing the sound of wild birdsong. Those birds used to eat the spiders and now there are too many of them, too.

In 2012, U.S. government scientists attached tiny parachutes made of green tissue and cardboard to 2,000 dead mice laced with snake poison and dropped them from helicopters. The rodent corpses hung from branches throughout the forests like nightmarish festive decorations. The experiment failed to significantly impact the overall brown snake population. With too few birds to disperse the seeds, researchers estimate that new tree growth has declined as much as 92%, and the forests have thinned. Some of Guam’s native birds have been nurtured back from near-extinction on nearby snake-free islands, but Guam itself still hosts a heavy and expanding U.S. military presence, with billions of dollars in construction planned for the next few years.

For American machinery manufacturers and operators, places like Guam were essentially test runs for the frenzy of construction that would begin at home when everyone returned. Following the war’s conclusion, the U.S. got drunk on bulldozers: Many of its major cities, despite never once being attacked, began to take on a bizarre resemblance to the area-bombed ruins of Europe and Asia as large swathes of natural landscape and farmland were leveled in preparation for a new dawn of infrastructure and suburbia. During the late 1950s in California, an orange tree was bulldozed on average every 55 seconds.

Of course, it wasn’t just bulldozers used for this nationwide transformation — wrecking balls and cranes did just as much work — but this particular machine became the symbolic metaphor of the era. “Mother Earth is going to have her face lifted!” read one earthmoving equipment advertisement in 1944, complete with an illustration of a feminized planet rolled on its side and looking to the ground as a man drives a bulldozer over her face. 

In New York, Robert Moses famously oversaw the clearance of vast tracts of land for public and private development. In his famous book “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air,” philosopher Marshall Berman captured his own conflicted feelings as a New Yorker during this period. He was awestruck by what was taking place around him. “To oppose his [Moses’s] bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers, was — or so it seemed — to oppose history, progress, modernity itself. And few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that,” he wrote. 

But his perspective changed in 1953 when the bulldozers arrived at his door to begin work on a new expressway. “At first we couldn’t believe it; it seemed to come from another world,” he wrote. “They surely couldn’t mean what the stories seemed to say: that the road would be blasted directly through a dozen solid, settled, densely populated neighborhoods like our own; that something like 60,000 working- and lower-middle-class people, mostly Jews, but with many Italians, Irish and Blacks thrown in, would be thrown out of their homes.” And yet it was so. Berman remembered visiting the construction sites after the evictions, sometimes to weep for what was being destroyed, sometimes to “marvel” at how quickly his “ordinary nice neighborhood” was being transformed into “sublime, spectacular ruins.” 

The image of a person weeping for the devastation wrought by the bulldozer while still maintaining awe at its capabilities remains to this day a poignant summation of the seemingly irreconcilable paradox of this machine, both destroyer and creator, and the disorienting speed of erasure it has enabled. Around the world, these scenes are as common today as they were during the demolition of Berman’s Bronx.

Unlike most architects, Fahad Zuberi dedicates himself to studying the destruction of the built environment as much as its construction. Zuberi, currently a scholar at MIT Architecture, remembers when the earthmoving machines first arrived in his neighborhood in the Indian city of Aligarh. 

“It was around 20 years ago, when I was a kid,” he told me over Zoom. “I remember one of those yellow JCBs arrived in our area. It was a very new thing. Some of us had never seen them before, and it was fascinating to see what they could do. We would go to construction sites just to see them in action. There was a running joke amongst young people: If there is a JCB digging something nearby, then no work is getting done today. Everyone would want to go and watch. I come from a Muslim ghetto, and we were always in need of something: better roads, better drains. There was great malnourishment with regard to infrastructure. When these big yellow machines arrived, we saw them as aspirational: They would build a better city for us. But there’s been a dramatic change over the last two to three years. Now, nobody in India looks at a JCB with the same eyes — nobody.”

For many marginalized groups around the world, heavy earthmoving equipment has often been the visible part of the faceless bureaucratic mega-machine that runs roughshod through communities in the name of urban renewal, beautification or “slum” clearance. In India, the yellow JCB has become more than that — a catchall term for earthmoving equipment transformed into weapons of both literal and metaphoric power. For some, they symbolize unspeakable terror; for others righteous justice. 

It began in 2017 when the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath — a member of India’s ruling right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — started threatening to destroy the homes and assets of criminals in the state. By 2020, he’d begun making good on his threats, including demolishing the home of one of India’s most notorious gangsters, Vikas Dubey, not long after police teams sent to apprehend him were ambushed by his gunmen. 

By 2022, Adityanath’s use of demolition as a form of extrajudicial punishment had become widespread and indiscriminate. Earthmoving machines began appearing outside the homes of people, mostly Muslims, who’d been accused of rioting or even just attending protests. Many had never been found guilty or even tried in a court of law for whatever they’d been accused of. The authorities conducting the demolitions would often insist that the dwellings had been “illegally constructed.”

But “illegality” in the built environment is extremely common in India. In Delhi alone, estimates suggest that anywhere between 30% and 80% or more of properties could be considered illegal. 

“It was clear that it was only Muslim houses being targeted,” Zuberi told me. In the wake of demolitions, BJP politicians publicly celebrated them as a form of “vigilante justice,” and the phenomenon became known as “bulldozer raj” (rule by bulldozer). The anti-Muslim overtones were clear: In a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, a BJP spokesperson equated the letters JCB with “jihadi control board.”

Local press and members of opposition parties branded Adityanath “Baba Bulldozer” — Papa Bulldozer — continuing the genealogy of authoritarian leaders who have been nicknamed after the machine, including Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Tanzania’s John Magufuli. Adityanath embraced the criticism and the JCB became a symbol of his 2022 reelection campaign. “We have a special machine which we are using for building expressways and highways,” he said during a speech. “At the same time, we are using it to crush the mafia who exploited people to build their properties.” Those who failed to vote for Adityanath, the BJP politician Raja Singh warned, would be found and bulldozed. 

Around the country that year, widespread glorification of the machine engulfed certain sections of society. Processions of JCB vehicles started appearing at BJP political rallies, adorned in flowers and carrying people in their buckets, while crowds of onlookers waved toy bulldozers in the air. Pop songs about the machines racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Grooms rode to weddings atop earthmovers, and shops sold “JCB Gorilla” condoms — further emphasis on the machine’s enduring associations with a particular notion of hypermasculine heroism. At a mass wedding in March, newlywed couples were given toy bulldozers as gifts to “symbolize the victory of good over evil and also order in life,” according to a guest at the event. 

In Gujarat, Assam, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, scores of homes were flattened and their inhabitants were offered no alternative accommodation or compensation. BJP politicians who wished to be seen as no-nonsense strongmen began gravitating toward the iconography of the machine. 

In Madhya Pradesh, then-Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan became known as “Bulldozer Mama.” On April 11, Hasina Bi and her family were at their home in Khargone, where they had lived for 40 years, having redeveloped it from a mud house into a permanent structure. They were all asleep — it was Ramadan and they had been fasting. They awoke to the sound of bulldozers. 

“I had no reason to believe my house would be demolished,” Bi said in an interview with a researcher from Amnesty International. “The officials of the Municipal Corporation stood in front of my house and ordered the demolition of the houses. … I kept running around them with all my paperwork. I begged them to check my paperwork first. … They asked me to go somewhere else with all this and did not hear a single word I said. … I told them I won’t leave this house. ‘I am so poor, where will I go?’ I asked. I stood there steadfast until the police started beating me up with lathis [batons] and yelled, ‘Get out of here!’ I did not move. I said ‘Raze me down with this bulldozer. Take my dead body with you. Where will I go in this poverty?’ Then my son came to me and begged me to move: ‘Ammi, the authorities won’t even think twice before killing you.’ All my life’s earnings and memories were in that house. They did not even allow us to collect my belongings. Everything was razed down.”

Five days later, in Jahangirpuri, a relatively poor neighborhood in North Delhi with a large Muslim population living among a Hindu majority, there were religious parades to celebrate the Hindu festival of Hanuman Jayanti. The first two were authorized by police and went off without incident. But a third unapproved procession in the evening took a different route past a mosque where local Muslims were honoring Ramadan.

It was a sweltering night — a heatwave had begun that would become one of India’s hottest in a century. Some members of the crowd were carrying knives, swords, baseball bats and guns, and they chanted and played loud music outside the mosque. Arguments broke out and violence ensued. Stones, bricks and bottles were thrown, and shots were fired. In footage online, fires can be seen raging in the street. Police arrived to control the incident and eight officers were injured in the chaos, one by a bullet. The head of the BJP in Delhi at the time, who kept a toy bulldozer on the desk in his office, called the local mayor of North Delhi to action: “I request you to act strictly and swiftly and mark the illegal structures of these rioters and use the bulldozer against them.”

Four days later, nine large earthmoving vehicles (several of which were JCB-branded) descended on the street where the mosque stood, accompanied by hundreds of police and paramilitary forces. Without warning, they began destroying homes and businesses. Crowds gathered and some owners tried to protect their properties from the looming, craned buckets and bulldozer blades. Dust clouds filled the air. A news anchor from the TV channel Aaj Tak climbed aboard one of the machines and broadcast from the cab as the operator jolted levers. “You are now watching live,” she said as the grim Ballardian spectacle unfolded, “as the crane destroys an illegal construction.” 

The demolitions only stopped when Brinda Karat, a 77-year-old politician from the Communist Party of India, emerged from the crowd and blocked one of the machines by standing in front of it while waving in the air a physical copy of a Supreme Court order to stop the destruction. According to Amnesty International, at least 25 properties were destroyed that day, of which 23 were Muslim-owned. As before, the authorities insisted that the demolitions had taken place due to the illegality of the structures, but the timing was not lost on the locals. One man interviewed on Aaj Tak remarked: “This [shop] has been around for 50 years. … It suddenly become illegal after the Hindu-Muslim issue?”

Despite its role as the brand-du-jour of the bulldozer raj, JCB doesn’t actually make bulldozers. The company is better known for its backhoe loaders, excavators, telehandlers and forklifts. Yet among the general public in India, “bulldozer” is now a proxy word for any big machine used in these performative demolitions, of which JCBs have become the most visible. 

JCB, or J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, is a U.K. company founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, who began by making agricultural machines from war surplus materials in a rented garage. Today, the company is among the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery. In the U.K., JCB’s iconic yellow machines are associated with construction, of course, but also children’s toys and books, a whimsical theatrical show known as the “dancing diggers” and even a platinum-selling pop single from the 2000s (“JCB” by Nizlopi). 

The company is now run by Bamford’s son, Lord Anthony Bamford. 2024 was a good year for Bamford and his family, one of the wealthiest in the U.K.: They secured a $389 million payout from JCB — their biggest in nearly a decade — following the company’s 44% surge in profit since the year prior. India played a significant role in that growth; it is JCB’s biggest single market, with six manufacturing units and a network of more than 60 dealers and 700 outlets there. 

The Bamfords are a colorful industrial dynasty. Lord Bamford, worth around $8.4 billion, flies to and from the JCB headquarters in a white Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. Renowned as both a flamboyant socialite and political kingmaker, he’s among the top donors to the U.K. Conservative Party and is close friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose wedding he hosted in 2022. Bamford is also currently being investigated for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax avoidance. He and his wife, Lady Carole Bamford, live in the Cotswolds, a quaint pastoral utopia for the U.K.’s rich and famous, in a Georgian mansion once owned by a former British governor-general of India. According to a profile of Lady Bamford in W Magazine, the Bamfords’ “extravagant parties have become nearly legendary. For an India-theme party, Bamford had elephants carry guests up the drive. … Almost any sit-down they throw can be a full-blown affair, with liveried footmen and flowing Krug.” 

The day after the destruction in Jahangirpuri, Lord Bamford happened to be in India with Johnson, who was still the U.K. prime minister. They were inaugurating a new JCB factory in Gujarat, the home state of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At one point, Johnson climbed into the cab of a machine and leaned out to wave at photographers. Neither he nor Bamford made any comments to the press about the violence in Delhi.

Last February, Amnesty International published two detailed reports on the human rights violations committed with JCB’s equipment, demanding that the company take action. “We’ve had a wall of silence. No acknowledgment at all of the issues we’ve raised,” Peter Frankental, a program director of economic affairs at Amnesty U.K., told me. “No concern being expressed that their equipment and brand is being used to violate human rights and strike fear into Muslim communities. For how much longer can they continue to escape scrutiny?”

In November 2024, India’s Supreme Court handed down a judgment that it hoped would finally bring an end to years of bulldozer raj: No person’s home could be demolished merely because they were accused or even convicted of an offense. “These legalities will protect people,” Zuberi, who helped advise legal experts on the Supreme Court guidelines, told me. “But I don’t think the cultural or political aspect of all this will be affected. This idea of collective punishment via the built environment has been socially accepted in India. The glorification of the demolition of homes is now mainstream.”

According to an investigation by the Indian magazine Frontline, at least 7,407 houses were demolished in state-led eviction drives in 2024 alone, rendering over 41,000 people homeless. Addressing the years of destruction, the jurist Kapil Sibal, currently the president of the India Supreme Court Bar Association, wrote: “My home is not just a brick-and-mortar structure. Its masonry and whitewashed walls do not even begin to tell the story. Within its womb lies all that I cherish. It saves me from the heat of the blazing sun, protects me from chilling winter nights, and holds the memories that live with me. The joys of my being are cradled within it. … A home where I am both alone and together [is] essentially a part of my very being. When you allow a bulldozer to wade through it, you don’t just destroy a structure, you destroy the essence of all I am. With it, all of me falls apart.”

For similar reasons, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once lamented that a home is not simply demolished; it is “murdered.”

“There is no parallel between bombs and bulldozers,” Bill Clinton said when questioned about Israeli-Palestinian tensions in 1997. In some sense, he was correct. The force delivered is incomparable. “Bombings are a cosmic phenomenon,” said the French philosopher Paul Virilio, a survivor of World War II. “You don’t feel like a concrete person is doing this to you, it’s more like the apocalypse or a huge storm or the eruption of Vesuvius.” A bomb is a clear and blatant act of violence, but a bulldozer can appear banal and bureaucratic. The violence the machine enacts is slow, rumbling, grinding, drawn out. Not an instantaneous vaporization.

And yet the end result of both acts is largely the same: a home destroyed, a neighborhood flattened; in some cases, bodies beneath rubble. As the philosopher and environmentalist Richard Sylvan wrote: “The Bomb and the Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora’s Box.” In the aftermath, it doesn’t much matter the cause of the destruction.

Headquartered in Texas, Caterpillar is the world’s largest construction equipment company and the foremost global producer of bulldozers. If you picture a bulldozer in your mind, it’s probably something like a Caterpillar D9. 

The company had a market capitalization of $171 billion as of February. In recent years, Caterpillar has become something of a style brand too. Its robust flip phone is one of the most sought-after in the “dumbphone boom,” and its boots, sneakers and collaborations with fashion designers are regularly featured on influential streetwear websites like Highsnobiety and Hypebeast. 

Caterpillar has been supplying heavy equipment to Israel since the 1950s. The most recognizable is the D9 bulldozer. The D9 is an impressive beast: As tall as a doubledecker bus, it weighs in at around 54 tons, almost as heavy as an M1 Abrams tank. The blade alone weighs as much as an Asian elephant, and it can be augmented with a ripper on the back, a gigantic steel talon that can dig into earth and rock and carve out ditches. 

Once they arrive in Israel, bulldozers destined for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) often undergo a range of modifications. Thick plates of armor are added, as well as bulletproof glass and additional slats to deflect rocket-propelled grenade rounds. Extra modifications have been known to include crew-operated machine guns, smoke projectors and grenade launchers. These modifications make the IDF’s D9 — nicknamed the “Doobi” (Hebrew for “teddy bear”) — 20 tons heavier, about the same weight as 45 midsized cars. Inside the cabin, an isolation system keeps the air conditioned and the noise to a maximum of 77 decibels. In 2024, the IDF became the world’s first army to deploy autonomous unmanned D9s, which have become known as “Pandas.”

It’s difficult to set eyes on an IDF-modified D9 without traveling to Palestine and witnessing them in action. The closest I could get was by ordering a highly realistic 1/35 scale model from China and assembling its 200-plus individual pieces myself. Gradually, I put it together using tweezers, nail files and extra-thin cement, fixing together the armor plates, the ripper, the gunner’s seat and the mounted machine gun. Slowly, a menacing object the size of a kitten took shape in my living room. Next to it, a human would be around the size of my little finger.

The D9 has become central to the actions of the Israeli government in Palestine. “In the hostilities, the omnipresent bulldozers have as much strategic importance as the tanks,” wrote Christian Salmon, a French observer who traveled across Ramallah, Rafah and Gaza in 2002. “Never has such an inoffensive machine struck me as being more of a harbinger of silent violence. … Geography, it is said, determines war. In Palestine it is war that has achieved the upper hand over geography.” 

In the most recent conflict in Gaza, D9s have been involved in the destruction of homes, hospitals, factories, olive and orange groves, greenhouses, graveyards and archeological sites. Home and infrastructure demolitions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem using bulldozers have also increased in prevalence. A recent report by The New York Times showed D9s rolling through Tulkarm and Jenin, destroying shops and businesses as well as ripping up roads and water and sewage pipes, blocking emergency vehicles and destroying the trees and shrubs on a decorative roundabout. There are unconfirmed reports that bulldozers were used to run over and bury civilians alive and also desecrate the graves of people buried in a courtyard during the siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital in December 2023.

In an interview with Breaking the Silence, an Israeli NGO established by IDF veterans, a former officer explained the ruinous and somewhat surreal outcome of mass bulldozing campaigns in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014: 

Other accounts of bulldozing in Gaza are even more graphic. In October 2024, CNN published an article about Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old father of four and construction manager who took his own life after serving as a bulldozer operator for the IDF during the most recent war. He spent 186 days at work until he was injured when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his vehicle. “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him. And he died after it, because of the post-trauma,” his mother told CNN. “He always said, ‘no one will understand what I saw,’” his sister added. What Mizrahi saw from the seat of his D9 was revealed by his co-operator, Guy Zaken. “We saw very, very, very difficult things,” Zaken told CNN. “Things that are difficult to accept.” In testimony to the Knesset last June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” He explained that, “everything squirts out.”

While armored D9s are the IDF’s bulldozer of choice for military endeavors, other machines — including those manufactured by JCB, Hyundai and Volvo — are used for home demolitions across Palestine. According to Jeff Halper, the chair of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, more than 55,000 homes were destroyed in the territories from 1967 to 2021. 

There are two main forms of state-sanctioned home demolition: demolition for “deterring terrorist attacks” and demolition for lack of building permits. The latter is more common. It is extremely difficult for most Palestinians to build a home legally. In July 2023, an IDF official confirmed during a Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting that, on average, more than 90% of Palestinian requests for permits were rejected, while approximately 60-70% of Israeli requests were approved. Desperate for housing, many Palestinians build their homes without proper permits. These buildings, once identified by the authorities, are then subject to demolition. Under military orders, Israeli authorities are able to bulldoze homes within 96 hours of issuing a removal order. Often, due to the heavy penalties incurred for building without a permit, Palestinians tear down their own homes if Israel issues a demolition order.

Over the years, Israel’s Caterpillar bulldozers have drifted in and out of Western media attention. In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American human rights activist, traveled to Gaza to join a group of volunteers who had agreed to act as human shields to protect Palestinian homes from Israeli demolitions. Within a month or so of arriving, Corrie wrote to her mother to say she was having nightmares about the machines, dreams in which they arrived outside her family home in the U.S. while she and her mother hid inside.

On March 16, on an overcast spring afternoon, Corrie — dressed in an orange fluorescent jacket and armed with a megaphone — stood atop a mound of dirt in the Rafah refugee camp and faced off against a D9 as it attempted to demolish the home of the Nasrallah family. As the Nasrallah children watched through a crack in their garden wall, the operator drove the D9 over Corrie and then reversed back over her again, crushing her skull, ribs and vertebrae. An IDF report concluded that the operator did not see her. Corrie was rushed to a hospital but succumbed to her injuries and was declared dead that evening. The story of a young American woman being killed in broad daylight by an American-made machine, paid for and shipped to Israel by the American government, made international headlines and started what would become a flurry of lawsuits against bulldozer manufacturers. But few of the cases managed to lay a substantial glove on any of the companies involved or achieve legal remedy or compensation for those affected by the activities of these machines. 

In 2005, Corrie’s parents, along with four Palestinian families whose relatives had been killed by D9s, filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. against Caterpillar, accusing the company of aiding and abetting war crimes by providing bulldozers to the Israeli military knowing they would be used unlawfully to demolish homes and endanger civilians. Ultimately, the court ruled that the export of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel as part of the military sales program was a foreign policy decision made by the government, and the court did not have the authority to question it. In response to inquiries from Human Rights Watch before the lawsuit was filed, James Owens, Caterpillar’s CEO at the time, stated that the company did “not have the practical ability or legal right to determine how our products are used after they are sold.” 

Though the company claimed it could not monitor the use of its machines, spying on the families of people killed by the machines turned out to be perfectly feasible. In 2017, an investigation by The Guardian and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that after the conclusion of the Corrie case, Caterpillar hired the corporate espionage company C2i to spy on the family and report back on any subsequent actions they might be planning.

In March 2011, another lawsuit was filed against Caterpillar, this time against its Swiss subsidiary. The complaint was led by TRIAL International, which was assisting six Palestinian families whose homes had been illegally demolished in the West Bank city of Qalqilya. While the prosecutor recognized that Israel had committed war crimes using the bulldozers, the case against Caterpillar was ultimately closed on the grounds that the bulldozers in question were “not weapons” and what the IDF did with them was not Caterpillar’s fault.

Criticism of Caterpillar has also come from within. Numerous shareholder proposals have asked the company to review its human rights policies due to the overwhelming evidence of Caterpillar bulldozers being weaponized against Palestinians, to no avail. As Doug Oberhelman, the company’s CEO from 2010 until his retirement in 2017, has said, “How our customers use [the bulldozers] is their business. We can’t stop them.” In 2022 and again in 2023, a nonprofit pension agency for retired Methodist clergy and a major Caterpillar shareholder requested that the company permit an independent third-party report into potential human rights violations. The board both times voted against: “[W]e believe we already deploy the right policies, processes and governance to ensure we make the right decisions about where and how we conduct our business aligned with our values.”

The question of whether a bulldozer can be considered a weapon, Frankental assured me, is fundamentally meaningless: “Whether or not you designed it for that purpose — it has been weaponized,” he said. The more pertinent inquiry lurking beneath all this — one that is broadly relevant in the 21st century as advances in industries like AI, social media and surveillance increasingly complicate our lives — is: How responsible are the manufacturers of a particular technology for the ways in which it is ultimately used? 

For some, the notion that the manufacturer of an earthmoving machine should be held responsible for what operators do with it on the streets of India or in distant wars in the Middle East seems unreasonable. Famously, gun manufacturers in the U.S. assume basically zero accountability for the deaths of people killed by their products. Roi Bachmutsky has heard that kind of argument a lot. Over Zoom, the international human rights lawyer told me: “The problem is, it assumes that these earthmoving companies are just distant manufacturers, far away from where these violations are committed. But they aren’t just manufacturers; most heavy machinery firms provide services to these machines long after they leave their hands. They certify them, provide maintenance, and they can tell where they are at any conceivable moment.”

These modern machines have evolved into what are essentially gigantic computers, equipped to both collect and transmit huge quantities of data. Telematic technology, as it is known, has become an industry standard in the earthmoving world. JCB’s is called LiveLink, and Caterpillar’s is called VisionLink. Almost every piece of Caterpillar or JCB equipment that leaves the factory now contains telematics. A machine can be tracked and monitored 24 hours a day, even when the engine is switched off. Fuel, oil and coolant can be monitored from anywhere in the world, and so too even things as minute as the way a particular operator uses the clutch. Machines can be “geofenced” so that alerts go off whenever they enter or leave a predetermined area on a map. And they can be remotely immobilized to prevent any unauthorized use. Data continuously streams from machine to cloud, providing insights for anyone privy to all this information. In a recent interview, Caterpillar’s chief technology officer said: “We have over four million assets actively running around the world today, and 1.4 million of those are connected; connected to us, connected to our customers and our dealers.”

In the spring of 2022, Russian soldiers looted 27 machines worth nearly $5 million from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, and shipped them 700 miles back to Russia. But when they tried to turn the machines on, they had been remotely “kill-switched” by the dealership. What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as “VIN-locking,” which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products, instead requiring a licensed or official company technician to do so. It is a controversial practice that has been at the heart of the “right-to-repair” debate in the U.S. and has resulted in widespread “tractor hacking” by farmers who wish to mend their own equipment. As the sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow wrote in his analysis of the Melitopol story, “The technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters. … [I]t was invented to thwart American farmers.”

When it suits their purposes, then, the technology exists for heavy machinery companies to monitor, control and even disable products. Human rights abuses against Palestinians and Indians apparently don’t rise to the level of violating company values, let alone cause enough concern for the company to brick their machines. “They obviously generate all this data for improving their services and manufacturing. Why aren’t they generating it for human rights due diligence as well?” Frankental wondered. “Instead, they’ve taken a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ approach.”

Bachmutsky painted a hypothetical picture of a knife manufacturing company: “What if that manufacturer knew that it was supplying those knives directly to people inclined to attack someone? Perhaps they knew one of their customers had a history of violent knife attacks, and sold them it anyway. What if they also provided that person with maintenance, like knife sharpening services, despite that knowledge? What if they also had a technology that allowed them to see exactly where all of their knives are at every conceivable moment? Do you not think it’s starting to look a lot less strange that they would have some responsibility for the end use of those knives?”

In the 1850s, Ralph Waldo Emerson embarked on a lecture tour across the U.S. The lectures were later collected in a book of essays, “The Conduct of Life,” with chapters such as “Power,” “Wealth,” “Beauty” and “Behavior.” In one titled “Fate,” Emerson sought to address “the question of the times” — “How shall I live?” He wrote: “You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” 

I remembered that quote on the grey and cold winter morning when I arrived at JCB’s global headquarters in the West Midlands. The enormous factory sat in front of three picturesque, manmade lakes lined with trees and populated with wildfowl introduced by the Bamford family, including mandarin ducks, great crested grebes and pochards. The yellow JCB logo reflected on the rippling water. Across the road was the JCB Golf and Country Club, a private venue with a professional-level golf course and luxury accommodations. I passed a sinister, spider-like statue, 45 feet high, made from rusted old parts of earthmoving machinery, as well as a helipad where a white Sikorsky was parked. At the factory entrance stood another statue, bronze this time: five musclebound men shoveling dirt and carrying it uphill by the sackful. I assumed it was intended to remind visitors how JCB had revolutionized such slow and laborious tasks. 

As I waited in the large white-marble reception hall for a public tour to begin, I glanced through a book about the history of the company. My eye was drawn to a photo of a chimpanzee driving a JCB and another of a just-married couple being carried away from a church in the mouth of a digger. Then the tour began. Quotes from Lord Bamford lined the stairwells — “Always looking for a better way,” “The power to change our world.” We saw a piece of machinery signed by Margaret Thatcher and a museum filled with early prototypes, advertising posters and a small set of models depicting JCB’s operational fleet of airplanes used to fly clients and management around the world. In the gift shop, JCB-branded USB cables, headlamps and champagne flutes were on sale.

On the factory floor, the tour came alive in a clamor of energetic industrial noise. Above our heads, enormous chassis hung on chains from conveyor belts in the ceilings, and huge hydraulic presses rose and fell. Forklifts glided around on indoor roads as workers in hoods and masks and breathing apparatuses welded, painted and assembled. Inside protective chambers, high-powered laser beams cut through thick metal plates. Something red glowed behind a heavy curtain. 

The tour’s final stop was the production line: a conveyor belt on the floor that moved almost imperceptibly slowly past groups of workers who each had around 20 minutes to do their work. The process began with a raw and disembodied engine. Six hundred feet or so later, I watched as a worker climbed into the cab of a fully assembled backhoe loader and drove it out of the factory. 

There it was, destroyer and creator, molded in a process of bewitching efficiency. And despite everything I’d heard, learned and read over the previous three months of research and reporting, I couldn’t help but marvel at this sublime and spectacular machine.