‘A piece of Canadian history’
Tank used to train troops for D-Day dug up in in english winery
The awkwardly named Covenanter tank was not exactly a star of the Second World War.
In fact, German technological advances and a fickle engine rendered the model obsolete months after it first left the factory, and none of the 1,700 vehicles built ever actually fired a shot in anger.
But for Canadian troops on the eve of a historic battle, the Covenanter proved indispensable. Converted into a training tool, it helped ready this country’s infantry forces for their biggest moment of the war, the D-Day invasion, whose 73rd anniversary is tomorrow.
The soldiers from Canada abandoned the tanks as they left their British training grounds for the beaches of Normandy. But now one of only two surviving examples of the rare war machine has literally been unearthed from the English countryside, where oddly enough the departing infantrymen had buried it seven decades ago.
“This is a piece of Canadian history,” says Craig Moore, a British tank enthusiast who helped in the excavation late last month. “It’s not often that you get dug up a tank used by the Canadian army before D-Day.”
The machine came out of the ground at what is now a vineyard rusty and packed with chalky soil, but the military-restoration buff who spearheaded and funded the dig, Rick Wedlock, plans to bring it back to actual working order.
The project is also to be featured on a History Channel series, though the TV network was not the driving force behind the excavation as British media reports suggested, said Moore.
Jeff Noakes, a historian at Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum, applauded the salvage, calling it a tangible reminder of the estimated 500,000 Canadian soldiers who passed through Britain during the war, many of them undergoing advanced training before D-Day.
“This tank being recovered from three or four metres down in a vineyard really helps bring back to life, so to speak, the events of almost three-quarters of a century ago,” he said.
The Covenanter was relatively cutting edge as it started life in 1939: fast and with a gun able to knock out any German opposition.
But when the Germans added more armour and bigger guns to their Panzer tanks, it was suddenly an under-performer. An unreliable motor and a design that “stupidly” put the radiator at the front, exposed to enemy fire, sealed its fate, said Moore, editor of tankhunter.com
The Canadian 3rd Infantry Division, training in a rural swath of Surrey, south of London, adopted several to help get ready for the June 6, 1944, invasion of Europe.
They would have been used to practice fighting alongside tanks, and toward the end to learn how to stop enemy tanks. In fact, one side of the excavated Covenanter was badly damaged, apparently hit by an explosive “satchel charge” during an exercise, Moore said.
Used tanks were actually coveted by metal-scrap merchants back then but the visiting troops probably lacked the time or contacts to find one and, “Canadians being nice people,” buried the leftovers so they wouldn’t be a hazard to the local farmer and his cows.
One was later dug up in the 1970s and eventually restored, sitting now in at the U.K.’s Bovington Tank Museum. The other one was more or less forgotten in land that became Denbies Wine Estate, until Wedlock heard about it and went searching with a sophisticated metal detector.
“It is the second one left in the world, and both were used by Canadian infantry,” said Moore. “This is an incredibly rare and historically valuable World War Two tank.”