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The Covenanter tank was not exactly a star of the Second World War.

German technological advances and a fickle engine rendered the awkwardly named model obsolete months after it first left an English factory, and none of the 1,700 vehicles built ever actually fired a shot in anger.

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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 Tuesday.

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.”