Restored D-Day tank to be unveiled on anniversary

For years the Centaur tank, which used to provide covering fire for Royal Marines during the Normandy landings, has lain abandoned on the bank of the Caen canal, near the famous Pegasus Bridge.

The bridge was the site of one of the most famous assaults on D-Day, when gliders silently landed with fewer than 200 men on board to take two bridges without the Germans destroying them, allowing the soldiers who had landed on the Normandy beaches to move inland and begin the liberation of France.

The original bascule bridge was replaced in the 1990s but is now preserved just yards from its original site on the Caen canal where the Memorial Pegasus, a museum on the historic assault, has now been set up.

Pegasus Bridge will be one of the sites where commemorations to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day are held, including a mass parachute drop, a ceremony at the museum, and a midnight ceremony to mark the actual moment of the airborne landings.

They will also involve the inauguration of the Centaur tank, which has been restored by the museum.

Only 80 of the unusual Centaur tanks, specifically adapted for use by the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group in the D-Day landings, were ever made, and it thought that just five remain.

Mark Worthington, curator of the Memorial Pegasus, said the tank will now join other artefacts preserved at the museum and its park. He said: “There are only five of these left in the world to my knowledge and this is the only one of the five which actually landed on D-Day.

“It was on the bank of the Caen Canal about 500 yards from here, and it was falling to bits, literally falling to bits.”