The worst tank of WW2 might be one that never fired a shot in battle. Britain built more than 1,700 of them anyway. It was called the Covenanter. In 1939, Britain knew war was coming and it was short on tanks. So the Army ordered a new cruiser tank and did something reckless to save time. It ordered the thing into production straight off the drawing board. No prototype first. No testing. Just build it. And the company chosen to design it wasn't even a tank maker. It was a railway company, the London, Midland and Scottish. On paper, the Covenanter looked fine. It was fast, around 30 miles per hour. It sat very low to the ground, which made it harder to hit. It carried the standard British 2-pounder gun of the time. Then they actually started building and testing it. The engine was in the back, like most tanks. But to keep the tank's profile low, the designers put the radiators up front, next to the driver. That meant the engine coolant had to be piped all the way through the crew compartment, front to back. The result was a tank that cooked its own crew. The fighting compartment got brutally hot. And the cooling system still couldn't keep the engine from overheating. Not in the desert. In Britain. The Covenanter overheated in the cool, damp English countryside. Engineers tried fix after fix. Modified radiators. New louvers. New marks of the tank. None of them truly solved it. It had other issues too. It was cramped. Its armor was thin. Its 2-pounder gun was already falling behind German tanks. And its cooling problems made it useless for North Africa, the one place Britain actually needed tanks in 1941 and 1942. So the Army made a decision. The Covenanter would never be sent into combat as a battle tank. And the factories kept building them. Britain was desperate to keep tank production lines running, keep workers trained, and keep units equipped with something, anything, to practice on. Over 1,700 Covenanters rolled out of the factories. They spent the war in Britain as training tanks, driving around Salisbury Plain while other tanks went to fight. A handful of Covenanters did eventually see action, but not as tanks. Some had their turrets removed and were converted into bridgelayers. A few of those were used in Burma and in Europe to help other vehicles cross gaps and ditches. The tank that couldn't fight ended up as a bridge so other tanks could. Plenty of WW2 tanks were outgunned, outarmored, or obsolete. The Italians had tankettes so small they were nearly useless. The Japanese had tanks with barely an inch of armor. But all of those at least went to war. Britain built an entire fleet of tanks, more than many countries had in their whole army, and decided they weren't good enough to send.