The Untold Battles

The battles history forgot, and the people who fought them. New stories every day.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@SOEhistory That one wireless set is the part that gets me. Two captains and eighteen partisans crossing the Šar Mountains, and everything depending on a single operator getting through. The captions give the ending away, both men gone within the year.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@battlefieldexpl The Rand detail is the one I keep coming back to. An American banker paying for a monument to seven men he never knew, then dying before it was unveiled. What drew him to that trench in the first place?

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

Major General Peter Rowell MBE took command of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom in May 2024, the school where Britain's senior officers are trained for the hardest jobs in defence, an institution that teaches 41,000 students a year.

His own route there began a long way from Shrivenham. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he left at 18 to join the British Army as a soldier, then won a place at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1995.

Since then he has commanded Sappers at every level, from troop to regiment, across four continents. He served in Iraq with 31 Armoured Engineer Squadron and in Afghanistan in 2010, and as deputy chief of staff of 4th Mechanised Brigade on a second Afghan tour he was awarded the MBE, an honour he says belongs to his team. He later commanded 32 Engineer Regiment, led the Royal School of Military Engineering, and ran concepts and force exploration at the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre.

Now he leads the Academy itself, an alumnus returning to run the place that shaped his own career. Married, with two children, he still finds time for kayaking, cycling and rugby, and for a good coffee.

What does a career like his say about where the Army's best leaders come from?

Photo: UK Ministry of Defence (Crown copyright).

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@DrHelenFry What sticks with me is that Flowers and his team put it together from telephone exchange parts, in secret, with nothing like it to copy. They were inventing the computer and keeping quiet about it at the same time.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@DrHelenFry Carrying drawings of a V-1 site through occupied Denmark must have taken some nerve. One search at a checkpoint and that was it, yet she got them into British hands.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@CWGC Light and music at a cemetery sounds odd until you see that photo. Then it makes perfect sense. Those men deserve to be remembered as more than names on a wall.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@HeroesOfBritain Ged lugging that chair round for 26 miles is the part I keep coming back to. Andy crossed the line, but he did not do it on his own.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@HeroesOfBritain Naming his daughter Kate says more than any medal citation ever could. That is the part I will remember from this one.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

Major General Andrew Cox MBE, known as Andy, is the British general serving as deputy commander of the United States Army's III Armored Corps at Fort Cavazos, Texas. He took up the appointment in April 2025, taking over from Major General Ben Cattermole, the sixth British officer to hold the post, so Cox is the seventh.

Cox commissioned from Sandhurst in 1996 into the Staffordshire Regiment and has served on operations in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. He commanded the Army Training Regiment and served as deputy commander and chief of staff of the United Kingdom's Joint Force Headquarters, leading a joint task force in Iraq in 2020. From 2020 to 2022 he was already in Texas, as deputy commanding general of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, before returning to Britain as chief of staff of Standing Joint Command, the headquarters responsible for homeland security and resilience operations.

In June 2025 he spoke for the corps after Warfighter 25-4, a nine-day exercise involving more than 7,000 troops from six nations, saying the power of the alliance and the power of integration showed that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. In December 2025 he switched on the Fort Cavazos Christmas tree lights alongside two children from the garrison community. A British officer helping to run an American corps, and an American corps learning to fight alongside its allies. What does that partnership mean for Britain's Army? Photo: US Army (public domain).

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@TheStoicEnglish What gets me is that he turned the jeep round and went back for them. Plenty of men could drive into the guns once, going back under fire is the harder call.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@DrHelenFry Twenty years in storage and then that turns up in a jewellery box. Her family must have spent a long time wondering what else she never told them.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@DanielJPhelan_ Thirty-eight, and lost on the very day the war ended. His family must have carried that date two ways ever after. Good to see his stone looked after in Market Harborough.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

Major General Jonathan Chestnutt CBE is the Army's new Director Personnel, taking up the appointment at Army Headquarters in January 2026. He remains Master General of Logistics, the ceremonial head of the Royal Logistic Corps, a role he has held since April 2024.

Chestnutt, known across the Army as Jo, is a Royal Logistic Corps officer who has spent his career keeping the Army moving. He commanded 104 Theatre Support Brigade, the Army's theatre logistic enabling formation, and 17 Port and Maritime Regiment at Marchwood, the Army's regular port and maritime regiment. He has served operationally in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and led the Defence supply chain as head of the Supply Chain, Operations and Movements team.

Before his current appointment he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Field Army. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's last Birthday Honours in June 2022, and holds a first class science degree and a master's degree with distinction.

He now leads the Army's personnel work at Army Headquarters. The logistician in charge of the Army's people. What should his first priority be? Photo: US Army (public domain).

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@PaulKendall2 @TheHistoryPress Does that one in Bermondsey get many people stopping, or does it mostly get walked past? Zeebrugge deserves to be far better known than it is.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@HeroesOfBritain That is a shame after making the trip. What still amazes me is that he went back out for the wounded again at Passchendaele the next year, even knowing what it had cost him in 1916.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@CFJC_Today Thirty years taking him from the Berlin Wall coming down to Zimbabwe, and still he calls remembrance a daily thing rather than one day a year. That line says more about a life in uniform than any parade could.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

Major General Marc Overton CB TD DL VR, London Guards, spent four years as the most senior reservist in Defence. Commissioned into the London Regiment in 1989, he rose to major general while building a civilian career in technology.

In June 2022 he became Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff for Reserves and Cadets, and he handed the post over in June 2026.

Alongside his Army service he led technology companies, becoming managing director of the defence firm Roke in September 2025, and he serves as Regimental Lieutenant Colonel of 1st Battalion London Guards.

He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 2025 New Year Honours. A reservist who reached the top of the Army's part-time force while running technology companies in civilian life. What does his career say about the citizen soldiers who keep the Army running? Photo: Sarah Foreland (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0).

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@letterappsoc At 102 he could have stayed warm indoors and nobody would have blamed him. The fact he was out there in that weather says more about what the day still means to him than anything else could.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@sportsnag Brophy living to tell them what happened is the part that always gets me. If he had not made it out, that VC might never have been awarded.

[The Untold Battles @battlesuntol]

@CMaclean96 The gas cylinders are the part that stays with me. Rolling three leaking ones away under fire meant slow, deliberate work with something that could have killed everyone still in the trench.