Robert Denny

Proud father. Mending rivers for water voles & fish. Beekeeping. Dogs and hounds. Fly fishing, gardener, cook, rugby referee.

[Untold War Stories @UntoldWarFacts]

🧵 7/7

The photographs the Eager Beavers brought back helped guide the invasion of Bougainville.

Joe Sarnoski, who kept firing from his nose gun as he died, was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Jay Zeamer, the pilot the Army had nearly written off, who flew a wrecked bomber 500 miles home on a broken leg and shredded arms, was also awarded the Medal of Honor. It was one of the very few times in American history that two men from a single aircraft received the Medal of Honor for the same action.

Every other member of the crew received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award for valor.

Nine men. One mission. Two Medals of Honor and seven Distinguished Service Crosses. No air crew in American history has ever been decorated like the Eager Beavers.

Zeamer survived his wounds. He spent months in hospitals, recovered, lived a long life, and died in 2007. He is buried at Arlington.

The pilot nobody wanted, flying the bomber nobody wanted, with a crew of men nobody wanted, became the most decorated air crew the country has ever produced.

This was the story of the Eager Beavers.

I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

I’ve been waiting more than 15 months for @HMRCgovuk to refund about £350 on my deceased mother’s account so that we can wind up the estate. Today I received a reminder from them that the executors will have to submit a tax return for this year all because of their tardiness.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@MarcherReborn Baked beans and Spam - choice!

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@MarcherReborn Copy and paste that right across the country!

[Graham Denny @GrahamDenny9]

#Gutted #watervole @SWTWildFarms @SuffolkBiod @Mammal_Society @Gameandwildlife @JennyA_Rawson @RabKing___aye @barry_woodhous7 @Naturalcalendar @NaturalEngland

[Robin Redmile-Gordon @WhatNowDoc]

Well, what you’ve all been asking for. It’s out now on Kindle and Amazon in digital. The paperback should be out next week.

Please, do me a favour, leave me an honest review, nothing less than five stars, obviously. 🙏

https://t.co/QQqtvYMb8e

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@paulpowlesland @stuartpengs I have and do trespass, when necessary in order to carry out project work so completely get your motivations.
Equally, I get Stuart’s concerns and thinking.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@paulpowlesland @stuartpengs Interesting discussion between the two of you. Paul, your example, I think is perfectly reasonable to clear up and well done. A quick pre work breeding bird survey to mitigate risks would cover it.
Good to hear the Roding is in good hands. The Wandle has similar benefactors.

[Countryside Alliance @CAupdates]

A huge response to this recent programme! We spent the day meeting men and women who depend on trail hunting for their livelihoods.

Since the programme aired on GB News yesterday, lots of people have responded to oppose the government’s proposed ban on the activity. Thank you!

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@WhatNowDoc @Drystonesonnet Safe to say, that’s a view to die for!

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@julian_voelcker They help but the big difference is from the stuff you buy in 1 foot rolls. They are used in dairies and cattle sheds.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

Two tier Dachshunds!

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@MG6pii I doubt the pilots will be in control of anything more than a desk after that.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

Excellent.

[Not that Elon. @Eggplant_Elon]

The Last Englishman

Part One: Tuesday, 12 May 2026

The pound was bleeding out, and the man on the screen was using the word 'sobering'.

Tom Ashbury read the post twice. El-Erian had a gift for the polite obituary, the kind written while the body was still warm and the family still in the room. Thirty-year gilt at 5.77. A level not seen since March 1998, when Ashbury had been twenty-two years old and convinced, in the way only the young and well-paid are convinced, that money was a solved problem.

He set the phone face down on the bar.
The wine bar off Lombard Street was three-quarters empty at half past six on a Tuesday, which would have been unthinkable five years ago and was now simply Tuesday. A woman in her early thirties sat two stools down, reading something on her phone with the particular stillness of someone receiving bad news she had already half expected.

The barman polished a glass that did not need polishing. Somewhere behind the bottles, a radio was running the BBC news at a volume calibrated not to be heard.

Ashbury turned the phone back over.
He had been reading the warnings for two years. Lyn Alden. Russell Napier. The quiet men at the back of the gilt desks who used to send him notes when he still worked at Cazenove and who now sent him nothing, because the notes had become legally complicated and the men had become tired.

He had read them and stacked sats and said nothing at dinner parties, because saying anything at dinner parties was a way of finding out which of your friends had become informants without quite realising it.

He thought about his daughter.
Eliza was twenty-six. She worked in something called Permit Compliance at the GLA, a department which had not existed three years earlier and which now occupied four floors of a building in Southwark.

She believed, in the careful way of people who had been to good universities recently, that the system was difficult but reformable. She had not asked him about his views in eighteen months. He understood this to be a kindness.

The phone buzzed. A news alert, the licensed kind, from the only outlet still permitted on his device after the consolidation. Chancellor reassures markets. Fiscal framework remains credible. PM to address Commons tomorrow. Ashbury read it the way a man reads a weather forecast issued from inside a hurricane.

He thought of the ukdecline counter he had bookmarked years ago, before the site had gone dark under the Information Integrity Act, before mere possession of its archived figures had become a Tier Three offence. £4,184 a second. He had memorised the number the way other men memorised football scores.

Every second, somewhere in the Treasury, a young economist clicked through a model that did not include the variable Ashbury was looking at on his phone right now.

He paid in cash, which was still legal, just, and walked out into the dusk.

In fourteen years, he would be sixty. In fourteen years, the cottage in Norfolk would still be standing, though the licensed heating would not be reaching it, and the note pushed under his door would carry forty Bitcoin and a sentence in his old friend’s hand that he had not yet read and could not yet imagine.

But that was fourteen years away.

Tonight, the pound was bleeding out, and the man on the screen was using the word sobering, and Tom Ashbury walked east toward Aldgate with the particular slow clarity of a man who has just understood that the polite phase of something is ending.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

There’s a handful of grit in my eye.

[Dr MuVenda @Ndi_Muvenda_]

In Kruger National Park, South Africa, veteran ranger Sipho Nkosi suffered a heart attack while on solo patrol. His vehicle was found empty, and search teams began looking for him.

What the park’s remote trail cameras revealed broke the hearts of everyone who saw the footage.

An old bull elephant — known to rangers as “Mnumzane” (Zulu for “Sir”) — had found Sipho’s body. For three full days and nights, the elephant refused to leave. He stood guard, gently touching the ranger with his trunk, chasing away hyenas and jackals that came too close, and even covering parts of the body with branches and leaves.

On the third night, the elephant was still there — visibly grieving, swaying slowly beside his fallen friend. Only when the full recovery team arrived with vehicles did Mnumzane finally step back, watching solemnly as they carried Sipho away.

Park officials later confirmed that Sipho had rescued this same elephant as a calf years earlier after poachers killed his mother. The elephant had never forgotten.

One colleague who viewed the footage whispered:

“He didn’t come to say goodbye. He came to make sure no one disrespected his brother.”

Mnumzane still visits the exact spot regularly. Rangers now leave fresh water and fruit there in honor of both.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@st3venwilliams @MikeDales @TheBarmyArmy Thanks both. Heard it a lot on TMS but never explained.

[Robert Denny @denny_robert]

@Thebestfigen @JonathanSlayton Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do this if you could!