Executed at Dawn (14 page)

The execution post at Poperinghe, against which men such as Private James Michael were shot. Private Michael of the 10th Battalion Cameronians, Scottish Rifles, was shot at dawn for desertion on 24 August 1917. He had gone absent during the opening of the Third Battle of Ypres in July. Private Herbert Morris was recruited in the West Indies during the winter of 1916/17. As he was black, he was never intended to be a combatant. He went absent, he said, because he could not cope with the sound of the guns. At 17 he was one of the youngest to be shot – though not the only one underage. (Courtesy of Paul Kendall)

After the war, an MP recalled being told by a general that he had ‘paraded the whole division in order to see the sentence carried out' (Moore, 1999). On 22 May 1916, Private William Burrell of the 2nd Sussex Regiment was shot for desertion. Private Burrell was executed in front of his comrades, who were ordered to face away from the place of execution and told that anyone who turned around would be placed on a charge. Such was the strain on the men present that one man fainted as the shots rang out.

As brutal as such public executions may seem today, the military hierarchy justified them on the grounds that there would have been no purpose in executing a soldier except in front of his comrades, where it would serve as a deterrent to others. But as Private Walter Williams of the Machine Gun Corps/Northumberland Fusiliers (Williams, 2013) shows in his memoirs, this was not always the effect achieved. Williams wrote about the emotional aftermath of having to witness, along with many other soldiers, the execution of a man from his own regiment. When the men had fallen out after the execution, a number expressed their anger at what they had just seen by swearing, cursing the injustice, and breaking whatever was to hand, while others prayed. The men were united in the view that the execution was not the deterrent the army had hoped for and that their officers had lost all respect. This was surely not the effect the officers concerned would have hoped for or expected?

It was also likely that the First World War, perhaps more than any conflict that had gone before, piled horror upon horror on those involved, and therefore the effect of witnessing an execution became diluted as the war progressed.

The deterrent aspect of the executions was further undermined by the fact that a number of men who had been shot for desertion were serial offenders – they had been tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence had been commuted two, three and sometimes four times before their luck finally ran out. By way of an example, Private Frederick Broadrick of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was serving with its 11th Battalion while already subject to a suspended death sentence, when he deserted again rather than parade for a working party to which he had been detailed; he was executed on 1 August 1917. Private Samuel Cunningham, also from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who had enlisted in January 1914, was sentenced to twenty-eight days' detention for desertion on 21 January 1916. Undeterred, he deserted again; after his eventual capture, at a court martial held on 29 April 1917, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed on 19 May 1917.

The Reverend Julian Bickersteth wrote in his diary on 5 July 1917 about Private Walter Yeoman, who had deserted a further four times since his initial act of desertion. The man had had his death sentence commuted and then suspended to give him another chance, but he had deserted again.

The evidence, therefore, as limited as it might appear, points to this being an aspect of military executions where there was no consistency, as not all executions were carried out with the condemned man's battalion or regiment present, which undermined the only logical reason for executions, namely deterrence. As will be discussed later, some soldiers simply did not believe that they took place at all.

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From 1915 onwards, uncomfortable questions about the army's use of the death penalty began to be asked in Parliament. In 1915, Under Secretary of State for War Harold Tennant, in answer to a direct question, confirmed that executions had taken place, but in July of that year he refused to confirm the number of death sentences passed, on the grounds that it would not be in the public interest. Over the subsequent years the questions were to continue.

In 1919, the army showed that it was aware of the public mood and the likely consequences for its ability to retain the death penalty, as evidenced in the following extract from Public Record Office file ‘WO32/5479 Suspension of the Death Penalty: 1918–19':

‘Even during the continuance of hostilities there was very strong feeling both in the country and in the House of Commons against the infliction of the death penalty for military offences. Now that hostilities have ceased it can confidently be stated that the effect on this country of a death penalty might lead to an agitation which might be difficult to control and in all probability would jeopardise the prospects of maintaining the death penalty for military offences in time of peace when the Annual Army (Act) comes before the Houses of Parliament.' 2nd March 1919 D.P.S. [Director of Personal Services] Brigadier General Sir Wyndham Childs (Department of the Adjutant General)

The Darling Committee Report in 1919 effectively gave a clean bill of health to the court martial system of the time despite three committee members refusing to sign the report. These individuals then submitted their own report, which differed from the majority report in many areas. Specifically, they complained that investigations into miscarriages of justice had been blocked and, although such instances were evident, they had been unable to investigate further. They also concluded that there had been too many courts martial during the war, court martial panel members should have legal training, the confirmation-of-sentence process should be removed, and that a right of appeal should be introduced.

In 1920, a War Office committee of inquiry was set up, under the chairmanship of Lord Southborough, to look into the different types of hysteria and traumatic neurosis and, not surprisingly, this was referred to as the Shell Shock Committee, which reported back two years later. As a result of its deliberations, it brought together knowledge of these conditions and treatment methods and Corns and Hughes-Wilson provided a detailed examination of the work of this committee.

One of the witnesses called was Captain James Churchill Dunn, DSO, MC and Bar, DCM, of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers who had received his gallantry awards while serving as a trooper in the Boer War. In a debate in the House of Commons on 18 January 2006 (Hansard), Keith Simpson, MP, recalled that Captain Dunn, who went on to serve as a medical officer on the Western Front, had published his diaries, in which he had expressed his views on morale and discipline. He was one of only two medical officers who gave evidence to the committee. He was a man who was ‘absolutely convinced of the deterrent value of executing those who wilfully deserted and absconded; he believed in the deterrent effect',
but his choice of the word ‘wilfully' suggests that he did not believe it should apply to those men who simply could not help themselves as a result of mental trauma.

Following a strong campaign from abolitionists, such as Ernest Thurtle, MP, who had himself served as a captain on the Western Front, the death penalty for eight offences committed on active service was abolished in 1928. These offences included striking or offering violence to a superior officer, disobeying a lawful order so as to display a wilful defiance of authority, and sleeping or being drunk while on sentry duty. The death penalty remained for desertion, cowardice, leaving a post without orders, mutiny and treachery when committed on active service. Thurtle was an abolitionist because he felt that it was unfair that military law ‘enabled non-fighting people, the majority, to send fighting men, the minority, to be killed or maimed in any cause the majority may decide proper. And the fighting man may not refuse on pain of death, or at least, penal servitude.'

He went on to write:

… in these days no democracy has the right to shoot any man, volunteer or conscript, because he is unable to withstand the horrors of modern war. If war cannot be waged without the Death Penalty, and we take the penalty away, much the worse for the people who make wars but good care no doubt to those who fight in them.

But it was not until April 1930, in the face of considerable opposition in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, from among others a number of retired senior officers, that the death penalty was finally abolished in the military for all the remaining offences except those of serious misconduct in action, assisting the enemy, obstructing operations, giving false air signals, mutiny or incitement to mutiny, and failure to suppress a mutiny with intent to assist the enemy. The death penalty for these remaining offences was finally abolished in 1998.

Brigadier F.P. Crozier made an interesting, if somewhat confused, contribution to the abolition debate. He seemed to misunderstand the terms ‘abolition' and ‘reform', and clearly thought that it was the method of execution that needed to be reformed and that the firing squad itself was the focus of abolition. Crozier acknowledged that this needed doing but then, completely missing the intention and purpose of the debate, went on to advocate that the firing squad should be replaced by a single machine gun which he felt would be more efficient. In this, ironically, he was probably correct.

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Military executions in the First World War do not constitute the British Army's finest hour. The conduct of the courts martial themselves has given rise to many concerns around the processes and procedures followed, the lack of suitable legal representation for defendants, and the failure to call relevant witnesses. There are many excellent books available for those who are interested and want to find out more, and so those concerns do not have to be covered again in this book.

It is difficult, though, to move on without restating the part that chance played in the death penalty. Moore (1999) repeats a story told by Major M.M. Wood, MP, in 1921, who said that he had been told by someone who had acted as the president of a court martial that he had always imposed the maximum sentence because he felt secure in the knowledge that there was a confirming officer further up the chain of command who would in the end make the final decision. Unfortunately, a confirming officer subsequently told Wood that he had never commuted a death sentence because he had always felt that the members of the court martial, having seen the prisoner themselves, were in a better position to impose the proper sentence. As a consequence, men would be executed because of such basic misunderstandings.

While the generals were reluctant to see the death penalty abolished for offences committed on active service because they saw such a step having a negative impact on discipline, it is important to note that not a single Australian soldier throughout the First World War was ever sentenced to death by a court martial, despite pressure from Sir Douglas Haig. It would be hard to argue that no Australian soldier ever fell asleep whilst on guard duty or committed any of the other offences but, equally, it would be hard to argue that the lack of the ultimate deterrent affected their ability to perform in the field. This difference in approach was summed up by a British soldier, Private George Morgan, who made the following observation (Brown, 2001): ‘They didn't shoot any Australians. They would have rioted. They weren't like us. We were docile.'

Conversely, it should be noted that the French Army executed about 600 of its men, the Germans forty-eight, and the Belgians thirteen. The German Army was double the size of the British Army and yet executed a much smaller number of its men. So once again, the question needs to be asked – were the German soldiers better disciplined than their British counterparts or was a different approach to these matters adopted?

The death penalty was used to deter those on active service from committing one or more of the proscribed offences. For deterrence to be effective, the sentences needed to be publicised, but there is evidence (Moore, 1999) that this was not always the case and ‘some victims … were put to death almost in secret'. Moore felt that at times the army was deliberately secretive about what it was doing and went on to say, ‘Certainly, despite pronouncements and promulgations, doubts remained in the minds of many soldiers as to the frequency of executions and the details of the last grim rites.'

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It is also difficult to read about the military's, and in particular the officers', support for the use of the death penalty without concluding that class factors were also at play. At the outbreak of the First World War, British society was very much class-based. By way of an example, military commissions were available for the taking for young men from public schools but not for those from grammar schools (Marr, 2009); however, that had to change as stocks in that particular pond became depleted as casualties mounted. As the need for more officers became pressing, the army's response was to create temporary officers who would hold their commission for the duration of the war but who could only be drawn from the ranks of the sergeants and corporals. These experienced men, however, were very often reluctant to take a commission because they felt that their chances of survival would be less as an officer – junior officers had a life expectancy of just six weeks (Lewis-Stempel, 2011) – despite the attraction of time out of the line for officer training. Nevertheless, by the end of the war it was estimated that 40 per cent of officers came from the lower and middle classes (Paxman, 2013).

Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, there were even brigades and battalions formed that catered solely for those from the upper and middle classes so that they would not have to serve alongside men from the lower classes. A further example of the class divide was that letters from the soldiers in the trenches to their loved ones were subject to censorship, with their officers reading them and blocking out anything untoward, while officers were trusted and their letters were allowed to be sent home without anyone casting an eye over them. In addition, officers were granted more leave than their men and this became a source of grievance as the war dragged on. Officers also had servants and ate better meals than those of lower rank. It was also true that as an officer you were more likely to be treated for shell shock, if needed, than the men you commanded.