Military Executions during World War I pp 100-130 | Cite as
Pour encourager les autres: Morale, Discipline and the Death Penalty on the Front Line
Chapter
Abstract
Having examined how military law was structured, and analysed attitudes towards morale and discipline, we must now consider how British commanders used the death penalty, or at least the threat of it, during the war. Two broad questions will be explored. First, what general trends can be discerned? To what extent do these reflect pre-existing structures? And was any military formation more vulnerable to capital sentences than any other? Second, how were the sentences applied in individual units? What variations from any detected general trends were there?
Keywords
Death Penalty Death Sentence Commanding Officer Capital Sentence British Army
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Notes
- 1.For example, Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, A Brass Hat in No Man’s Land (Cedric Chivers, Bath, 1930), p. 204, recalls ordering the machine-gunning of fleeing Portuguese troops during 1918. See also G. Oram, Worthless Men: race, eugenics and the death penalty in the British army during the First World War (Francis Boutle, London, 1998), p. 33.Google Scholar
- 2.On 15 February 1915 Private Morgan and Lance Corporal Price, 2 Welsh Regiment, were executed for murder, but their names were not recorded in the courts-martial registers.Google Scholar
- 3.G. Sheffield, ‘Officer—Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in the British Army 1902–22’, PhD thesis (King’s College, London, 1994).Google Scholar
- 4.Private Whittle, 5 Dragoon Guards was sentenced to death by court martial on 23 August 1914 for sleeping at his post. His sentence was commuted to two years’ hard labour. PRO W0213/2.Google Scholar
- 5.Robert Blake, The Private Papers ofDouglas Haig 1914–1919 (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1952), p. 77.Google Scholar
- 6.Major A. F. Becke, Order of Battle, Part 1: The Regular British Divisions (HMSO, London, 1945).Google Scholar
- 7.See graph in Oram, Death Sentences, p. 14, or Worthless Men, p. 38.Google Scholar
- 8.If 43rd and 44th Divisions are removed from the calculation, the average number of condemnations in Territorial Force Divisions rises slightly to 24 — still significantly fewer than in Regular units.Google Scholar
- 9.Alan Moorhead, Gallipoli (Wordsworth Editions, Ware, 1997), p. 138.Google Scholar
- 10.For ease of reference and for the sake of completeness I have included Royal Naval Division as a New Army formation.Google Scholar
- 11.Maxse papers, IWM 11/1.Google Scholar
- 12.Quoted in T. Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 (Routledge, London, 1990), p. 51.Google Scholar
- 13.Curiously, the divisional history, Lieutenant-Colonel H. M. Davson, History of the 35th Division (Cassell, London, 1926) virtually ignores this unprecedented phenomenon.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Gerard Christopher Oram 2003