Executed at Dawn (21 page)

Loath as we might be to take criticism from others, some did have more experience of military executions in the First World War than the British. Therefore the observations of a French officer by the name of Massard (Putkowski and Sykes, 1996), who had been present at a number of executions in Vincennes, where some twenty-seven spies and traitors had met their end, would seem to be appropriate and relevant. Massard was present for the executions of Privates Frederick Johnson and Harry McClair of the 2nd Border Regiment on 1 August 1918; they had been sentenced for desertion. Massard's recollections make a number of interesting observations, including that the men were attended by a ‘huge padre of alcoholic appearance'.

Massard was horrified by the conduct of the executions, with both men ‘tied up from head to toe like sausages', making it impossible for the men to move. As a result, they looked like shop window mannequins as they were conveyed in a flatbed lorry to the execution site. On their arrival, Massard noted with distaste that the army chaplain ‘mumbled some words and then went off to eat!' He summed up the execution, conducted by two separate firing squads of six men each, as follows: ‘No military complements, no parade, no music, no march past; a hideous death without drums or trumpets.'

It is difficult to read Massard's recollections without feeling a level of bewilderment and anger. These executions took place nine months after Guilford was handed a set of notes setting out the conduct of an execution. The size of the firing squads was different, six men instead of ten, and the condemned men had been bound in such a way that they could not move, while Guilford's notes speak only of having their wrists bound. The behaviour of the army chaplain is also a cause for concern, as he appeared to display a lack of interest in the proceedings and in the condemned men. Who decided that these executions should be conducted in this way? Although at this distance in time we will never know their names, suspicion must surely fall on either the men's commanding officer or the APM, as it is hard to see that it could have been anyone else. My feeling is that it was more likely to have been the APM because the APM was likely to have been more experienced regarding executions, and the regimental officers would have been only too happy to leave arrangements to them.

The death penalty for murder in civilian life was not abolished until the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended its use in England, Wales and Scotland (but not in Northern Ireland), and substituted a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. The Act further provided that if, before the expiry of the five-year suspension, each House of Parliament passed a resolution to make the effect of the Act permanent, then it would finally be abolished. In 1969 the Labour Home Secretary, James Callaghan, proposed a motion to make the Act permanent, which was carried in the House of Commons on 16 December 1969, and a similar motion was carried in the House of Lords on 18 December 1969. The death penalty for murder was abolished in Northern Ireland on 25 July 1973 under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973. Despite its abolition, there are still many people who would support its restoration.

In the years of the First World War, there was strong support for the death penalty across all elements of society, and so it is no surprise that it not only existed but was enforced in the military. Those serving on the Western Front and the other theatres of the First World War knew the consequences of committing offences under military law, and undoubtedly a number would have supported the use of the death penalty. Many, though, sympathised with the condemned men because they understood what they had been through, as well as their personal circumstances, far better than those who had recommended and confirmed the death sentence. I would contend, however, that despite the standards and practices of the times, the death penalty for those serving in the military and committing offences that had no parallel in civilian life, was both wrong-headed and illogical – and those involved in its administration should have realised that was the case.

Army discipline comes from training, and then more training, backed up by a set of rules enshrined in military law, ignorance of which, as in civilian law, does not form an acceptable defence. The British Army supported the death penalty because it argued that it needed it to maintain discipline and keep an army in the field, but as Lieutenant-Colonel Meyler, who later became MP for Blackpool, said, ‘You train your soldiers not to be impressed by fear, to despise fear, and then you go and bring out … this death sentence which is supposed to improve their discipline by means of fear. The whole thing is illogical.'

Ernest Thurtle also shared Meyler's view when he wrote that the War Office, in the last resort, had defended the death penalty on the grounds of military necessity. He interpreted this as demonstrating that it was only the threat of being shot by men of their own side that kept the British soldier fighting, despite the fact that, as he pointed out, the death penalty had not applied to the Australian soldiers. He concluded with the following words:

no democracy has the right to shoot any man in cold blood, 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 take good care not to fight in them.

The fact that no Australian soldier was executed in the First World War, despite pressure from Sir Douglas Haig for them to adopt the death penalty, is for me the centrepiece of the case for the illogicality of the British Army's approach to capital offences in the military. I say illogical because there is absolutely no evidence that the performance and discipline of the Australian soldiers was undermined because the Australian military did not have the death penalty as a means of ensuring conformity and control. I find it hard to believe that no Australian soldier ever fell asleep on guard duty or committed the other offences that would have meant a death sentence for their British counterparts, and you would be a brave person to argue that they were less effective as a result.

Support for the death penalty is based on the principles of punishment and deterrence, but in the British Army, with the exception of murder and treason, the capital offences did not have an equivalent in the civilian world. If you are prepared to accept that the British Army in the midst of the First World War needed not only to have, but also to impose, the death sentence, then the assumption would be that the execution would not only punish the individual but also act as a deterrent to others. It is the deterrent aspect that can be the only justification for those public military executions that took place, demonstrating to the men in the battalions and regiments concerned what they could expect if they decided to, for example, desert. From the evidence I have been able to gather it seems that the deterrence aspect was just not apparent in many of the executions, to the point where soldiers simply stopped believing that they happened. In addition, if the death sentence was such a deterrent, then why had some of those who were eventually executed deserted a number of times?

Even allowing for the procedures of the times, the way that decisions leading to the confirmation of a death sentence were made was not just wrong-headed but, in fact, plain wrong. This view is based on the fact that military law was changed in September 1914 to allow for the decision of a field court martial to be enacted quickly; the condemned man's right to an appeal was also taken away.

After the First World War, the British Army and its supporters made much of the fact that only 10 per cent of those sentenced to death were actually executed, but behind that figure there exists a real cause for concern. In civilian life, for example, which after all existed in parallel with military life during the First World War and only a few miles distant from it, if a murder was committed, the perpetrator would be arrested and taken before a court and, if subsequently found guilty, would be sentenced to death by the judge in that court. The law allowed for an appeal process and once that was exhausted the sentence would be carried out. In the British Army, however, things were done somewhat differently: once a soldier had been found guilty of a capital offence, he would not be told the sentence but would have to wait while his case passed up through the decision-making tree. It would appear that confirmation of the sentence depended on the man's senior officers and ultimately the commander-in-chief taking a view as to whether an example needed to be made, based on the perceived discipline and or performance of the individual's battalion or regiment. So once again, even allowing for the practices of the times, this cannot have been right if the sentence was being determined not by the offence itself, but for reasons unconnected to the offence. Was it right that the decision concerning a man's life could hinge on the perceived discipline and performance of those he served with?

The only explanation for the denial of an appeal for those soldiers condemned to death has to be the needs of the exigencies of the service, as perceived by the military hierarchy. If the condemned man had a right of appeal then very few men would have chosen not to exercise it, which would have placed a burden on the system. I suspect also that there was a strong desire to keep matters in-house where they could be contained, because an appeal process could have led to appeals being considered by those from a non-military background who may have questioned the courts martial process, the lack of evidence, the lack of qualified legal representation and the reasons why a sentence had been confirmed.

Once the sentence had been confirmed then the execution would take place within a matter of hours or, in some cases, minutes, giving the individual concerned little time to prepare or, even if they were able, to draw attention to their plight.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Britain was a society with distinct social classes, yet even accepting that was the custom of the time, it is indefensible that class played such a prominent role in the British Army's enforcement of discipline. As was the case with the Australians, it is hard to believe that British Army officers did not commit any capital offences – of course they did, but they were just dealt with differently.

It is hard to understand how it could be the case that only three officers were executed in the First World War, with one of those being for murder. In 1916, Sir Douglas Haig wrote that desertion by an officer should be treated more severely than with the other ranks, but his wish changed nothing. Under-performing officers were taken out of the front line and either sent back to Britain or placed in roles behind the lines. On the rare occasions that an officer was charged and found guilty, they were more likely to be cashiered or demoted. Unlike their men, officers could and did appeal, and many were pardoned and restored to their rank by King George V in the years after the war had ended. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the opponents of pardons for those executed were not keen to accept this as a reason for pardons to be granted, albeit posthumously, to the other ranks.

There is also evidence that the private soldier was viewed by some officers as virtually worthless. This is not a re-run of the ‘lions led by donkeys' debate, but if a condemned man was viewed in that way then it is not a huge leap to a position where he is viewed as expendable. For me, the issue of class is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of the British Army's adherence to the death penalty because, unlike civilian law, it did not apply to all men equally. The case of Private James Crozier is a blatant example of this, as is the part played by Major (later Brigadier) Crozier. Major Crozier was faced with two men who had deserted, one being an officer and the other a young private soldier, and he was dismayed that those above him decided that no further action was to be taken against the officer. However, despite the glaring unfairness involved, he did not hesitate to recommend that Private Crozier should be executed.

Sir Douglas Haig's mantra, ‘truth could be abandoned in the cause of the war effort', leads to another area of concern: namely, the lack of transparency on the part of the military hierarchy and the politicians. It was the army's procedure up until 1917 for its Records Office bluntly to inform families that their family member had been sentenced to death and that this sentence had been carried out, resulting in the forfeiture of all rights to campaign medals and benefits, which had the effect of leaving many families destitute. The Army Records Office could only send such letters if it was informed that a sentence had been carried out and yet, up until 1917, some commanding officers included those executed in the lists of men killed in action. This situation ended in 1917, much to the army's dismay, when the government decided in November of that year that the families of those executed were to be informed that their loved ones had died on active service. This had been an informal procedure on the part of some commanding officers, though it is impossible to say with any confidence whether such officers were motivated by concerns for the men's families or a desire, for whatever reason, to keep things quiet, thereby protecting themselves and ultimately the army.

In the early years of the First World War, the government itself was reluctant to admit that executions were taking place, or the numbers involved. It could be argued, therefore, that the government and the military hierarchy's behaviour seemed to be bordering on embarrassment about what was happening. I believe that, certainly up until 1916 when conscription was brought in, one of their concerns would have been the possible impact on recruitment if the facts became known. The government could not afford to take the British people for granted and risk alienating them, which might have been the result if the scale of the executions had become known.

Neither the military hierarchy nor the government did much to dispel the feeling that they had something to hide even when the war ended. Families, politicians and other interested parties were prevented from gaining access to the courts martial papers on the basis that only defendants could request these, and as they had been shot no one else had a right to them. Furthermore, the papers relating to those executed were initially embargoed for 100 years. The army also engaged in ‘weeding out' – which today would be referred to as redacting – what it considered to be sensitive documents from battalion and regimental diaries and routine orders, in what it admitted was an attempt to ‘thwart the inquisitive'.