Over three hundred British soldiers were executed in the war for different offenses ranging from desertion to murder.  For those who were charged this was the ‘extreme penalty’.

There are some ‘myths’ on the subject First man shot

This is a very sensitive subject, especially for the relatives of the soldiers, and there have been a number of attempts to have pardons granted for those who were executed, some of whom came from the York and Lancaster Regiment.  I have to say that while I believe that these men would not under current military discipline suffer this extreme penalty, I don’t agree with the attempt to have those sentences changed. So much of history happened in a way that would not happen today, or would not be approved under today’s rules and mores. It is very hard to read the documents from those cases and believe that on such slender evidence a man was put to death, but at the same time, those were the rules under which they all lived. Having said that, medical science did not understand then as they do now, the effects of the trauma of war on those soldiers involved in it. In the vast majority of cases those men should not have suffered the extreme penalty, but they did, under the rules that applied then.

I will draw on a few sources for this section; the trial papers held in the Public Record Office at Kew, Anthony Babington’s book “For the sake of example”, Putowski & Sykes book “Shot at dawn, and “Blindfold and Alone” by Cathryn Corns & John Hughes-Wilson. Babington’s book was the first, he was a Judge who was given access to the records in the early 1980’s but was not allowed to mention the individual soldiers or their unit. In 1983 when his book was first published these details were still considered too sensitive.  “Shot at Dawn” needs to be read with some caution as it was not written with access to the individual soldiers’ Court Martial records, these are in the PRO under the reference WO 71/ and these are not referenced in the book. Also, other sources have shown a number of factual errors in the book. 

A good essay on the subject is John Peaty’s “Capital Courts-Martial during the Great War” published in “Look to Your Front, Studies in The First World War”.

The following is a list of those offenses for which the death penalty could be awarded under military discipline; mutiny, cowardice before the enemy, disobedience of a lawful order, desertion or attempted desertion, sleeping or being drunk on post, striking a superior officer, casting away arms or ammunition in the presence of the enemy, leaving a post without orders, abandoning a position, and treacherously communicating with or in any way assisting the enemy.  Under these rules, especially those in italics [my own] my grandfather must have been dangerously close to a similar fate when he was taken prisoner on 21 March 1918.

While the severity of the sentence grabs our attention we should also remember that it was a very small percentage of those involved in the war who were subjected to this penalty (small consolation to those involved or their relatives), that only some 10% of those awarded the death penalty had it confirmed and carried out and that probably very few soldiers actually knew anyone to whom this had happened.  From a penalty and deterrence point of view far more soldiers would have been aware of someone who had suffered Field Penalty Number 1, the degrading strapping of a man to a wheel for hours at time and left in public view.

A number of ‘myths’ have come down to us as ‘fact’ in regard to those who were to suffer the ‘extreme penalty and some of those are; they were all very young, only just old enough to fight for their country, they were escaping from the bombardment and gunfire, they were convicted without ‘due process’, they were all shell-shocked, they were shot for being ‘cowards’. While some of these may have been true in some individual cases, it is wrong to generalise that these assumptions were true in all cases.

Of those executed only eighteen were convicted of cowardice, the vast majority were convicted for desertion, and of these the big majority were not men fleeing from the bombardment, but were men who were apprehended some way from the front, some of them back in England.  As has been mentioned elsewhere on the site, troops were cycled through the trench system, usually spending not more than a few days at the front at any one time before being relieved and finding themselves in support areas, rear areas or training.  Only a very small part of an individual soldiers time would have been ‘under fire’. That is not to say that they did not live in pretty appalling conditions at the front.  The determination that an individual has exhibited ‘cowardice’ is a subjective viewpoint, but ‘desertion’ was not, it was objective; to be declared guilty of desertion a man had to be absent without leave from his unit for 21 days, or if he were apprehended away from his unit within the 21 day timeframe and was adjudged to have the intent not to return, then he would also be guilty of desertion. The manner of absenting himself and the ‘intent’ were important, as were the ways in which this would be determined. The majority of the men tried for desertion were apprehended some way from their units, they were away without leave and almost all would have been wearing civilian clothes, have discarded their unit badges and signs of rank, and also their weapons. One (Drummer Rose) had been living with a french girl for almost two years when he was caught and tried.  Being a soldier then meant living cheek by jowl with your mates, each putting up with the same bad conditions and helping each other out and the vast majority stuck with it knowing the penalty for not doing so.  And it has to be said that the British Army did not suffer the morale and discipline problems that so affected the French, possibly because of this deterrent.

The procedure to be followed when trying a man by Court Martial was well laid down and was followed, to say that they were executed and ‘did not receive even the rudiments of a just hearing’ (Shot at Dawn) is not correct.  One can have one’s own view of Court Martial procedure compared to the process of a criminal trial at the Old Bailey, but that is not the point. The constitution and procedure of the FGCM was laid down and was followed. In some cases the defendant did not opt for an Officer to defend him, and in many cases of desertion there was little defence put forward. The man was absent, evidence was put forward to back this position and there was little that could be put forward in mitigation as most men showed their intent not to return. The sentence of the FGCM was always then passed up through the command structure for approval until it reached GHQ. The man’s commanding officer would be required to give comments on the qualities of the individual as a soldier, and the discipline of the man’s unit and it is true that there would often be a comment to the effect that the sentence should proceed to ensure the continued discipline of the others, but that was after the case had been heard and the FGCM had given their view.

Babinton’s comment on this was that “Apart from the circumstances of the offence, the issue of life or death seems to have been determined by two factors - whether it was considered that the condemned man had the makings of a good soldier; and whether his execution might be beneficial for the immediate needs of discipline.”

As mentioned above, of those awarded the death penalty, almost 90% had it commuted to some other sentence, the review process was working in their case. There is another important point to remember when reviewing the files on these men, only the files of those for whom the sentence was carried out remain in the PRO, the files of all those others no longer exist, so we cannot read the process and comments that led to those 90% being commuted.  The files of those who were shot limit our view of the process.

After a sentence had been confirmed the promulgation of the sentence generally took place at a special parade of the condemned man’s unit, quite often this would happen on the morning that the man was shot.  His unit, by his commanding officer, the prisoner under escort and often a chaplain, attended the parade; the adjutant or another of the officers would read out the sentence. The firing squad was normally drawn from men of his unit, and often they did not know they they had drawn this duty until shortly before they had to shoot their comrade.

The first of these British soldiers to die in front of a firing squad was court martialled on the 6th September; the war had only been one month old.  The soldier was Private T.J. Highgate of the 1st Royal West Kents, and the charge against him was desertion.  He was 19 years old and it was the day after the retreat from Mons had ended. Private Highgate was found in a barn in civilian clothes, with his uniform at his side, and he was tried the day he was found by a Field General Court Martial (FGCM) whose members were a colonel, a captain and a lieutenant; there was no officer to defend him, presumably at his request, he was found guilty and executed by a firing squad from 15 Brigade on the morning of the 8th September. The proceedings were very rapid. Under the rules of procedure Highgate would have been aware at the end of the trial that he had been found guilty, but would not be aware of the sentence until the Commander-in-Chief confirmed it. Sir John French confirmed the sentence on the evening of the trial.  Highgate himself was only told that the death sentence had been awarded some 45 minutes before his execution.  Also, at the end of it all, even though he was the first to be shot, or maybe because he was, he has no known grave. The second man to be executed was shot on 26th September for cowardice, and the offence occurred on only his third day of active service, the shortest of the war. When the papers went to Sir Douglas Haig for confirmation of sentence he added his comment; “I am of the opinion that it is necessary to make an example to prevent cowardice in the face of the enemy as far as possible.”

At this early stage of the war the men were volunteers, these were not conscripts and an extract from Babington’s book is worth quoting.

“It remained to be seen how rigorously the Army’s stringent code of discipline would be applied to this rushed intake of temporary soldiers. Most of them had been impelled to join up through the most unselfish of motives - a resolute sense of duty or an emotional desire to serve their country in her hour of need. Many had neither the physique nor the temperament of the fighting man and still retained a visionary concept of warfare distorted by notions of chivalry and romance. Few of them at the moment of enlistment could possibly have predicted their reactions under fire or their endurance to the sights, the sounds and the strains of the battlefield.” The young men in the BEF had come with no experience of war into an environment where at the end of 1914, according to the Official History; “In British battalions which fought from Mons to Ypres there scarcely remained with the colours an average of one officer and thirty men who had landed in August, 1914.  The old British Army was gone beyond recall.” It is small wonder that some of these young men found it too much to take, but the very great majority of them did found a way to get through it.

So what are the differences between a General Court Martial (GCM) and a Field General Court Martial (FGCM)?  The differences arise because of the exigencies of life for army units in the field during war; it is more difficult to convene a judicial process in these circumstances. In peace a GCM would be convened and it would consist of at least five officers and would usually be assisted by a legally qualified judge-advocate. In action in the field these serious offences would be dealt with by a FGCM, which should consist of not less than three officers, preferably with at least one of the rank of major or above, and judge-advocates rarely participated. To pass a sentence of death all the officers had to be in agreement. There is an excellent description of the procedural rules that governed these judicial processes in Babington’s book, Chapter 2. It has been mentioned earlier that higher authorities did not in fact confirm some 90% of death sentences; Babington gives his likely explanation for this.

“It seems strangely illogical for a tribunal with a complete sentencing discretion to pass the maximum penalty coupled with a recommendation that it should be reduced. yet a number of courts martial which imposed the death sentence added a recommendation, sometimes a strong recommendation, to mercy. The answer may lie in the fact that a number of inexperienced and comparatively junior officers were completely out of their depth when sentencing for serious offences.”

There is a memorial to those who were ‘shot at dawn’ in the National Arboretum.  There is a post for each man and the statue is modeled on one of the young soldiers who died.  Facing him are six cedar sapplings symbolozing the firing squad.