Death Penalty News

Private James Smith had already served four years in the army by 1914. After enduring Gallipoli and the Somme, he was sent to Passchendaele where his refusal to fight earned him the death penalty. Men from his own battalion were ordered to shoot him but deliberately missed, apart from one who maimed him. An officer tried to deliver the coup de grâce, but couldn’t, so ordered a soldier to do it instead. “The guy was a hero,” concluded Dan Snow, after a tearful encounter with Private Smith’s great great nephew Charles Sandbach 100 years on . How our perceptions change. Or do they? In World War One’s Secret Shame: Shell Shock (BBC Two) Snow argued that the military has not vastly enlarged its capacity to care for those who incurred psychiatric trauma in uniform. Close to the trenches on the western front, the Army installed psychiatric treatment units, but only so that it could restore jibbering wrecks to battle-worthiness. No matter that the afflicted might be unable to walk s...

The Shot at Dawn Memorial, Staffordshire, UK A century ago today in the Great War, Second Lieutenant Eric Poole laid down his life at the city hall of a Belgian border town . As it was put by the sadly defunct Shot At Dawn site ( still preserved at the Wayback Machine ), “The cemetery register of Poperinghe New Military Cemetery states that Lt. Eric Skeffington Poole died of wounds on 10 December 1916. Tactfully, it omits to record also that his death was caused by a British Army firing squad.” A Canadian-born engineer, Poole had enlisted in the very first weeks of the war and been commissioned an officer by May 1915. In July of 1916, a falling artillery shell struck so close that its concussion knocked Poole down, spattering him with earth. He was hospitalized for shellshock but returned to duty in September — still complaining of rheumatism and feeling “damned bad.” One night in October as his unit moved up to a forward trench, Poole disappeared from it — nobody...

The Shot at Dawn Memorial, Staffordshire, UK On Saturday 29 October 2016, a bracing Autumnal morning, and with a light drizzle threatening, three additional stakes were added to the Shot at Dawn Memorial (created by Birmingham artist Andy deComyn) at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, England. The date had been suggested to Andy deComyn by Lee Dent and Richard Pursehouse of the Chase Project military research group and members of the Wolverhampton branch of the Western Front Association. They explained that two of the three ‘mutineers’ that were pardoned in 2006 (six years after the memorial was finished) had been executed on that date exactly a century ago (the third mutineer being executed in 1917). Andy checked the information provided by Lee and Richard and WFA NZ member Geoff McMillan, who on a visit in 2015 had first asked why the three men had seemingly been ‘omitted.’ Andy explained that originally the campaign for the soldiers to be pardoned di...

The Shot at Dawn Memorial in Alrewas, Staffordshire, UK A SERVICE has been held to remember soldiers who were executed for mutiny during the First World War. The names of three soldiers were added to the National Memorial Arboretum’s Shot at Dawn memorial, which commemorates 306 soldiers killed for desertion or cowardice during the conflict. One of the three to be remembered was Jesse Robert Short, from Newcastle, a corporal in the 24th Battalion (Tyneside Irish) Northumberland Fusiliers, who is thought to have been the inspiration behind the TV drama Monocled Mutineer . Cpl Short apparently incited his men to throw an officer in the river at Etaples in September 1917. New Zealander Private Jack Braithwaite and Gunner William Lewis, from Scotland, were also remembered at the service on Saturday, October 29. Jack Braithwaite , of Dunedin, volunteered for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in May 1915. He served in Egypt and was later sent to France in April...

Source: New Zealand War Graves Project An Otago soldier executed for mutiny is to be remembered this year at the Shot at Dawn Memorial in England. Jack Braithwaite, of Dunedin, volunteered for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in May 1915. He served in Egypt and was later sent to France in April 1916. While serving in France, he fell foul of the military authorities on a number of occasions, losing his rank as lance corporal in May 1916. He went absent without leave, served at the front for a short time, and was later imprisoned after again leaving his unit, receiving further terms in military prison after seeking to escape. His attempt to defuse an incident involving a group of Australian and New Zealand prisoners and a military policeman at a military prison resulted in his being charged with mutiny. British military leader General Sir Douglas Haig confirmed the court-martial sentence, and he was executed on October 29, 1916 at Rouen. He was one ...

The Shot at Dawn memorial at The National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire The soldier believed to be the inspiration behind the television drama The Monocled Mutineer is to be commemorated nearly 100 years after he was shot at dawn for mutiny. Jesse Robert Short was executed for his role in the mutiny against military police at Étaples army base camp in France in September 1917. He was pardoned in 2006 and will now have his name added to the Shot at Dawn memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, which was set up to honour British army and Commonwealth soldiers executed for desertion and other capital offences during the First World War. Corporal Short, a Northumberland Fusilier, who is remembered in the 2012 song Mutiny by the folk rock band the Levellers, is to be included after a campaign by relatives of other pardoned soldiers. The memorial features stakes marking 306 soldiers, arranged around a white statue of a blindfolded private, sai...

British court martial on the front. Screenshot from " For King and Country ", a film by Joseph Losey (1965) with Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay. In the mist of an anaemic French dawn, the weak sunlight burning through leaden skies, they placed the blindfold over Jack Braithwaite's eyes. He stiffened against the whitewashed wall, the wisps of breath from his open mouth quickening. These were Jack Braithwaite's horrifying last moments. At 6.05am on October 29, 1916, Jack was executed by firing squad, joining the ranks of those slaughtered by his own side. His death on that barren patch of land in Rouen came minutes after one Gunner Lewis was shot. Jack, aged 31, heard the rifles' crackle and the sound turned his legs to jelly. His crime: mutiny. But that incendiary word paints a picture that does not fit the act that cost Jack his life. Jack, who openly admitted at his court martial, "I am not a born soldier, just a Bohemian jo...

Screenshot from " King & Country " by Joseph Losey with Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde (1964) James Crozier was 16 when he presented himself at his local army recruiting office in Belfast in September 1914. He was accompanied by his mother, Elizabeth, who tried in vain to prevent him enlisting. The recruiting officer, who also happened to be called Crozier, assured her he would look out for her son and "would see that no harm comes to him". Throughout the winter of 1915-16, Private James Crozier fought on the Somme in the 36th Ulster Division, 9th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles. In early February 1916, he failed to report for sentry duty in the trenches near Serre on the Western Front. A week later, he was found wandering in a daze some distance behind the front line. An army doctor examined him and declared him fit in both mind and body and, on 14 February 1916, he was court-martialled for desertion. James Crozier defended himself, saying that he had no...

Screenshot from " King & Country " by Joseph Losey with Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde (1964) No British soldier of the Great War was condemned to be ‘shot at dawn’. The capital sentence passed on 3,080 occasions by Field General Courts Marshall between 1914 and 1920 was “to suffer death by shooting”. Of the 346 executions actually carried out, most indeed took place at dawn: not for any symbolic or legal reason, but according to one historian, “because it was a quiet time – casual bystanders were not welcome”. Another myth is that the majority of victims were shot for cowardice. In fact, two thirds of those shot were convicted of desertion, (an easier charge to prove in legal terms). Over four years only 18 British soldiers were shot for showing cowardice and two for the unique military crime of “sleeping on sentry”. The next largest category of executions was murder, a crime which of course at that time carried the death penalty in civilian cou...

Screenshot from "The Paths of Glory" (Les Sentiers de la Gloire), by Stanley Kubrick, with Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker (1957) Ce livre confirme les travaux entamés dès 1995 par André Bach sur les fusillés après jugement d'un conseil de guerre. Un sujet ressorti de l'oubli dans les années 90 et qui divise encore les Français sur la nécessité ou non d'une réhabilitation individuelle ou collective de ces 740 fusillés. Le nom de 220 d'entre eux est gravé sur un monument aux morts de France. Passionné par la Première Guerre mondiale, Frédéric Mathieu, un normalien de 42 ans, est l'auteur du site "Ders des ders" consacré aux tout derniers survivants de tous les pays de la Grande Guerre. Pour "14-18, les fusillés", il s'est plongé, a-t-il expliqué à l'AFP, dans les dossiers des conseils de guerre conservés au Service historique de la Défense à Vincennes, en les recoupant avec d'autres sources : fiches de décès des militair...