Executed at Dawn by David Johnson Read Free Book Online

approve the sentence of death in this instance.

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    The Army Acts, the Manual of Military Law and the King’s Regulations are very detailed documents, but they have surprisingly little to say where the death sentence is concerned once the regulations for the conduct of court martial have been dealt with. The document that could be considered the closest thing to a standard operating procedure are the notes given to the Anglican chaplain Edward Guilford, and yet so far it has not been possible to establish their origins or how widely they were disseminated.
    It has sometimes seemed within the published material concerning executions that the fact that 90 per cent of sentences were commuted was seen as something to be proud of, as a demonstration that somehow the system worked – yet really the opposite is true, even allowing for the fact that some of those sentenced were in fact serial offenders. If the British Army and the politicians were convinced of the need for the death penalty on active service then the sentence should have been mandatory with a right to an appeal. The British Army’s apparent lack of transparency and honest conviction about the death sentence is also of concern, as evidenced by the practice of ‘weeding out’, or what is now known as redacting, to ‘defeat the inquisitive’, and the next chapter will deal with this aspect in more depth.
    After the war, Mr H.V. Clarke (Corns and Hughes-Wilson, 2001), who stated that he had worked at General Headquarters (GHQ), the overall headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, made what seems to be an extraordinary claim. He said that during his time at GHQ he had extracted data from the routine orders relating to executions which showed that the number of actual executions exceeded the official figures, and he wrote to newspapers stating that in his view the true number of executions was in fact 37,905.
    Although no newspaper published his extraordinary claim, it came to the attention of the authorities, leading Clarke to state that he had, as a result, destroyed his evidence. Subsequently no evidence has ever been found to substantiate Clarke’s claim and it is hard to believe (or maybe it’s a case of not wanting to believe) that his claim of 37,905 executed men was accurate. After all, the figure he claimed was nearly twice the number killed on the first day of the Somme in July 1916, or the equivalent of thirty-seven wartime battalions – executions on that scale would have been hard to conceal from the soldiers, the public and the politicians. It was not something that the death-penalty abolitionist, Ernest Thurtle, ever raised during his long campaign. Also, an attrition rate at that level would have caused a shortage of men that the generals would have been keen to avoid, even allowing for their support of the death penalty. This would have broken one of the underlying tenets of the death penalty – that it should not contribute to a shortage of men.
    But a final, and perhaps uncomfortable, thought before leaving this point, is the possible connection between Clarke’s claim and the army’s practice of weeding out problematic documentation. In 1917, the Under Secretary of State for War was asked in Parliament to discontinue the practice of naming soldiers who had been executed in routine orders, but he refused on the grounds that this would remove the deterrent nature of the sentence. These routine orders are notable for their absence from the official documents held today at The National Archives.
    Army discipline was based on the ideas of intimidation and fear, but if these were not regulated then it should not be a surprise to see this leading to abuse. Military law is quite explicit about what could and could not be done where field punishment was concerned, and yet this chapter has outlined instances of abuse, and more will be discussed over the coming chapters. Is it really too big a step to say that if the regulations for