Executed at Dawn by David Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

field punishments were abused, then it should not be a surprise to find that the ultimate sanction, the sentence of being shot at dawn, was equally open to abuse in the way that it was organised?

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    We will now move beyond the discussion of the legal and organisational aspects of the executions to consider the individuals who found themselves cast as players in these very human dramas, and what their experiences can add to our understanding of this aspect of the First World War.

2
THE SELECTION OF
THE FIRING SQUAD
    In the First World War men joined the army for many reasons, such as patriotism, thirst for adventure and wanting to do their bit with their mates. Even those who were conscripted would, to some extent, have shared those feelings, even in the face of increasing casualty lists and a growing awareness of what this war actually entailed. Somewhere in that mixture of feelings would have been an acceptance that war involved killing your enemy, but none would have thought as they headed for the Western Front that they might one day be called upon to kill one of their own.
    To give this issue some perspective, a look at the figures involved shows that, given the number of men who were executed, the number of those involved in a firing squad or in some other role at an execution, would in turn have been small bearing in mind the fact that over 5 million British and Commonwealth soldiers served on the Western Front at some point in the First World War.

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    According to the notes given to Guilford, the firing squad was to ‘consist of an Officer, 1 Sergeant and 10 men of the prisoner’s unit’. Contrary to what the notes suggest, however, the firing squad was not always drawn from the condemned man’s own unit, or indeed comprised the number of men specified.
    The order to form a firing party produced different responses from the officers concerned. Some were sensitive enough to realise that being a member of a firing squad was not a universally popular duty. Those officers would therefore first of all ask for volunteers, possibly even offering bribes in the form of extra pay, leave or rum rations. If bribery did not work, then an officer might turn to those men who had been convicted of committing minor offences and yet still remained with the unit.

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    Ernest Thurtle, MP, was a leading member of the abolitionist movement seeking to end the death penalty in the military in the years after the First World War. In a general debate in the House of Commons in 1926 that sought the abolition of the death penalty, he made a specific attack on sentencing soldiers to death for sleeping at their posts. He maintained that sleeping at one’s post was not a real, wilful act, adding that after the Commons had been sitting for sixteen hours, ‘members all around fell asleep. If the House was kept up for ninety-six hours without any sleep at all he would guarantee that 75 or 80 per cent of the members would be falling into deep slumbers.’
    Although the War Office denied Ernest Thurtle (amongst others) access to the records of those executed, he did manage to gather some evidence from those who had been involved in military executions in the First World War. A number of individuals wrote letters to Thurtle with their experiences; when these were published, he withheld the names of both the authors and of those shot. Subsequently, however, as more information has entered the public domain, it is now possible to reinsert some of the names concerned.
    Thurtle (2013) included an extract from a previously published article written by a soldier by the name of Private Albert Rochester, who had been sentenced to field punishment No.2 for an undisclosed offence. He had found himself taken by a military police corporal to a Royal Engineers depot where he was issued with three posts, three ropes and a spade, which he had to carry to a secluded spot. He was ordered to dig three holes, a specified distance